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Athenian Blues
By Pol Koutsakis. 2017
Stratos hates being called a hitman He takes care of problems Permanently Problems that people pay handsomely…
to have solved His clients don t want to know the details but Stratos is conscientious He will only take on a job if his research shows that the targets deserve their fate In the midst of the Greek economic crisis Stratos takes on the highest-profile case of his career The most celebrated lawyer in Greece and his beautiful actress wife both bid for his services but which one is telling the truth Helped by his three childhood friends Drag a homicide cop Teri a high-class transgender sex worker and Maria the love of his and Drag s life he realises that truth is always relative Especially when shattered loves and broken families are involvedThe Stronger Sex
By Anthea Bell, Hans Werner Kettenbach. 2009
Young lawyer Alex Zabel defends industrialist Herbert Klofft in a case for wrongful dismissal being brought against him by his…
former employee and mistress. She is thirty-four, he seventy-eight, a despot, now wheelchair bound and dying of cancer. Alex must deal with a hopeless case, his growing empathy with a repulsive client and his sexual attraction to Klofft's elderly wife.The Obese Christ
By Sheila Fischman, Larry Tremblay. 2014
The asocial, sexually repressed Edgar, kneeling in grief at his mother's graveside, turns abruptly to witness a terrifying and life-altering…
event: the brutal rape of a young woman. Compelled by muddled instinct (and ingrained religious conviction), our hero bears the unconscious victim home, solemnly pledging to care for her - and to act as her saviour. As winter closes in, the captor's neuroses are revealed and his behaviour becomes increasingly violent, allowing the victim only one escape.With The Obese Christ, Larry Tremblay squarely situates himself within the realm of Hitchcock, Polanski, and Stephen King. A brilliant exercise in unease and paranoia, The Obese Christ demonstrates Tremblay's powerful ability to evoke dead and fear, while immersing the reader in a wrapped and putrid world told from Edgar's sanctified point of view.In Absentia
By Morris Panych. 2012
Four seasons after her husband Tom's disappearance, Colette remains emotionally paralyzed, isolated in a country cottage. She waits in anguish,…
not knowing whether he is dead or alive, but clinging to hope. A young stranger in a jean jacket waves to her from the frozen lake - a sign? She emerges to give him her husband's parka - strangely, the boy has a likeness to Tom.What is the stranger's connection to her geologist husband, kidnapped more than a year before by leftist guerrillas in Colombia? How does this slyly seductive young stranger happen to show up at her home in rural Ontario, thousands of miles away? He seems to know more about Colette than he should, and as he slowly insinuates himself into her life, Colette's attentive sister, Evelyn, and her helpful neighbor Bill become increasingly alarmed.Part mystery, part moving story of vanished love, In Absentia explores the notion of disappearance, articulated in very personal terms. Through the tough, time-shifting action of the play, Colette reflects on her marriage and past love, offering rich associative memories while also uncovering the hidden and inaccessible - that which is made to disappear from view.Guilt and grief, infidelity and infertility, loss and longing are the deeper subjects Panych explores here. At the same time, the play examines the desire to make connections in life - thoughts to deeds, intentions to outcomes - in scenes often enlivened by the playwright's trademark humor.Cast of 3 men and 2 women.Nights of Awe
By Harri Nykanen, Kristian London. 2004
'Nykänen's twist on Nordic crime fiction may be the most inventive of the year. Ariel Kafka, a middle-aged bachelor, is…
a detective in Helsinki (think early Harry Hole) and, as far as he knows, the only Jew on the entire Helsinki police force, which is why he's picked to head up the investigation of a series of murders that began with two Arabic-looking men who may have been shouting Jewish obscenities as they died. Set during the days leading up to Yom Kippur, this complex tale moves quickly, as Ari attempts to figure it all out. With pressure from his colleagues, police administration, his brother, and the local Jewish community, can he uncover everything before the holiest day in the Jewish calender? The clever combination of classic Jewish themes with the traditions of Nordic crime makes for a refreshing tale with wide appeal. And the subtle humor, combined with a hero who is not completely depressed and alcoholic, makes it even better. Not just for readers of Nordic fiction, this should also be suggested to those who relate to New York Jewish detectives, including Lenny Briscoe (from Law & Order) and John Munch (from Homicide and Law & Order: SVU), as well as readers who enjoy the black humor of Stuart MacBride.' BooklistHarri Nykänen, born in Helsinki in 1953, was a well-known crime journalist before turning to fiction. He won the Finnish crime writing award The Clue in 1990 and in 2001. His fiction exposes the local underworld through the eyes of the criminal, the terrorist, and, most recently, from the point of view of an eccentric Helsinki police inspector.Some Rain Must Fall
By Don Bartlett, Karl Ove Knausgaard. 2016
The fifth installment in the epic six-volume My Struggle cycle is here, highly anticipated by Karl Ove Knausgaard's dedicated fan…
club--and the first in the cycle to be published separately in Canada.The young Karl Ove moves to Bergen to attend the Writing Academy. It turns out to be a huge disappointment: he wants so much, knows so little, and achieves nothing. His contemporaries have their manuscripts accepted and make their debuts while he begins to feel the best he can do is to write about literature. With no apparent reason to feel hopeful, he continues his exploration of and love for books and reading. Gradually his writing changes; his relationship with the world around him changes too. This becomes a novel about new, strong friendships and a serious relationship that transforms him until the novel reaches the existential pivotal point: his father dies, Karl Ove makes his debut as a writer and everything disintegrates. He flees to Sweden, to avoid family and friends.Involuntary Witness
By Patrick Creagh, Gianrico Carofiglio. 2002
A boy is found murdered in a well near a beach resort A Senegalese peddler is accused in a…
hopeless case soaked in small town racism The Italian judicial process revealed and an affectionate portrait of a deeply humane heroA Man of Genius
By Janet Todd. 2016
"Strange and haunting, a gothic novel with a modern consciousness." Philippa Gregory"A quirky, darkly mischievous novel about love, obsession and…
the burden of charisma, played out against the backdrop of Venice's watery, decadent glory." Sarah Dunant'A mesmerizing story of love and obsession in nineteenth century Venice: dark and utterly compelling."Natasha Solomons"Intriguing and entertaining; a clever, beguiling debut.Todd knows her Venice backwards."Salley Vickers"Revealing, surprising, compelling, gripping." Miriam Margolyes, actressA Man of Genius portrays a psychological journey from safety into obsession and secrecy. It mirrors a physical passage from flamboyant Regency England through a Europe conquered by Napoleon.Ann, a successful writer of cheap Gothic novels, becomes obsessed with Robert James, regarded by many, including himself, as a genius, with his ideas, his talk, and his band of male followers. However, their relationship becomes tortuous, as Robert descends into violence and madness. The pair leaves London for occupied Venice, where Ann tries to cope with the monstrous ego of her lover. Forced to flee with a stranger, she delves into her past, to be jolted by a series of revelations--about her lover, her parentage, the stranger, and herself. Janet Todd is known for her works about Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn, the Shelley circle, and Jane Austen. Born in Wales, her wandering childhood in the United Kingdom, Bermuda, and Sri Lanka led to work as an academic in Ghana, the United States, and United Kingdom. Her passion has been for women writers, the largely unknown and the famous. A former president of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, she lives in Cambridge and Venice.A Fine Line
By Howard Curtis, Gianrico Carofiglio. 1961
"A FINE LINE is a terrific novel, a legal thriller that is also full of complex mediations on the life…
of the lawyer and the difficult compromises inherent in any system of criminal justice. A book that is intensely rewarding at many levels."Scott TurowThe fifth in the best-selling Guido Guerrieri series. When Judge Larocca is accused of corruption, Guerrieri goes against his better instincts and takes the case. Helped by Annapaola Doria, a motorbike-riding bisexual private detective who keeps a baseball bat on hand for sticky situations, he investigates the alleged links to the mafia. Of course Guerrieri cannot stop himself from falling for Annapaola's exotic charms.The novel is a suspenseful legal thriller but it is also much more. It is the story of a judge who, to quote Dostoevsky, "lies to himself and listens to his own lies, so gets to the point where he can no longer distinguish the truth, either in himself or around himself."The Lie
By Mike Mitchell, Petra Hammesfahr. 2003
"...One shares Susanne's belief that she must try to carry the deception off. Whether she will succeed keeps the reader,…
peering over Susanne's shoulder at all the traps, turning the pages of this remarkable book."--The Independent (UK)Praise for Petra Hammesfahr's The Sinner:"The Sinner is best psychological suspense novel I have read all year."--Daily Telegraph"Dubbed Germany's answer to Patricia Highsmith, Hammesfahr should win new fans with this novel."Publishers Weekly"Demonstrates why she is one of Germany's bestselling writers of crime and psychological thrillers. It's grim, delves deep into the human psyche, and keeps you gripped."The Times (London)Nadia and Susanne look uncannily alike, but one of the women is seriously rich and the other is destitute. When Nadia asks Susanne to spend the weekend with her husband so that she can sneak off with a lover, how can Susanne refuse the outrageous payment on offer? Nadia and her husband barely speak to each other and he will be working most of the weekend. Easy money, or so it seems.One Friday afternoon Susanne drives Nadia's Alfa to her beautiful suburban villa with its indoor pool and glass doors opening onto the sloping lawn. This first stay is followed by others, as an apparently harmless game becomes a deadly web of lies.Petra Hammesfahr, born in 1951, has not had an easy life: she left school at thirteen and became pregnant by an alcoholic husband at seventeen. She published her first novel when she was forty and has since written over twenty crime and suspense novels. Petra also writes scripts for television and film. She has won numerous literary prizes, including the Crime Prize of Wiesbaden and the Rhineland Literary Prize.The Last Wolf & Herman
By George Szirtes, John Batki, László Krasznahorkai. 2016
Two short masterworks by the most recent winner of the Man Booker International Prize: here, in miniature, is every reason…
why he won The Last Wolf, translated by George Szirtes, features a classic, obsessed Krasznahorkai narrator, a man hired to write (by mistake, by a glitch of fate) the true tale of the last wolf of Extremadura, a barren stretch of Spain. This miserable experience (being mistaken for another, dragged about a cold foreign place, appalled by a species' end) is narrated--all in a single sentence--as a sad looping tale, a howl more or less, in a dreary wintry Berlin bar to a patently bored bartender. The Last Wolf is Krasznahorkai in a maddening nutshell--with the narrator trapped in his own experience (having internalized the extermination of the last creature of its kind and "locked Extremadura in the depths of his own cold, empty, hollow heart")--enfolding the reader in the exact same sort of entrapment to and beyond the end, with its first full-stop period of the book. Herman, "a peerless virtuoso of trapping who guards the splendid mysteries of an ancient craft gradually sinking into permanent oblivion," is asked to clear a forest's last "noxious beasts." In Herman I: the Game Warden, he begins with great zeal, although in time he "suspects that maybe he was 'on the wrong scent.'" Herman switches sides, deciding to track entirely new game... In Herman II: The Death of a Craft, the same situation is viewed by strange visitors to the region. Hyper-sexualized aristocratic officers on a very extended leave are enjoying a saturnalia with a bevy of beauties in the town nearest the forest. With a sense of effete irony, they interrupt their orgies to pitch in with the manhunt of poor Herman, and in the end, "only we are left to relish the magic bouquet of this escapade..." Translated by John Batki.Fugitive Kind
By Tennessee Williams, Allean Hale. 2001
Social outcasts, misfit survivors, dangerous passions—Tennessee Williams fleshed out the characters and themes that would dominate his later work in…
Fugitive Kind, one of his earliest plays. Fugitive Kind, one of Tennessee Williams's earliest plays, is one of his richest in dramatic material. Written in 1937 when the playwright was still Thomas Lanier Williams, Fugitive Kind introduces the character who will inhabit most of his later plays: the marginal man or woman who, through no personal fault, is a misfit in society but who demonstrates an admirable will to survive. Signature Tennessee Williams' characters, situations, and even the title (which was used as The Fugitive Kind for the 1960 film based on Orpheus Descending) have their genesis here. At age twenty-six, Williams was still learning his craft and this, his second full-length play, shows his debt to sources as diverse as thirties gangster films (The Petrified Forest, Winterset) and Romeo and Juliet. Fugitive Kind, with its star-crossed lovers and big city slum setting, takes place in a flophouse on the St. Louis waterfront in the shadow of Eads Bridge, where Williams spent Saturdays away from his shoe factory job and met his characters: jobless wayfarers on the dole, young writers and artists of the WPA, even gangsters and G-men. Fugitive Kind was also Williams's second play to be produced by The Mummers, a St. Louis theatre group devoted to drama of social protest. Called "vital and absorbing" by a contemporary review in The St. Louis Star-Times, this play reveals the young playwright's own struggle between his radical-socialist sympathies and his poetic inclinations, and signals his future reputation as our most compassionate lyric dramatist.Spring Storm
By Tennessee Williams, Dan Isaac. 1999
"A crucible of so many elements that would later shape and characterize Williams's work."--World Literature Today When Tennessee Williams read…
Spring Storm aloud to his playwriting class at the University of Iowa in 1938, he was met with silence and embarrassment. His professor, the renowned E. C. Mabie, remarked as he got up and dismissed the seminar, "Well, we all have to paint our nudes!" Tom's earlier comment in his journal that the play "is well-constructed, no social propaganda, and is suitable for the commercial stage" seems accurate enough in 1999, but woefully naive deep in the Depression when the play's sexual explicitness--particularly its matter-of-fact acceptance of a woman's right to her own sexuality--would have been seen as not only shocking but also politically radical. Spring Storm would later be disavowed by the author as "simply a study of Sex--a blind animal urge or force (like the regenerative force of April) gripping four lives and leading them into a tangle of cruel and ugly relations." But the solid and deft characterizations of the four young people whose lives intertwine--the sexually alive Heavenly Critchfield, her earthy lover Dick Miles, Heavenly's wealthy but tongue-tied admirer Arthur Shannon, and the repressed librarian Hertha Nielson who loves Arthur--are archetypes of characters we will meet again and again in the Williams canon. Epic in scope, a bit melodramatic in execution, tragic in outcome, Spring Storm created a wave of excitement among theatre insiders when it was given a staged reading at The Ensemble Studio Theatre's Octoberfest '96. This edition has been prepared, with an illuminating introduction, by Dan Isaac, who initiated the Octoberfest production.Clothes for a Summer Hotel: Play
By Tennessee Williams. 1983
This late play by Tennessee Williams explores the troubled relationship between F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The late Tennessee Williams's…
Clothes for a Summer Hotelmade its New York debut in 1980. Here Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, often seen as symbols of the doomed youth of the jazz age, become two halves of a single creative psyche, each part alternately feeding and then devouring the other. Set in Highland Hospital near Asheville, North Carolina, where Zelda spent her last confinement, this "ghost play" begins several years after Scott's death of a heart attack in California. But the past is "still always present" in Zelda, and Williams's constant shifting of chronology and mixing of remembrance with ghostly re-enactment suggest that our real intimacy is with the shadow characters of our own minds. As Williams said in the Author's Note to the Broadway production: "Our reason for taking extraordinary license with time and place is that in an asylum and on its grounds liberties of this kind are quite prevalent: and also these liberties allow us to explore in more depth what we believe is truth of character." Williams poses the inevitable, unanswerable questions: Did Scott prevent Zelda from achieving an independent creativity? Did Zelda's demands force Scott to squander his talents and turn to alcohol? Whose betrayal--emotional, creative, sexual--destroyed the other? But he poses these questions in a new way: in the act of creation, Zelda and Scott are now aware of their eventual destruction, and the creative fire that consumed two artists combines symbolically with the fire that ended Zelda's life.Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws & Other One-Act Plays
By Tennessee Williams, Thomas Keith. 1982
"The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays--like firecrackers in a rope." --Tennessee Williams This new collection of…
fantastic, lesser-known one-acts contains some of Williams's most potent, comical and disturbing short plays?Upper East Side ladies dine out during the apocalypse in Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws, while the poet Hart Crane is confronted by his mother at the bottom of the ocean in Steps Must Be Gentle. Five previously unpublished plays include A Recluse and His Guest, and The Strange Play, in which we witness a woman's entire life lived within a twenty-four-hour span. This volume is edited, with an introduction and notes, by the editor, acting teacher, and theater scholar Thomas Keith.The Russian Passenger
By John Brownjohn, Gunter Ohnemus. 2004
"At fifty the good Buddhist takes to the road, leaving all his belongings behind. His sole possession is a begging…
bowl. That's how it should be. The problem was, there were four million dollars in my begging bowl and the mafia were after me. It was their money. They wanted it back, and they also wanted the girl, the woman who was with me: Sonia Kovalevskaya".Not only a thriller about murder and big money but also a powerful evocation of the cruel history that binds Russia and Germany.Günter Ohnemus, born in 1946, lives in Munich and writes novels, essays and translations. This is his first novel to be translated into English.The Eyes of Lira Kazan
By Eva Joly, Judith Perrignon, Emily Read. 2012
"Plot twists galore, relentless suspense and expert insights to satisfy anyone fascinated by today's financial crisis."--Culture TF1 From Lagos to…
London, by way of the Faroe Islands and St. Petersburg, an investigation turns deadly. The head of the Nigerian fraud squad is evacuated from Lagos by secret service operatives. Meanwhile a junior prosecutor in Nice probes the mysterious death of the wife of a powerful banker and a crusading journalist in St. Petersburg pursues a corrupt oligarch and his criminal business empire. The paths of all three cross in London, where they find themselves embroiled in violent events obviously linked to financial and political interests and hunted by the oligarch's men, the Western secret services and goons sent by Nigerian oil magnates. A satirical, intelligent, and fast-paced thriller set in the world of high finance and low politics, The Eyes of Lira Kazan is co-written by Eva Joly, a prominent former prosecuting judge in Paris and a candidate in the 2012 French Presidential elections. Eva Joly is Norwegian born and this is her first novel. Judith Perrignon is a prize-winning essayist and the author of a number of historical and other literary works, including La nuit du Fouquet's avec Ariane Chemin. This is her second novel after the much lauded Les Chagrins, published in France in 2011.Framed
By Adriana Hunter, Tonino Benacquista. 2006
Praise for Holy Smoke, the first in the Antoine series:"A terrific black comedy ...both a blasphemously funny satire of provincial…
Italian chicanery and a wry acknowledgment of the ambivalence that ambitious immigrants feel about their roots."--The New York Times"Unexpected deadly demands made in the name of friendship inspire the plot of this quirky mystery novel. Irreverently inveighs against romantic love, cancer and the Paris suburbs."--The Washington Post"An iconoclastic chronicle of small-time crooks and desperate capers, with added Gallic and Italian flair. Wonderful fun."--GuardianAntoine, a fanatic billiards player, is asked to watch over a Paris art gallery. When he scuffles with a thief a statue falls and severs his right hand. His maverick investigation leads to the discovery of a series of gruesome killings. Soon Antoine finds himself the prime suspect in the murder of a gallery owner. A game of billiards decides the outcome of this satirical tale which brilliantly captures the world of modern art and the parasites that infest it.After being, in turn, a museum night-watchman, and a train guard on the Paris-Rome line, Tonino Benacquista is now a highly successful author of fiction and film scripts.The Corsican Caper: A novel
By Peter Mayle. 2014
Here is Peter Mayle at his effervescent best--his master sleuth, Sam Levitt, eating, drinking, and romancing his way through the…
South of France even as he investigates a case of deadly intrigue among the Riviera's jet set. Billionaire Francis Reboul is taking in the view at his coastal estate, awaiting the arrival of vacationing friends Sam Levitt and Elena Morales, when he spies a massive yacht whose passengers seem a little too interested in his property. The yacht belongs to rapacious Russian tycoon Oleg Vronsky, who, for his own purposes, will stop at nothing to obtain Reboul's villa. When Reboul refuses to sell, Vronsky's methods quickly turn unsavory. Now it's up to Sam--he's saved Reboul's neck before--to negotiate with an underworld of mercenaries and hit men, not to mention the Corsican mafia, to prevent his friend from becoming a victim of Vronsky's "Russian diplomacy." The dire situation doesn't stop Sam and Elena from attending glamorous fêtes where the wines and starlets alike sparkle, and enjoying sumptuous meals--from multicourse revelations to understated delights like the first asparagus of the season, on which one must make a wish. But as Sam's sleuthing draws him closer to the truth of Vronsky's schemes, he realizes Reboul might not be the only one unable to enjoy the good life for long. Brimming with entertaining twists, sparkling scenery, and mouthwatering gustatory interludes as only Peter Mayle can write them, The Corsican Caper is a one-way ticket to pleasure, Provençal style.From the Hardcover edition.Blackout
By Howard Curtis, Gianluca Morozzi. 2004
"A spine-tingling novel that keeps you mesmerized from beginning to end."--InfiniteStorie"Morozzi has a light touch. He has an uncanny ability…
to convey mood swings, excitement and plot twists with ever increasing velocity."--Gazzetta di Parma"A chilling and claustrophobic thriller with an unpredictable ending. Morozzi joins the best in the genre."--LINUSBologna in August: unbearable heat, an empty city. Claudia is a young student in a hurry to return home from her work as a waitress and get out of the skimpy uniform she hates. Tomas is a young man on his way to elope to Amsterdam with his girlfriend, Francesca. Aldo is a husband and father with an uncanny resemblance to Elvis Presley, anxious to get to an apartment filled with guilty secrets. All three have an urgent need to be somewhere else. Instead, they are trapped in an elevator in a deserted building on a holiday weekend. They are like three wasps in an upturned glass . . . and one of the trio is a serial killer.This dark, twist-packed psychological thriller in the style of Phonebooth has been adapted as a US film to be released in the fall of 2008, starring Amber Tamblyn and directed by cult Mexican auteur Rigoberto Castañeda.Gianluca Morozzi was born in Bologna in 1971, where he lives today. He is well-known as a cutting-edge satirist and music critic, often compared to Nick Hornby and Ben Elton. Blackout is his first thriller.