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By Jessica Hagedorn, Elaine Kim. 2004
More than a decade after its initial publication, the groundbreaking anthology Charlie Chan Is Dead remains the best available source…
for contemporary Asian American fiction. Edited by acclaimed novelist and National Book Award nominee Jessica Hagedorn, Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World brings together forty-two fresh, fascinating voices in Asian American writing--from classics by Jose Garcia Villa and Wakako Yamauchi to exciting new fiction from Akhil Sharma, Ruth Ozeki, Chang-Rae Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Monique Truong. Sweeping in background and literary style, from pioneering writers to newly emerging voices from the Hmong and Korean communities, these exceptional works celebrate the full spectrum of Asian American experience and identities, transcending stereotypes and revealing the strength and vitality of Asian America today.By Douglas Coupland. 2016
Bit Rot, a new collection from Douglas Coupland that explores the different ways 20th-century notions of the future are being…
shredded, is a gem of the digital age. Reading Bit Rot feels a lot like bingeing on Netflix... you can't stop with just one."Bit rot" is a term used in digital archiving to describe the way digital files can spontaneously and quickly decompose. As Coupland writes, "Bit rot also describes the way my brain has been feeling since 2000, as I shed older and weaker neurons and connections and enhance new and unexpected ones." Bit Rot the book explores the ways humanity tries to make sense of our shifting consciousness. Coupland, just like the Internet, mixes forms to achieve his ends. Short fiction is interspersed with essays on all aspects of modern life. The result is addictively satisfying for Coupland's legion of fans hungry for his observations about our world. For almost three decades, his unique pattern recognition has powered his fiction, and his phrase-making. Every page of Bit Rot is full of wit, surprise and delight.From the Hardcover edition.By Aimee Parkison. 2012
"Aimee Parkison most often begins softly, slowly stripping away each layer of social interaction to get at what is numinous…
and frightening and necessary about living in the real world. These are stories both about the difficulty and the intense suddenness of human connection, about the profound link that exists between being in love and being alone."-Brian EvensonFrom "The Glass Girl":On certain evenings in dark motels, she could transform her lip into the edge of the bottle, imagining her face was made of amber glass and the men paused above her only to take a drink of breath. Over the years, men drank and drank until there were only two sips left inside. They began sucking the air out of the glass that grew warm in the wrong places because of heat radiating off their hands. The men's breath along with white feathers fell over autumn winds drifting through open windows.In this collection, Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize-winner Aimee Parkison's characters struggle to understand what happens when the innocent party becomes the guilty party. With magical realist flair, secrets are aired with dirty laundry, but the stains never come clean. Carol Anshaw writes, "Aimee Parkison offers a distinct new voice to contemporary fiction. Her seductive stories explore childhood as a realm of sorrows, and reveal the afflictions of adults who emerge from this private geography."Aimee Parkison has an MFA from Cornell University. She is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she teaches creative writing.By Lucie Wilk. 2013
An Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013: Top 100/Editors' Pick"A gorgeous debut."-JOSEPH BOYDEN, author of Through Black Spruce and The OrendaAt…
the hospital in Blantyre, Malawi, Bryce is learning to predict the worst. Racing heart: infection, probably malaria. He'll send Iris for saline. Shortness of breath? TB. Another patient rolled to the ward. And the round swellings, the rashes with dimpled centres, the small rough patches on a boy's foot? HIV. Iris will make him comfortable. They'll move on.Then there will be sleeplessness, rationed energy, a censuring of hope: the doctor's disease. Iris sees that one all the time.Henry Bryce has come to Blantyre to work off the grief he feels for his old life, but he can't adjust to the hopelessness that surrounds him. He relies increasingly upon Sister Iris's steady presence. Yet it's not until an accident brings them both to a village outpost that Bryce realizes the personal sacrifices Iris has made for her medical training, or that Iris in turn comes to fathom the depth of Henry's loss.The Strength of Bone is the story of a Western doctor, a Malawian nurse, and the crises that push both of them to the brink of collapse. With biting emotion and a pathological eye for detail, novelist and medical doctor Lucie Wilk demonstrates how, in a place where knowledge can frustrate as often as it heals, true strength requires the flexibility to let go.Advance Praise for The Strength of Bone"In supple, beautiful prose, Lucie Wilk recounts a doctor's struggle with technology and faith, and with the mysteries of death and love ... The Strength of Bone is an extraordinary look at the clash of worlds."-ANNABEL LYON, author of The Golden Mean and The Sweet GirlLucie Wilk grew up in Toronto and completed her medical training in Vancouver. Her short fiction has been nominated for the McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize Anthology, longlisted for a CBC Canada Writes literary prize, and has appeared in Descant, Prairie Fire and Shortfire Press. She is working toward an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. She practices medicine and lives with her husband and two children in London, UK.By Kathy Page. 2014
"Simply an epiphany."-Kirkus, starred reviewSimon Austen has the names people have called him tattooed all over his body. Waste of…
Space. Bastard. A Threat to Women. Murderer. Facing a lifetime behind bars and subjected to new therapies for sexual reprogramming, Simon finds himself plunged into a terrifying process of self-reconstruction. But how much, in the end, can a man really change? Darkly compelling and deeply moving, Alphabet is a psychological exploration of one man's uncertain and often-harrowing journey towards rehabilitation."Intense, revealing, challenging and above all riveting ... I kept saying to myself, how could she know this?"-Erwin James, convicted murderer, author of A Life Inside: A Prisoner's Notebook"Sometimes novelists go too far-and sometimes they manage to demonstrate that too far is the place they needed to go."-Time Out UKPraise for Kathy Page"Her unforgettable prose is moody, shape-shifting, provocative and always as compelling as a strong light at the end of a road you hesitate to walk down...but will."- Amy Bloom, author of Where the God of Love Hangs Out"Marvellously well-crafted ... I can't remember the last time I was so compelled, impressed and unsettled by the emotional world of a novel."- Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the VelvetBy Daphne Patai, Katharine Burdekin. 1985
Published in 1937, twelve years before Orwell's 1984, this novel projects a totally male-controlled fascist world that has eliminated women…
as we know them. They are breeders, kept as cattle, while men in this post-Hitlerian world are embittered automatons, fearful of all feelings, having abolished all history, education, creativity, books, and art. Not even the memory of culture remains. The plot centers on a "misfit" who asks, as readers must, "How could this have happenned?" Ann J. Lane calls the novel a "brilliant, chilling dystopia." "This is a powerful, haunting vision of the inner and outer worlds of male violence."-Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume One, 1884-1933By Craig Cravens, Magdaléna Platzová. 2014
"Told in clear and beautiful prose, Aaron's Leap is a deeply moving portrait of love, sacrifice, and the transformative power…
of art in a time of brutal uncertainty." -SIMON VAN BOOY, author of The Illusion of SeparatenessBased on the real-life story of Bauhaus artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Aaron's Leap is framed by the lens of a twenty first-century Israeli film crew delving into the extraordinary life of a woman who taught art to children in the Nazi transport camp of Terezín and died in Auschwitz. Aided by the granddaughter of one of the artist's pupils, the filmmakers begin to uncover buried secrets from a time when personal and artistic decisions became matters of life-and-death. Spanning a century of Central European history, the novel evokes the founding impulses, theories, and personalities of the European Modernist movement (with characters modeled after Oskar Kokoschka, Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel) and shows what it takes to grapple with a troubled history, "leap" into the unknown, and dare to be oneself.Magdaléna Platzová was raised in Prague and has lived in Washington, DC and New York City, where she taught literature at NYU, and now lives in Lyon, France. She is the author of a children's book, two collections of short stories, and three novels, including Aaron's Leap, a Lidové Noviny Book of the Year Award finalist, hailed by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a novel that "must be counted among the best written by contemporary Czech writers." It is her first book to be published in English.By Samuel Perry, Kang Kyong-Ae. 2009
"From Wonso Pond is an astonishing achievement of a young author whose life and work ended far too soon. Here,…
we have two girls and two boys, four hearts and two roads. From a colonized Korea, Kang sets the stage for the tragic birth of two rival nations. John Dos Passos and George Orwell may have had a Korean sister yet."--Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food For Millionaires "A vibrant account of the travails of Japanese colonialism as experienced by workers and women by the pioneering feminist writer of the Korean left. --Andre Schmid, author of Korea Between Empires"How refreshing it is to have a good old-fashioned story, told without narrative tricks or artifice. Kang Kyong-ae's From Wonso Pond is a powerful novel that charts the struggles of her impassioned characters as they learn to live, work, and love. The questions Kang poses and the issues she tackles are as universal as they are enduring. This essential work should be required reading for anyone interested in Korean history and literature."--Sung J. Woo, author of Everything Asian: A Novel"Anyone who wants to understand the terrible, wrenching conflicts that Koreans have endured and transcended in the past century could well begin with Kang Kyong-ae's brilliant, poignant, masterful novel. Her penetrating eye and sensibility fall on individuals that conventional writers miss--the poor, the frail, the heterodox, the women. To have a voice like this restored and rendered into English with such deftness by Samuel Perry is truly a major achievement." --Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago History Department Chairman and the author of The Origins of the Korean WarA classic revolutionary novel of the 1930s and the first complete work written by a woman before the Korean War to be published in English. From Wonso Pond transforms the love triangle between three protagonists into a revealing portrait of love and labor set against the backdrop of Japan's colonization of Korea.In a plot rich with Dickensian overtones, this novel paints a vivid picture of life in what is now North Korea through the eyes of Sonbi; her childhood neighbor, Ch'otchae; and a restless law student, Sinch'ol, as they journey separately from a small, impoverished village ruled by the lecherous landlord to the port city of Inch'on.But life is hardly easier there, as Sonbi wears herself out boiling silk threads twelve hours a day while Ch'otchae and Sinch'ol become overworked and underpaid dockworkers. All three become involved with underground activists, fighting oppression and colonial rule.Kang Kyong-ae (1906-1944) was born in Japan-ruled Korea and spent much of her adult life writing from her home in neighboring Manchuria. She is the author of many short stories and the novel Mothers and Daughters, which was also serialized in Korean journals during the 1930s. Kang died at the age of thirty-nine.Samuel Perry is an assistant professor of East Asian studies at Brown University.By Ben Okri, Pippa Goldschmidt, Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni, Elaine Chiew. 2015
Food can bring together families, communities, and cultures. It is the essence of life and yet our relationships with one…
another can be most fraught at the dinner table. This perpetually fascinating subject has inspired a unique collection of fiction--including flash fiction, essay, short stories, and even a "stoku" (amalgam of short story and haiku)--from a wonderfully diverse and international group of authors.The authors in the anthology include Elaine Chiew, Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni, Rachel J. Fenton, Diana Ferraro, Vanessa Gebbie, Pippa Goldschmidt, Sue Guiney, Patrick J. Holland, Roy Kesey, Charles Lambert, Krys Lee, Stefani Nellen, Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Ben Okri, Angie Pelekidis, Susannah Rickards, and Nikesh Shukla.Elaine Chiew is a London-based writer who has won several prizes for her short stories and flash fiction. She was included in One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories. Many of her stories revolve around food.Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author, poet, activist, and teacher of writing. She has been published in many magazines and her writing has been included in over fifty anthologies.Ben Okri has published eight novels, including The Famished Road and Starbook, as well as collections of poetry, short stories, and essays. He has won numerous international prizes.Pippa Goldschmidt writes long and short fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Her PhD in astronomy inspired her first novel The Falling Sky, about a female astronomer who discovers the Universe and loses her mind.By Gus Lee. 1991
A young, American-born child of an aristocratic Mandarin family that has fled China struggles to assimilate in 1950s San Francisco…
in a novel from "an incredibly rich and new voice." (Amy Tan).By Lev Raphael. 2003
"Lev Raphael is a daring writer--one who will not be -restrained by genre, but who tells his story with all…
the tools at his command. The German Money combines all of Raphael's estimable talents, delivering an emotional thriller about a totally believable contemporary family coming to terms with fifty years of silence."--Edmund WhiteBest known for Dancing on Tisha B'Av, the groundbreaking story collection exploring the lives of children of Holocaust survivors, Lev Raphael is also the author of five popular mysteries. Now he combines his talents in a story of emotional suspense.Paul has spent his life running--from New York, the city of his birth; from his beautiful beshert; from contact with his own siblings; but mostly from his mother, a Holocaust survivor of inexplicable coldness. Upon her mysterious death, the children face shocking questions. What caused her to die? Why did she divide their inheritance so that Paul, the least favorite son, was singled out to receive the most, the dreaded "German money,"a bequest of a million dollars accrued from German reparations to survivors . . . a gift as cynical as it is generous."Lev Raphael's new novel is a powerful, haunting and erotic tale. The stunning narrative builds to a shocking -denouement and kept me turning pages faster and faster to learn the truth."--Linda FairsteinLev Raphael is the author of thirteen books and known internationally as an insightful chronicler of the lives of the children of Holocaust survivors. Winner of the Lambda Literary Award, among many prizes, his short works have appeared in two dozen anthologies, including American Jewish Fiction: A Century of Stories. He is a book critic for National Public Radio and mysteries columnist for the Detroit Free Press.By David Homel, Fred A. Reed, Serge Lamothe. 2004
In the post-apocalyptic future, 50 years after the last government of turbo-liberals and its president-for-life have been elected, a group…
of researchers convenes a Congress to address the curious cultural phenomenon of the Baldwins, whose stories have been gathered and archived by the chroniclers. This novel of fragments represents contemporary prose at its most daring and experimental.By David Homel, Fred Reed, Serge Lamothe. 2004
In the post-apocalyptic future, 50 years after the last government of turbo-liberals and its president-for-life have been elected, a group…
of researchers convenes a Congress to address the curious cultural phenomenon of the Baldwins, whose stories have been gathered and archived by the chroniclers. This novel of fragments represents contemporary prose at its most daring and experimental.By Martin Amis. 2014
From one of England's most renowned authors, an unforgettable new novel that provides a searing portrait of life--and, shockingly, love--in…
a concentration camp. Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favourite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn't show you your reflection. It showed you your soul--it showed you who you really were. The wizard couldn't look at it without turning away. The king couldn't look at it. The courtiers couldn't look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for 60 seconds without turning away. And no one could. The Zone of Interest is a love story with a violently unromantic setting. Can love survive the mirror? Can we even meet each other's eye, after we have seen who we really are? In a novel powered by both wit and pathos, Martin Amis excavates the depths and contradictions of the human soul.By Jane Marcus, Helen Zenna Smith. 1930
This story offers a rare, funny, bitter, feminist look at war from women actively engaged in it. Published in London…
in 1930, Not So Quiet...(on the Western Front) is a novel in autobiographical guise that describes a group of British women ambulance drivers on the French front lines during World War 1. As Voluntary Aid Detachment workers, the women pay for the privilege of driving the wounded through shell fire in the freezing cold, on no sleep and an inedible diet, under the watchful eye of their punishing commandant, nicknamed Mrs. Bitch.By Olga Grjasnowa. 2019
Syria - a country at war Amal, Hammoudi and Youssef are young and ambitious, the face of modern Syria. But…
when civil war tears through their homeland, they are left with a horrifying choice: risk death by staying in the country they love, or flee in search of a new life elsewhere? From one of Germany's most talented literary voices comes this intricately woven story of brutality, loss, and how hope can shine through when darkness feels overwhelming.By John Steinbeck. 2002
Steinbeck's classic cautionary tale, now in an accessible new Spanish-language translationOne of Steinbeck's most taught works, The Pearl is the…
story of the Mexican diver Kino, whose discovery of a magnificent pearl from the Gulf beds means the promise of a better life for his impoverished family. His dream blinds him to the greed and suspicions the pearl arouses in him and his neighbors, and even his loving wife Juana cannot temper his obsession or stem the events leading to tragedy. This classic novella from Nobel Prize-winner John Steinbeck examines the fallacy of the American dream, and illustrates the fall from innocence experienced by people who believe that wealth erases all problems.By Aimee Parkison. 2012
"Aimee Parkison most often begins softly, slowly stripping away each layer of social interaction to get at what is numinous…
and frightening and necessary about living in the real world. These are stories both about the difficulty and the intense suddenness of human connection, about the profound link that exists between being in love and being alone."Brian EvensonFrom "The Glass Girl":On certain evenings in dark motels, she could transform her lip into the edge of the bottle, imagining her face was made of amber glass and the men paused above her only to take a drink of breath. Over the years, men drank and drank until there were only two sips left inside. They began sucking the air out of the glass that grew warm in the wrong places because of heat radiating off their hands. The men's breath along with white feathers fell over autumn winds drifting through open windows.In this collection, Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize–winner Aimee Parkison's characters struggle to understand what happens when the innocent party becomes the guilty party. With magical realist flair, secrets are aired with dirty laundry, but the stains never come clean. Carol Anshaw writes, "Aimee Parkison offers a distinct new voice to contemporary fiction. Her seductive stories explore childhood as a realm of sorrows, and reveal the afflictions of adults who emerge from this private geography."Aimee Parkison has an MFA from Cornell University. She is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she teaches creative writing.By Stanley Appelbaum. 2000
Carefully chosen collection provides both the French original and new line-by-line English translations -- on facing pages -- of 6…
great 19th-century French short stories. Merimée's Mateo Falcone, Sylvie by Nerval, Daudet's La mule du Pape, Flaubert's Hérodias, L'attaque du moulin by Zola, and de Maupassant's Mademoiselle Perle. Introduction and Notes.By Daniel Kehlmann. 2020
'A masterly achievement, a work of imaginative grandeur and complete artistic control' Ian McEwan'Brilliant and unputdownable' Salman RushdieHe's a trickster,…
a player, a jester. His handshake's like a pact with the devil, his smile like a crack in the clouds; he's watching you now and he's gone when you turn. Tyll Ulenspiegel is here!In a village like every other village in Germany, a scrawny boy balances on a rope between two trees. He's practising. He practises by the mill, by the blacksmiths; he practises in the forest at night, where the Cold Woman whispers and goblins roam. When he comes out, he will never be the same.Tyll will escape the ordinary villages. In the mines he will defy death. On the battlefield he will run faster than cannonballs. In the courts he will trick the heads of state. As a travelling entertainer, his journey will take him across the land and into the heart of a never-ending war.A prince's doomed acceptance of the Bohemian throne has European armies lurching brutally for dominion and now the Winter King casts a sunless pall. Between the quests of fat counts, witch-hunters and scheming queens, Tyll dances his mocking fugue; exposing the folly of kings and the wisdom of fools.With macabre humour and moving humanity, Daniel Kehlmann lifts this legend from medieval German folklore and enters him on the stage of the Thirty Years' War. When citizens become the playthings of politics and puppetry, Tyll, in his demonic grace and his thirst for freedom, is the very spirit of rebellion - a cork in water, a laugh in the dark, a hero for all time.