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The River City emerges as a hot spot for unseemly noir as life, death, and American history mix together into a frightening Southern cocktail.<

This debut novel by mathematician and Oulipo member Michèle Audin retraces the lives of French mathematicians over several generations through World Wars I and II. The narrative oscillates stylistically from chapter to chapter — at times a novel, fable, historical research, or a diary — locking and unlocking codes, culminating in a captivating, original reading experience.

The place is Serbia, the time is the late 1990s. Our protagonist, a single man, writes a regular op-ed column for a Belgrade newspaper and spends the rest of his time with his best friend, smoking pot and talking about sex, politics, and life in general. One day on the shore of the Danube he spots a man slapping a beautiful woman. Intrigued, he follows the woman into the tangled streets of the city until he loses sight of her. A few days later he receives a mysterious manuscript whose contents seem to mutate each time he opens it. To decipher the manuscript — a collection of fragments on the Kabbalah and the history of the Jews of Zemun and Belgrade — he contacts an old schoolmate, now an eccentric mathematician, and a group of men from the Jewish community.

As the narrator delves deeper into arcane topics, he begins to see signs of anti-Semitism, past and present, throughout the city and he feels impelled to denounce it. But his increasingly passionate columns erupt in a scandal culminating in murder. Following in the footsteps of is a cerebral adventure into the underground worlds of secret societies and conspiracy theories.

En 2070, la Terre vit dans la prospérité et le bonheur grâce à la Pompe à Electrons, qui fournit une énergie illimitée et gratuite. Une découverte extraordinaire, à moins que… A moins que cette invention miraculeuse ne constitue à plus ou moins longue échéance une menace imparable pour notre Univers ; un piège tendu par une civilisation parallèle pour annihiler notre réalité. Seules quelques personnes ont pressenti la terrible vérité : un jeune physicien marginal, une Lunarite intuitionniste, un extraterrestre rebelle vivant sur une planète qui se meurt. Mais qui les écoutera ? Qui les croira ? Contre la stupidité, les Dieux eux-mêmes luttent en vain.<

In a surreal, but familiar, vision of modern day Egypt, a centralized authority known as ‘the Gate’ has risen to power in the aftermath of the ‘Disgraceful Events,’ a failed popular uprising. Citizens are required to obtain permission from the Gate in order to take care of even the most basic of their daily affairs, yet the Gate never opens, and the queue in front of it grows longer.

Citizens from all walks of life mix and wait in the sun: a revolutionary journalist, a sheikh, a poor woman concerned for her daughter’s health, and even the brother of a security officer killed in clashes with protestors. Among them is Yehia, a man who was shot during the Events and is waiting for permission from the Gate to remove a bullet that remains lodged in his pelvis. Yehia’s health steadily declines, yet at every turn, officials refuse to assist him, actively denying the very existence of the bullet.

Ultimately it is Tarek, the principled doctor tending to Yehia’s case, who must decide whether to follow protocol as he has always done, or to disobey the law and risk his career to operate on Yehia and save his life.

Written with dark, subtle humor, describes the sinister nature of authoritarianism, and illuminates the way that absolute authority manipulates information, mobilizes others in service to it, and fails to uphold the rights of even those faithful to it.

This irresistible debut, set in contemporary New York, provides a sharp, insightful look into how the relationship between two best friends changes when they are no longer coming of age but learning how to live adult lives.

As close as sisters for twenty years, Sarah and Lauren have been together through high school and college, first jobs and first loves, the uncertainties of their twenties and the realities of their thirties.

Sarah, the only child of a prominent intellectual and a socialite, works at a charity and is methodically planning her wedding. Lauren — beautiful, independent, and unpredictable — is single and working in publishing, deflecting her parents’ worries and questions about her life and future by trying not to think about it herself. Each woman envies — and is horrified by — particular aspects of the other’s life, topics of conversation they avoid with masterful linguistic pirouettes.

Once, Sarah and Lauren were inseparable; for a long a time now, they’ve been apart. Can two women who rarely see one other, selectively share secrets, and lead different lives still call themselves best friends? Is it their abiding connection — or just force of habit — that keeps them together?

With impeccable style, biting humor, and a keen sense of detail, Rumaan Alam deftly explores how the attachments we form in childhood shift as we adapt to our adult lives — and how the bonds of friendship endure, even when our paths diverge.

In her critically acclaimed debut story collection, Elisa Albert boldly illuminates an original cross section of disaffected young Jews. With wit, compassion, and a decidedly iconoclastic twenty-first-century attitude, in prose that is by turns hilarious and harrowing, Albert has created characters searching for acceptance, a happier view of the past, and above all the possibility of a future.

Holidays, family gatherings, and rites of passage provide the backdrop for these ten provocative stories. From the death of a friendship in "So Long" to a sexually frustrated young mother's regression to bat mitzvah — aged antics in "Everything But," and culminating with the powerful and uproariously apropos finale of "Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose," will excite, charm, and profoundly resonate with anyone who's ever felt ambivalent about his or her faith, culture, or place in the world.

A year has passed since Ari gave birth to Walker, though it went so badly awry she has trouble calling it “birth” and still she can't locate herself in her altered universe. Amid the strange, disjointed rhythms of her days and nights and another impending winter in upstate New York, Ari is a tree without roots, struggling to keep her branches aloft.

When Mina, a one-time cult musician — older, self-contained, alone, and nine-months pregnant — moves to town, Ari sees the possibility of a new friend, despite her unfortunate habit of generally mistrusting women. Soon they become comrades-in-arms, and the previously hostile terrain seems almost navigable.

With piercing insight, purifying anger, and outrageous humor, Elisa Albert issues a wake-up call to a culture that turns its new mothers into exiles, and expects them to act like natives. Like Lionel Shriver’s and Anne Enright’s , this is a daring and resonant novel from one of our most visceral writers.

Believing they were being taken to a better camp, Belgrade's Jews would climb into the truck with a sense of relief. Mainly women, children and the elderly, they expected a long and uncomfortable trip but, after crossing the border, their journey would come to an abrupt end. Here the drivers would get out and attach a hose from the exhaust to the back of the truck-Over the course of a few months in 1942 the Nazis systematically exterminated the majority of Serbia's Jews using carbon monoxide and specially designed trucks. The only information the narrator of this bleakly comic novel can find about the summer when his relatives disappeared is the names of the truck drivers: Götz and Meyer. During his research he becomes fascinated by the unknowable characters and daily lives of these men. But his imagination proves a dangerous force, and his obsession with the past threatens to overwhelm him.<

Published in 1928 to great acclaim when its author was just twenty years old, is sweeping, kaleidoscopic, and passionate. The novel presents a stunning series of flashes — scenes, moods, dreams, and weather— as the narrator wanders through Barranco (then an exclusive seaside resort outside Lima). In one beautiful, radical passage after another, he skips from reveries of first loves, South Pole explorations, and ocean tides, to precise and unashamed notations of class and of race: an Indian woman “with her hard,shiny, damp head of hair — a mud carving,” to a gringo gobbling “synthetic milk,canned meat, hard liquor.”

Adán’s own aristocratic family was in financial freefall at the time, and, as the translator notes, is as “subversive now as when it was written: Adán’s uncompromising poetic vision and the trueness and poetry of his voice constitute a heroic act against cultural colonialism.”

Der Mensch ist zu den Sternen vorgestoßen und hat ein gewaltiges Imperium errichtet, das von einem Ende der Galaxis zum anderen reicht. Eines Tages beginnt es zu zerfallen, und ganze Welten sinken auf niedrigere Kulturstufen zurück. Doch es gibt einen Plan, entworfen von einem genialen Mathematiker, der das Wiederentsethen des Imperiums garantiert, durch weisen Einsatz von Technik und Naturwissenschaften zur rechten Zeit. Eine geheime Forschungsstation soll den Prozeß überwachen. Befindet sie sich auf der Erde? Aber wer weiß in einigen Jahrtausenden noch etwas von der alten Erde, der einstigen Wieder der Menschheit?

Dieser Roman erschien unter dem Titel .

Homero Aridjis has always said that he was born twice. The first time was to his mother in April 1940 and the second time was as a poet, in January 1951. His life was distinctly cleaved in two by an accident. Before that fateful Saturday he was carefree and confident, the youngest of five brothers growing up in the small Mexican village of Contepec, Michoacán. After the accident — in which he nearly died on the operating table after shooting himself with a shotgun his brothers had left propped against the bedroom wall — he became a shy, introspective child who spent afternoons reading Homer and writing poems and stories at the dining room table instead of playing soccer with his classmates. After the accident his early childhood became like a locked garden. But in 1971, when his wife became pregnant with their first daughter, the memories found a way out. Visions from this elusive period started coming back to him in astonishingly vivid dreams, giving shape to what would become .

Aridjis is joyously imaginative. has urgency but still takes its time, celebrating images and feelings and the strangeness of childhood. Readers will love being in the world he has created. Aridjis paints the pueblo of Cotepec — the landscape, the campesinos, the Church, the legacy of the Mexican Revolution — through the eyes of a sensitive child.

Marie's job as a guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors of the Gallery surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belies their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the museum guard who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery's masterpieces on the eve of the First World War. After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn open.

Labor Day, 1976, Martha's Vineyard. Summering at the family beach house along this moneyed coast of New England, Fern and Edgar — married with three children — are happily preparing for a family birthday celebration when they learn that the unimaginable has occurred: There is no more money. More specifically, there's no more money in the estate of Fern's recently deceased parents, which, as the sole source of Fern and Edgar's income, had allowed them to live this beautiful, comfortable life despite their professed anti-money ideals. Quickly, the once-charmed family unravels. In distress and confusion, Fern and Edgar are each tempted away on separate adventures: she on a road trip with a stranger, he on an ill-advised sailing voyage with another woman. The three children are left for days with no guardian whatsoever, in an improvised Neverland helmed by the tender, witty, and resourceful Cricket, age nine.

Brimming with humanity and wisdom, humor and bite, and imbued with both the whimsical and the profound, is a story of American wealth, class, family, and mobility, approached by award-winner Ramona Ausubel with a breadth of imagination and understanding that is fresh, surprising, and exciting.

Žymaus amerikiečių rašytojo, eseisto ir žurnalisto, kilimo iš Irano, trečiasis romanas. Tai intriguojantis pasakojimas apie Maleko, universiteto dėstytojo, grįžimą į Teheraną, iš kurio dar vaikystėje su tėvu pabėgo į Ameriką. Nepaprasti įvykiai Irane, išdavystės, korupcija, represijos, nuolatiniai persekiojimai, motinos paieškos ir baimė dėl geriausio draugo, įsivėlusio į militarizuotą grupuotę, sudaro siužeto pagrindą, kuris prikausto dėmesį išskirtiniais veikėjais, atsidūrusiais sunkiai nuspėjamoje egzotiško krašto aplinkoje. Retrospekcijų būdu skaitytojas nukeliamas ir į Antrojo pasaulinio karo laikotarpį, jungiant paralelinio pasakojimo grandis apie netolimos praeities neramumų draskomą Iraną. Atsiskleidžia sudėtingi žmonių likimai atsidūrus istorinių įvykių mėsmalėje, kai reikia perkainoti nusistovėjusias draugystės, meilės, sąžinės, tėvų ir vaikų santykių moralines kategorijas, prisitaikyti prie netvaraus pasaulio diktuojamų sąlygų ir nustatytų žmonių bendravimo normų arba žūti.<

1945. gads. Lordu palātai jāizlemj, kurš mantos Beringtonu ģimenes titulu un mantu. Vai tas būs Harijs Kliftons vai Džailss Beringtons? Karsti gaidītās jaunās Kliftona hronikas grāmatas lappusēs iesoļo Kliftonu ģimenes jaunā paaudze. Pēc tam, kad Sebastjans tiek atstādināts no mācībām skolā, viņš nevilšus tiek iejaukts starptautiska mēroga krāpšanā, kas saistīta ar Rodēna statuju Domātājs. Vai Sebastjans kļūs par miljonāru, vai viņa dzīvībai draud briesmas?<

Lasītāji priecāsies atkal satikt Džefrija Ārčera jau iznākušā romāna Atbildi zina tikai laiks varoņus. Kliftonu sāga ir Ārčera slavenākais romāns. Jauna sieviete dodas uz Amerikas Savienotajām Valstīm apņēmības pilna jebkādiem līdzekļiem atrast mīļoto vīrieti, jo nespēj noticēt, ka viņš gājis bojā. Vienīgais pierādījums, kas viņai pieejams, ir vēstule, kura jau vairāk nekā gadu tā arī palikusi neatvērta kādā Bristoles mājā uz kamīna malas…<

Kliftonu ģimenes sāga ir ambiciozākais izcilā Lielbritānijas rakstnieka Džefrija Ārčera romāns. Šajā grāmatā, kura aizsākas 1919. gada Bristoles nomalē, lasītājs dodas dramatiskā, negaidītu un galvu reibinošu pavērsienu pilnā piedzīvojumā pa Kliftonu dzimtas ceļu. Pat pēdējo lappusi aizverot, rodas nepārvarama vēlme šo ceļojumu turpināt… Uzticīgais un mīlošais Meizijas vīrs kādudien aiziet uz darbu ostas dokā un vairs neatgriežas. Kaut kā savelkot galus, Meizija sastopas ar šķēršļiem, kurus rada viņai nezināms, ārkārtīgi ietekmīgs cilvēks. Meiziju vada pārliecība, ka viņa paveiks visu iespējamo, lai izrautos no trūkuma un bezcerības un atvērtu logu uz pasauli savam ļoti talantīgajam dēlam Harijam.<