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Edward St Aubyn

At Last

Patrick Melrose

<p>A Notable Book of 2012</p><p>One of 's Best Fiction Books 2011</p><p>One of 's Best Books of 2012</p><p>One of 's Top 10 Fiction Books of 2012</p><p>Here, from the writer described by as "our purest living prose stylist" and whom Alan Hollinghurst has called "the most brilliant English novelist of his generation," is a work of glittering social comedy, profound emotional truth, and acute verbal wit. is also the stunning culmination of one of the great fiction enterprises of the past two decades in the life of the English novel.</p><p>As readers of Edward St. Aubyn's extraordinary earlier works-and the Man Booker Prize finalist are well aware, for Patrick Melrose, "family" has always been a double-edged sword. begins as friends, relatives, and foes trickle in to pay final respects to his mother, Eleanor. An American heiress, Eleanor married into the British aristocracy, giving up the grandeur of her upbringing for "good works" freely bestowed on everyone but her own son, who finds himself questioning whether his transition to a life without parents will indeed be the liberation he had so long imagined.</p><p>The service ends, and family and friends gather for a final party. Amid the social niceties and social horrors, Patrick begins to sense the prospect of release from the extremes of his childhood, and at the end of the day, alone in his room, the promise some form of safety. . .</p><

Edward St Aubyn

A Clue to the Exit

<p>Charlie Fairburn, successful screenwriter, ex-husband, and absent father, has been given six months to live. He resolves to stake half his fortune on a couple of turns of the roulette wheel and, to his agent's disgust, to write a novel-about death. In the casino he meets his muse. Charlie grows as addicted to writing fiction as she is to gambling.</p><p>His novel is set on a train and involves a group of characters (familiar to readers of St. Aubyn's earlier work) who are locked in a debate about the nature of consciousness. As this train gets stuck at Didcot, and Charlie gets more passionately entangled with the dangerous Angelique, comes to its startling climax. Exquisitely crafted, witty, and thoughtful, Edward St. Aubyn's dazzling novel probes the very heart of being.</p><

Edward St Aubyn

Lost for Words

<p>Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels were some of the most celebrated works of fiction of the past decade. Ecstatic praise came from a wide range of admirers, from literary superstars such as Zadie Smith, Francine Prose, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Michael Chabon to pop-culture icons such as Anthony Bourdain and January Jones. Now St. Aubyn returns with a hilariously smart send-up of a certain major British literary award.</p><p>The judges on the panel of the Elysian Prize for Literature must get through hundreds of submissions to find the best book of the year. Meanwhile, a host of writers are desperate for Elysian attention: the brilliant writer and serial heartbreaker Katherine Burns; the lovelorn debut novelist Sam Black; and Bunjee, convinced that his magnum opus, , will take the literary world by storm. Things go terribly wrong when Katherine’s publisher accidentally submits a cookery book in place of her novel; one of the judges finds himself in the middle of a scandal; and Bunjee, aghast to learn his book isn’t on the short list, seeks revenge.</p><

Edward St Aubyn

On the Edge

Sabine is the most mercurial woman Peter Thorpe has ever known. Such is his desire for her that he overturns his whole life — his disillusioned merchant-banker’s life — and leaves everything behind, not caring that his lover is of no fixed address, nor that his search for her will take him to the beating heart of New Ageism in northern California.Each of his fellow seekers is in hot pursuit of that elusive something (happiness?), and in their eccentric company Peter stumbles across vistas he had never before dared to imagine. .‘St Aubyn has achieved a comic novel which is more than a send-up and carries the message that love is not quite all you need’ Independent‘An intellectually informed, richly insightful and vigorously funny take on the modern condition’ Sunday Times‘Pierced with goodwill, tenderness and a new kind of thoughtfulness’ Spectator‘His satire is unfailingly funny and immensely satisfying’ Guardian<

Doug Allyn

The Best American Mystery Stories 2015

The Best American Mystery Stories

In his introduction, guest editor James Patterson observes, “I often hear people lamenting the state of Hollywood... If that’s the case, I’ve got one thing to say: read these short stories. You can thank me later.” Patterson has collected a batch of stories that have the sharp tension, drama, and visceral emotion of an Oscar-worthy Hollywood production. Spanning the extremes of human behavior, features characters that must make desperate choices: an imaginative bank-robbing couple, a vengeful high school shooter, a lovesick heiress who will do anything for her man, and many others in “these imaginative, rich, complex tales” worthy of big-screen treatment.<

Megan Abbott

Phoenix Noir

Lee Child, Diana Gabaldon, James Sallis, and others reveal how, in Phoenix, sunshine is the new noir.<

José Eduardo Agualusa

A General Theory of Oblivion

<p>On the eve of Angolan independence an agoraphobic woman named Ludo bricks herself into her apartment for 30 years, living off vegetables and the pigeons she lures in with diamonds, burning her furniture and books to stay alive and writing her story on the apartment’s walls.</p><p>Almost as if we’re eavesdropping, the history of Angola unfolds through the stories of those she sees from her window. As the country goes through various political upheavals from colony to socialist republic to civil war to peace and capitalism, the world outside seeps into Ludo’s life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of someone peeing on a balcony, or a man fleeing his pursuers.</p><

Naja Marie Aidt

Baboon

Beginning in the middle of crisis, then accelerating through plots that grow stranger by the page, Naja Marie Aidt’s stories have a feel all their own. Though they are built around the common themes of sex, love, desire, and gender, Aidt pushes them into her own desperate, frantic realm. In one, a whore shows up unannounced at a man’s apartment, roosts in his living room, and then violently threatens him when he tries to make her leave. In another, a wife takes her husband to a city where it is women, not men, who are the dominant sex — but was it all a hallucination when she finds herself tied to a board and dragged back to his car? And in the unforgettable “Blackcurrant,” two young women who have turned away from men and toward lesbianism abscond to a farm, where they discover that their neighbor’s son is experimenting with his own kind of sexuality. The first book from the widely lauded Aidt to reach the English language, delivers audacious writing that careens toward bizarre, yet utterly truthful, realizations.<

Daniel Alarcon

War by Candlelight: Stories

Something is happening. Wars, both national and internal, are being waged in jungles, across borders, in the streets of Lima, in the intimacy of New York apartments. is an exquisite collection of stories that carry the reader from Third World urban centers to the fault lines that divide nations and people — a devastating portrait of a world in flux — and Daniel Alarcón is an extraordinary new voice in literary fiction, one you will not soon forget.<

César Aira

Dinner

One Saturday night a bankrupt bachelor in his sixties and his mother visit a wealthy friend. They discuss their endlessly connected neighbors the daughter of what was her name? Miganne, who lived in front of Cabanillas s office Which Cabanillas? The one married to Artola s daughter? They talk about a mysterious pit that opened up one day, and the old bricklayer who sometimes walked to the Cemetery to cheer himself up. Anxious to show off his valuable antiques, the host shows his guests old wind-up toys, and takes them to admire an enormous doll. Back at home, the bachelor decides to watch some late night TV before retiring. The news quickly takes a turn for the worse as, horrified, the newscaster finds herself reporting about the dead rising from their graves, leaving the cemetery, and sucking the blood of the living all the figures are disturbingly reminiscent of the dinner party. And how can the citizens save their town when deep down there is always such a dark thirst for life?"<

Aharon Appelfeld

Adam and Thomas

<p>Adam and Thomas must learn to survive and do. They forage and build a small tree house, although it's more like a bird's nest. Adam's family dog, Miro, manages to find his way to him, to the joy of both boys. Miro brings the warmth of home with him. Echoes of the war are felt in the forest. The boys meet fugitives fleeing for their lives and try to help them. They learn to disappear in moments of danger. And they barely survive winter's harshest weather, but when things seem to be at their worst, a miracle happens.</p><

Diana Abu-Jaber

Birds of Paradise

At thirteen, Felice Muir ranaway from home to punish herself for some horrible thing she had done leaving ahole in the hearts of her pastry-chef mother, her real estate attorney father, and her foodie-entrepreneurial brother. After five years of scrounging forfood, drugs, and shelter on Miami Beach, Felice is now turning eighteen, andshe and the family she left behind must reckon with the consequences of heractions and make life-affirming choices about what matters to them most, nowand in the future.<

Anonymous

Spouse Swap

Beeline Double novel

Kingsley Amis

Dear Illusion: Selected Stories

New York Review Books Classics

When he published his first novel, Lucky Jim, in which his misbehaving hero wreaks havoc with the starchy protocols of academic life, Kingsley Amis emerged as a bad boy of British letters. Later he became famous as another kind of bad boy, an inveterate boozer, a red-faced scourge of political correctness. He was consistent throughout in being a committed enemy of any presumed “right thinking,” and it is this, no doubt, that made him one of the most consistently unconventional and exploratory writers of his day, a master of classical English prose who was at the same time altogether unafraid to apply himself to literary genres all too often dismissed by sophisticates as “low.” Science fiction, the spy story, the ghost story were all grist for Amis’s mill, and nowhere is the experimental spirit in which he worked, his will to test both reality and the reader’s imagination, more apparent than in his short stories. These “woodchips from [his] workshop”—here presented in a new selection — are anything but throwaway work. They are instead the essence of Amis, a brew that is as tonic as it is intoxicating.<

Anonymous

Voluptuous Confessions Of A French Lady Of Fashion

Victorian erotica

Anonymous

Entures And Amours Of A Barmaid . A Series Of Facts

Victorian erotica

Anonymous

The Three Chums: A Tale Of london Everyday Life

Victorian erotica

Naja Marie Aidt

Rock, Paper, Scissors

<p>"The emotions unleashed in this tale. . are painfully universal. Yet you know exactly where in the universe you are. This is the hallmark of great short stories, from Chekhov's portraits of discontented Russians to Joyce's struggling Dubliners." — Radhika Jones, Time</p><p>Naja Marie Aidt's long-awaited first novel is a breathtaking page-turner and complex portrait of a man whose life slowly devolves into one of violence and jealousy.</p><p>Rock, Paper, Scissors opens shortly after the death of Thomas and Jenny's criminal father. While trying to fix a toaster that he left behind, Thomas discovers a secret, setting into motion a series of events leading to the dissolution of his life, and plunging him into a dark, shadowy underworld of violence and betrayal.</p><p>A gripping story written with a poet's sensibility and attention to language, Rock, Paper, Scissors showcases all of Aidt's gifts and will greatly expand the readership for one of Denmark's most decorated and beloved writers.</p><p>Naja Marie Aidt was born in Greenland and raised in Copenhagen. She is the author of seven collections of poetry and five short story collections, including Baboon (Two Lines Press), which received the Nordic Council's Literature Prize and the Danish Critics Prize for Literature. Rock, Paper, Scissors is her first novel.</p><

Gary Alexander

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 86, No. 6. Whole No. 511, December 1985

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Jeffery Renard Allen

Rails Under My Back

<p>"Will put Allen in the company of writers such as James Joyce, August Wilson, and Ralph Ellison." — The Philadelphia Inquirer.</p><p>When it was first published fifteen years ago, Jeffery Renard Allen's debut novel, Rails Under My Back, earned its author comparisons to some of the giants of twentieth-century modernism. The publication of Allen's equally ambitious second novel, Song of the Shank, cemented those lofty claims. Now, the book that established his reputation is being restored to print in its first Graywolf Press edition. Together, the two novels stand as significant achievements of twenty-first-century literature.</p><p>Rails Under My Back is an epic that tracks the interwoven lives of two brothers, Lucius and John Jones, who are married to two sisters, Gracie and Sheila McShan. For them, their parents, and their children, life is always full of departures; someone is always fleeing town and leaving the remaining family to suffer the often dramatic, sometimes tragic consequences. The multiple effects of the comings and goings are devastating: These are the almost mythic expression of the African American experience in the half century that followed the Second World War.</p><p>The story ranges, as the characters do, from the city, which is somewhat like both New York and Chicago, to Memphis, to the West, and to many "inner" and "outer" locales. Rails Under My Back is a multifaceted, brilliantly colored, intensely musical novel that pulses with urgency and originality.</p><

Andre Aciman

Eight White Nights

<p>A LUSHLY ROMANTIC NOVEL FROM THE AUTHOR OF CALL ME BY YOUR NAME.</p><p>Eight White Nights is an unforgettable journey through that enchanted terrain where passion and fear and the sheer craving to ask for love and to show love can forever alter who we are. A man in his late twenties goes to a large Christmas party in Manhattan where a woman introduces herself with three words: "I am Clara." Over the following seven days, they meet every evening at the same cinema. Overwhelmed yet cautious, he treads softly and won’t hazard a move. The tension between them builds gradually, marked by ambivalence, hope, and distrust. As André Aciman explores their emotions with uncompromising accuracy and sensuous prose, they move both closer together and farther apart, culminating on New Year's Eve in a final scene charged with magic and the promise of renewal. Call Me by Your Name, Aciman's debut novel, established him as one of the finest writers of our time, an expert at the most sultry depictions of longing and desire. As The Washington Post Book World wrote, "The beauty of Aciman’s writing and the purity of his passions should place this extraordinary first novel within the canon of great romantic love stories for everyone." Aciman’s piercing and romantic new novel is a brilliant performance from a master prose stylist.</p><

André Alexis

Fifteen Dogs

<p>— I'll wager a year's servitude, answered Apollo, that animals — any animal you like — would be even more unhappy than humans are, if they were given human intelligence.</p><p>And so it begins: a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto veterinary clinic. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferring the old 'dog' ways, and those who embrace the change. The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings. Wily Benjy moves from home to home, Prince becomes a poet, and Majnoun forges a relationship with a kind couple that stops even the Fates in their tracks.</p><p>André Alexis's contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, shows you can teach an old genre new tricks.</p><

Kathleen Alcott

The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets

<p>Ida grew up with Jackson and James — where there was “I” there was a “J.” She can’t recall a time when she didn’t have them around, whether in their early days camping out in the boys’ room decorated with circus scenes or later drinking on rooftops as teenagers. While the world outside saw them as neighbors and friends, to each other the three formed a family unit — two brothers and a sister — not drawn from blood, but drawn from a deep need to fill a void in their single parent households. Theirs was a relationship of communication without speaking, of understanding without judgment, of intimacy without rules and limits.</p><p>But as the three of them mature and emotions become more complex, Ida and Jackson find themselves more than just siblings. When Jackson’s somnambulism produces violent outbursts and James is hospitalized, Ida is paralyzed by the events that threaten to shatter her family and put it beyond her reach. Kathleen Alcott’s striking debut, The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets, is an emotional, deeply layered love story that explores the dynamics of family when it defies bloodlines and societal conventions.</p><

Kathleen Alcott

Infinite Home

<p>Edith is a widowed landlady who rents apartments in her Brooklyn brownstone to an unlikely collection of humans, all deeply in need of shelter. Crippled in various ways — in spirit, in mind, in body, in heart — the renters struggle to navigate daily existence, and soon come to realize that Edith’s deteriorating mind, and the menacing presence of her estranged, unscrupulous son, Owen, is the greatest challenge they must confront together.</p><p>Faced with eviction by Owen and his designs on the building, the tenants — Paulie, an unusually disabled man and his burdened sister, Claudia; Edward, a misanthropic stand-up comic; Adeleine, a beautiful agoraphobe; Thomas, a young artist recovering from a stroke — must find in one another what the world has not yet offered or has taken from them: family, respite, security, worth, love.</p><p>The threat to their home scatters them far from where they’ve begun, to an ascetic commune in Northern California, the motel rooms of depressed middle America, and a stunning natural phenomenon in Tennessee, endangering their lives and their visions of themselves along the way.</p><p>With humanity, humor, grace, and striking prose, Kathleen Alcott portrays these unforgettable characters in their search for connection, for a life worth living, for home.</p><

Ibrahim Al-Koni

Anubis: A Desert Novel

A Tuareg youth ventures into trackless desert on a life-threatening quest to find the father he remembers only as a shadow from his childhood, but the spirit world frustrates and tests his resolve. For a time, he is rewarded with the Eden of a lost oasis, but eventually, as new settlers crowd in, its destiny mimics the rise of human civilization. Over the sands and the years, the hero is pursued by a lover who matures into a sibyl-like priestess. The Libyan Tuareg author Ibrahim al-Koni, who has earned a reputation as a major figure in Arabic literature with his many novels and collections of short stories, has used Tuareg folklore about Anubis, the ancient Egyptian god of the underworld, to craft a novel that is both a lyrical evocation of the desert's beauty and a chilling narrative in which thirst, incest, patricide, animal metamorphosis, and human sacrifice are more than plot devices. The novel concludes with Tuareg sayings collected by the author in his search for the historical Anubis from matriarchs and sages during trips to Tuareg encampments, and from inscriptions in the ancient Tifinagh script in caves and on tattered manuscripts. In this novel, fantastic mythology becomes universal, specific, and modern.<

Mario Alberto-Zambrano

Loteria

<p>A young girl tells the story of her family's tragic demise using a deck of cards of the eponymous Mexican game in this spellbinding debut novel that marks the arrival of a powerhouse new talent.</p><p>With her older sister Estrella in the ICU and her father in jail, eleven-year-old Luz Castillo has been taken into the custody of the state. Alone in her room, the young girl retreats behind a wall of silence, writing in her journal and shuffling through a deck of Lotería cards-a Mexican version of bingo featuring bright, colorful images.</p><p>Neither the social worker assigned to her case nor her Aunt Tencha, who desperately pleads for her niece's release, can cajole Luz to speak. The young girl's only confidant is her journal. Within its pages, Luz addresses an invisible higher power, sharing her secrets.</p><p>Using the Lotería cards as her muse, Luz picks one card from the deck with each shuffle. Each of the cards' colorful images- mermaids, bottles, spiders, death, and stars-sparks a random memory. Pieced together, these snapshots bring into focus the joy and pain of the young girl's life, and the events that led to her present situation. But just as the story becomes clear, a breathtaking twist changes everything.</p><p>A surprising, spellbinding tale richly imaginative and atmospheric, Lotería is an exquisite debut novel from an outstanding new voice in fiction.</p><

Sascha Arango

The Truth and Other Lies

<p>Dark, witty, and suspenseful, this literary crime thriller reminiscent of The Dinner and The Silent Wife follows a famous author whose wife — the brains behind his success — meets an untimely death, leaving him to deal with the consequences.</p><p>“Evil is a matter of opinion…”</p><p>On the surface, Henry Hayden seems like someone you could like, or even admire. A famous bestselling author who appears a modest everyman. A loving, devoted husband even though he could have any woman he desires. A generous friend and coworker. But Henry Hayden is a construction, a mask. His past is a secret, his methods more so. No one besides him and his wife know that she is the actual writer of the novels that made him famous.</p><p>For most of Henry’s life, it hasn’t been a problem. But when his hidden-in-plain-sight mistress becomes pregnant and his carefully constructed facade is about to crumble, he tries to find a permanent solution, only to make a terrible mistake.</p><p>Now not only are the police after Henry, but his past — which he has painstakingly kept hidden — threatens to catch up with him as well. Henry is an ingenious man and he works out an ingenious plan. He weaves lies, truths, and half-truths into a story that might help him survive. But bit by bit the noose still tightens.</p><p>Smart, sardonic, and compulsively readable, here is the story of a man whose cunning allows him to evade the consequences of his every action, even when he’s standing on the edge of the abyss.</p><

Jewel E Ann

Idle Bloom

<p>"What lies beneath my veiled perfection is the ugly truth—my truth, my reality, my destiny."</p><p>Vivian Graham has an acceptance letter into Harvard, a badass tattoo, loyal friends, ties to marijuana, a penchant for Dunkin’ Donuts, and her pesky V-card.</p><p>Everyday she takes the Red Line to her job at The Green Pot in Boston while her friends enter the coveted, black iron gates to higher learning. The ramifications from a tragic accident have put her life on hold while time marches on for everyone around her.</p><p>After graduating from Harvard Law, Boston native, Oliver Konrad, moves to Portland to start his career and his life. Three years later, after a horrific discovery, he returns home to trade in his three-piece suit for leather work boots and his suburban home for a condo in Cambridge.</p><p>All he brought back to the East Coast was an aversion to pillows and secrets he keeps hidden behind a mysterious locked door. Oliver’s days are predictable and his nights are lonely until he meets Vivian on the subway. Her long raven hair, green eyes, and mile-long legs are achingly sexy, but the way she "innocently" fingers and licks her Boston Kreme doughnut can only be described in two words—complete torture.</p><p>When their paths cross at every turn, laughter is abundant, friendship is easy, and love is unintentional. However, their future seems improbable.</p><

Frederick Irving Anderson

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 11, No. 51, February 1948

Jeffery Renard Allen

Holding Pattern: Stories

<p>The world of Jeffery Renard Allen’s stunning short-story collection is a place like no other. A recognizable city, certainly, but one in which a man might sprout wings or copper pennies might fall from the skies onto your head. Yet these are no fairy tales. The hostility, the hurt, is all too human.</p><p>The protagonists circle each other with steely determination: a grandson taunts his grandmother, determined to expose her secret past; for years, a sister tries to keep a menacing neighbor away from her brother; and in the local police station, an officer and prisoner try to break each other’s resolve.</p><p>In all the stories, Allen calibrates the mounting tension with exquisite timing, in mesmerizing prose that has won him comparisons with Joyce and Faulkner. is a captivating collection by a prodigiously talented writer.</p><

Leila Aboulela

The Kindness of Enemies

<p>It’s 2010 and Natasha, a half Russian, half Sudanese professor of history, is researching the life of Imam Shamil, the 19th century Muslim leader who led the anti-Russian resistance in the Caucasian War. When shy, single Natasha discovers that her star student, Oz, is not only descended from the warrior but also possesses Shamil’s priceless sword, the Imam’s story comes vividly to life. As Natasha’s relationship with Oz and his alluring actress mother intensifies, Natasha is forced to confront issues she had long tried to avoid — that of her Muslim heritage. When Oz is suddenly arrested at his home one morning, Natasha realizes that everything she values stands in jeopardy.</p><p>Told with Aboulela’s inimitable elegance and narrated from the point of view of both Natasha and the historical characters she is researching, is both an engrossing story of a provocative period in history and an important examination of what it is to be a Muslim in a post 9/11 world.</p><

Mohammed Achaari

The Arch and the Butterfly

Preparing to leave for work one morning, Youssef al-Firsiwi finds a mysterious letter has been slipped under his door. In a single line, he learns that his only son, Yacine, whom he believed to be studying engineering in Paris, has been killed in Afghanistan fighting with the Islamist resistance. His comfortable life as a leftist journalist shattered, Youssef loses both his sense of smell and his sense of self. He and his wife divorce and he becomes involved with a new woman. He turns for support to his friends Ahmad and Ibrahim, themselves enmeshed in ever-more complex real estate deals and high-profile cases of kidnapping. Meanwhile Youssef struggles to reconnect with his father, who, having lost his business empire and his sight, spends his days guiding tourists around ancient Roman ruins. Shuttling between Marrakech, Rabat and Casablanca, Youssef begins to rebuild his life. Yet he is pursued by his son's spectral presence and the menace of religious extremism, in this novel of shifting identity and cultural and generational change.<

Felipe Alfau

Chromos

Chromos is one of the true masterpieces of post-World War II fiction. Written in the 1940s but left unpublished until 1990, it anticipated the fictional inventiveness of the writers who were to come along — Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Sorrentino, and Gaddis. Chromos is the American immigration novel par excellence. Its opening line is: "The moment one learns English, complications set in." Or, as the novel illustrates, the moment one comes to America, the complications set in. The cast of characters in this book are immigrants from Spain who have one leg in Spanish culture and the other in the confusing, warped, unfriendly New World of New York City, attempting to meld two worlds that just won't fit together. Wildly comic, Chromos is also strangely apocalyptic, moving towards point zero and utter darkness.<

Poul Anderson

A Midsummer Tempest

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 14, No. 68, July 1949

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Americanah

<p>From the award-winning author of , a dazzling new novel: a story of love and race centered around a young man and woman from Nigeria who face difficult choices and challenges in the countries they come to call home.</p><p>As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are leaving the country if they can. Ifemelu — beautiful, self-assured — departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze — the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor — had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.</p><p>Years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. But when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, and she and Obinze reignite their shared passion — for their homeland and for each other — they will face the toughest decisions of their lives.</p><p>Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, is a richly told story set in today’s globalized world: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s most powerful and astonishing novel yet.</p><

Roberto Arlt

The Mad Toy

<p>Feeling the alienation of youth, Silvio Astier's gang tours neighborhoods, inflicting waves of petty crime, stealing from homes and shops until the police are forced to intervene. Drifting then from one career and subsequent crime to another, Silvio's main difficulty is his own intelligence, with which he grapples. Writing in the language of the streets and basing his writings in part on his own experience, with his characters wandering in a modern world, Arlt creates a book that combines realism, humor, and anger with detective story. Although astronomically famous in South America, Roberto Arlt's name is still relatively unknown in Anglophone circles, but the rising wave of appreciation of South American literature is bringing him to the fore.</p><

Roberto Arlt

The Seven Madmen

<p>Remo Erdosain's Buenos Aires is a dim, seething, paranoid hive of hustlers and whores, scoundrels and madmen, and Erdosain feels his soul is as polluted as anything in this dingy city. Possessed by the directionlessness of the society around him, trapped between spiritual anguish and madness, he clings to anything that can give his life meaning: small-time defrauding of his employers, hatred of his wife's cousin Gregorio Barsut, a part in the Astrologer's plans for a new world order… but is that enough? Or is the only appropriate response to reality — insanity?</p><p>Written in 1929, The Seven Madmen depicts an Argentina on the edge of the precipice. This teeming world of dreamers, revolutionaries and scheming generals was Arlt's uncanny prophesy of the cycle of conflict which would scar his country's passage through the twentieth century, and even today it retains its power as one of the great apocalyptic works of modern literature.</p><

Felipe Alfau

Locos: A Comedy of Gestures

The interconnected stones that form Felipe Alfau's novel LOCOS take place in a Madrid as exotic as the Baghdad of the 1001 ARABIAN NIGHTS and feature unforgettable characters in revolt against their young 'author' "For them," he complains, "reality is what fiction is to real people; they simply love it and make for it against ray almost heroic opposition" Alfau's "comedy of gestures" — a mercurial dreamscape of the eccentric, sometimes criminal, habitues of Toledo's Cafe of the Crazy — was written in English and first published in 1936, favorably reviewed for The Nation by Mary McCarthy, as she recounts here in her Afterword, then long neglected.<

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