Hailed from publication as one of the finest novels ever written in Hebrew, A Room is in the league of Gravity's Rainbow or The Recognitions: a monumental, subversive classic of twentieth-century literature.
Eliza travels to Sydney to deal with the estate of her Aunt Dodge, and finds Maxine, a hitherto unknown cousin, occupying Dodge's apartment. When legal complications derail plans to live it up on their inheritance, the women's lives become consumed by absurd attempts to deal with Australian tax law, as well their own mounting boredom and squalor.
Since 2010, this anthology has been an essential resource for readers, critics, and publishers interested in contemporary European literature. In this, the seventh installment of the series, Best European Fiction 2016 continues its commitment to uncovering the best prose writing happening on the continent
One of the most penetrating and sympathetic explorations ever undertaken by one writer into the mind of another, Prancing Novelist is far more than a simple tribute or work of research. Prancing Novelist is not only a monument to Firbank, but is also a showcase for Brophy's own uproarious prose, not to mention her genius for telling good stories.
The writer-narrator of The Bulgarian Truck has hit upon a new technique for writing a novel, which he calls "a building site beneath the open sky," but he cannot persuade his more widely read wife, Marianne, a character from an earlier novel, that it is any good.
Focusing on the experiences of one particular family living in one particular house during these historic events, Ayse Kulin mixes fact and fiction, soap opera and Tolstoy, to bring to light the effects of such political upheaval on a nominally comfortable and affluent household: the monied and intellectual class who find that their stake in Turkish life and culture is far more precarious than they could have guessed.
Prague is a place where murders happen, and it takes an English-speaking Russian expat with a strong antipathy for the city and its inhabitants to solve the mystery . . . or maybe not. As the plots thicken, the two narrators of Kirill Kobrin's ten short stories gradually merge into a single hazy, undefined personality.
Majnun lives his life online in his grandparents' well-appointed home in the Brazilian capital. No school, no work-just bored in Brasilia. After falling in love with a married woman, he flees to Madrid with friends, intent on, well ... something. As the story progresses, his vague interests threaten to boil over into violent, even deadly action.
John Barth, a moderately successful novelist just turned sixty, decides to take a sail on Chesapeake Bay with his wife, but a tropical storm forces them deep into the Maryland tidal marshes. Lost, Barth takes out his dinghy to search for a way home, but becomes embarked instead on a quest through the murkier regions of his own memory-a semi-memoir, staged as an operatic cruise through desire, vocation, despair, love, marriage, selves, and counterselves.
Finnley Wren: His Notions and Opinions, Together with a Haphazard History of His Career and Amours in These Moody Years, as Well as Sundry Rhymes, Fables, Diatribes and Literary Misdemeanors stands as one of the greatest American responses to the thrown gauntlet that is Tristram Shandy. An innovative, uproarious sentimental education, this novel marries the mordant satire of Wylie's Generation of Vipers to what might in other hands have been an ordinary story of frustrated ambition and frustrated love, turning forty-eight hours' worth of drunken conversation into an emotional and typographical explosion.
The nine stories that make up this collection depict a wide variety of contemporary Koreans navigating a world focused on material wealth and social power, in which family ties have been disrupted and all relationships are dysfunctional.
A postmodern poet who successfully employed classic structures to exploit the range of possibilities inherent in the Slovenian language, this selection from the life's work of Milan Jesih highlights his revolutionary approach to verse. Beginning with humor and autobiography and gradually withdrawing into a universe of of fragments, quotations, dreams, and doubt, this collection offers English readers a first glimpse into the work of one of Slovenia's literary treasures.
Subtitled "An Exploration of the Musico-Erotic," this novel is an experiment in blurring the boundaries between the syntax of music and that of poetry.
Editor's note/An interview with Gerald Murnane by Antoni Jach/Looking for Writers Beyond Their Work by John Griswold/Five Silhouettes by Luis Chitarroni (translated by Sarah Denaci)/Seven and a Half Studies by S.D. Chrostowska/Nine Suppositions Concerning "Bouvard and Pecuchet" by Jacques Jouet (translated by E.C. Gogolak)/Irrationality, Situations, and Novels of Inquiry by Thalia Field/Margins and Mirrors by Warren Motte/The Colon by Lily Hoang and Bhanu Kapil/The Fragile Shelter of the Declarative: On Edouard Leve by Adrian West/Transgressive Autofictions by Jacques Houis/Contributors/Translators/Acknowledgments/Book Reviews/Books Received/Annual Index
A moving contribution to the tradition of the metaphysical novel as exemplified by Dostoyevsky and Bernanos, and likewise a worthy counterpart to the vibrant and polyphonic work of fellow Iberians Camilo Jos? Cela and Juan Goytisolo, "The Sea" is a cornerstone of postwar Catalan literature. Set in a tubercular sanatorium in Mallorca after the Spanish Civil War, it tells the story of three children sharing a gruesome secret who are brought together again by chance and illness -- two patients and one nurse. A love triangle, a story of retribution, and an exploration of evil, "The Sea" is "a profound and radical descent into the depths of the human soul." (Gerard de Cortanze)
On Wing, the first published work of fiction by the Slovak poet-philosopher Robert Gal, is a constellation of hundreds of aphorisms, dreams, anecdotes, and inquiries, all written in a restless, searching, "improvisational" prose whose techniques reflect those of Bernhard, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, not to mention the saxophonist and composer John Zorn, who makes a brief cameo as a character.
The narrator of this novel is Ballerina, a fifteen-year-old with the cognitive faculties of a child, and each of its fifteen chapters begins with her first wetting her bed and thereby greeting a new day. Drawing comparison to William Faulkner in its expressionistic depiction of Ballerina's interior world, this is a classic of contemporary Slovenian literature: a hugely popular exploration of a character whose world is so divorced from what we think of as reality.
A forlorn traveler is taken in by three suffering orphans, who, in the midst of their pain, give him food and shelter. The first, orphaned by history, still mourns a father who was sent to a Nazi concentration camp, never to return. The second, orphaned by pathology, has a rare disease, and is facing madness alone in a mountain chalet. The third, orphaned by philosophy, is a teenager who has decided to cut all ties with his parents.Never one to avoid challenging questions, in this poignant triptych Laroche examines the relationship between a writer and his words: suggesting that, perhaps, he is the orphan of his own work.
A bevy of mediocre writers are invited to a seminar aboard a specially chartered train, and this novel tracks their progress across Europe: bitter, bickering, and self-absorbed. Aboard this Literature Express is a Georgian author whose love for the wife of his own Polish translator seems as doomed as his hopes for international success; worse still, it seems all the novelists congregated on The Literature Express intend to write their next books about their time on the train... Can our Georgian author compete? Is there any hope for contemporary literature, or, barring that, at least his own little love affair? "The Literature Express" is a riotous parable about the state of literary culture, the European Union, and our own petty ambitions--be they professional or amorous.
In normal, everyday tones, a story is told by the perpetrator of triple incest: first with his mother as a child and a young man, then with his daughter as he grows into mature manhood, and finally with his sister in middle age. This primeval fairytale burns with an icy passion as the narrator switches roles along with familial relationships. The quasi-metaphysical lucidity with which he pursues his odd fate is eerie, particularly in light of his apparent innocence as to the perverse nature of his taboo attachments, and the theatrical artifice with which he pursues them. In the end, his passionate desire is so earnest that the reader is left to wonder if he is truly a monster or an innocent: who is directing whom?
Aged twenty, and with no war experience, Nicholas Mosley found himself in charge of a platoon of men positioned along the Italian front during the Second World War. With his father in prison on charges of treason, he had enlisted primarily in an effort to improve his family image. But the war left Mosley a radically changed man: he had gone in out of personal convenience, and left with a sense of greater purpose. Saved from death by one of his men, holed up in barns and trenches and tents, and marching across Europe, Mosley found in war a certainty that eluded him in peacetime. "War is both senseless and necessary, squalid and fulfilling, terrifying and sometimes jolly," he writes. "This is like life. Humans are at home in war (though they seldom admit this). They feel they know what they have to do." In an interview conducted between 1977 and 1978, Nicholas Mosley said, "When I was young William Faulkner was my great love, not just because of the density of style, but because he seemed to be dealing with the question not of what will happen next but what is happening now. The first Faulkner novel I read was The Sound and the Fury, which I got hold of when we liberated a POW camp in Italy in 1944 and I liberated the Red Cross Library. I was about twenty.... What in god's name, after all, was I doing aged twenty in Italy in a war?"
An exile returns to Spain from France to find that he is repelled by the fascism of Franco's Spain and drawn to the world of Muslim culture. In Marks of Identity, Juan Goytisolo, one of Spain's most celebrated novelists, speaks for a generation of Spaniards who were small children during the Spanish Civil War, grew up under a stifling dictatorship, and, in many cases, emigrated in desperation from their dying country. Upon his return, the narrator confronts the most controversial political, religious, social, and sexual issues of our time with ferocious energy and elegant prose. Torn between the Islamic and European worlds around him, he finds both ultimately unsatisfactory. In the end, only displacement survives.
A retired academic and writer is becoming a media celebrity of sorts, appearing on various talk shows to voice his controversial views on human nature and war. While in New York to make such an appearance, he becomes the victim of a hit-and-run--set up by the CIA? the FBI? terrorists?--and ends up confined to a hospital bed. This forced inactivity allows him to reflect on his life--the work he has done, the women he has known--as various people from his life gather around him, including both his first and second wives. Reminiscing about his past while dealing with his present, the man begins to see his provocative ideas about fidelity, sin, and grace play themselves out in a virtuosic way that could only be conceived by Nicholas Mosley.
Hidden behind a cloak of exotic mystery, Cuba is virtually unknown to American citizens, G. Cabrera Infante--in Infante's Inferno and several of his other novels--allows readers to peek behind the curtain surrounding this island and see the vibrant life that existed there before Fidel Castro's regime. Detailing the sexual education and adventures of the author, Infante's Inferno is a lush, erotic, funny book that provides readers with insight into what it was like to grow up in pre-revolutionary Havana. Viewing every girl as a potential lover, and the movies as a place both for entertainment and potential sexual escapades, Cabera Infante captures the adolescent male mindset with a great deal of fun and self-consciousness. With his hallmark of puns and wordplay--excellently translated by Suzanne Jill Levine--Cabrera Infante has a hilariously updated of the Don Juan myth in a tropical setting.
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