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From the author of Annihilation, a brilliant speculative thriller of dark conspiracy, endangered species, and the possible end of all things. ΓÇ£Jane SmithΓÇ¥ΓÇönot her real nameΓÇöreceives an envelope that contains a note from a woman she doesnΓÇÖt know and a key to an anonymous storage unit. The key leads her to a pair of taxidermied animals, a hummingbird and a salamander, which turn out to be two of the most endangered creatures on earth.Jane has set in motion a series of events that quickly spin beyond her control. She is being followed, her home surveilled, her family in peril. The author of the mysterious noteΓÇöJaneΓÇÖs only real leadΓÇöis already dead. She was, Jane learns, a reputed ecoterrorist. What did she want with Jane?Profiteering wildlife smugglers; an amoral energy company; an extremistΓÇÖs apocalyptic vision. The threats come from all around, and time is running outΓÇöfor Jane and possibly for the world.Hummingbird Salamander is Jeff VanderMeer at his dazzling, cinematic best, wrapping profound questions into a tightly plotted tale of the fight to survive.

The New York Times-bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with his collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and works.Irrealis moods are a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happen. Irrealis moods are also known as counterfactual moods and include the conditional, the subjunctive, the optative, and the imperative-all best expressed in this book as the might-be and the might-have-been. One of the great prose stylists of his generation, André Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what time means to artists who cannot grasp life in the present. Irrealis moods are not about the present or the past or the future; they are about what might have been but never was but could in theory still happen. From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, C. P. Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection on the imagination's power to forge a zone outside of time's intractable hold.

Finalist for the 2022 Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction ΓÇó Longlisted for the PEN/Hemmingway Award for Debut Novel ΓÇó A New York Times Book Review EditorsΓÇÖ Choice ΓÇó A Most Anticipated Book of 2021 at O, The Oprah Magazine, Refinery29, and The Millions ΓÇó One of GoodreadsΓÇÖ 75 Debut Novels to Discover in 2021 ΓÇó One of The AdvocateΓÇÖs 22 LGBTQ+ Books You Absolutely Need to Read This YearΓÇ£A wonderful, immersive debut novel . . . In GrattanΓÇÖs hands, lifeΓÇÖs joys are magnetic.ΓÇ¥ ΓÇöPatrick Nathan, The New York Times Book ReviewAn extraordinary family saga following a mother and two teens as they navigate a new life in East Germany.Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Beate Haas, who defected from East Germany as a child, is notified that her parentsΓÇÖ abandoned mansion is available for her to reclaim. Newly divorced and eager to escape her bleak life in upstate New York, where she has lived as an adult, she arrives with her two teenagers to discover a city that has become an unrecognizable ghost town. The move fractures the siblingsΓÇÖ close relationship, as Michael, free to be gay, takes to looting empty houses and partying with wannabe anarchists, while Adela, fascinated with the horrors of the Holocaust, buries herself in books and finds companionship in a previously unknown cousin. Over time, the town itself changes, tooΓÇöfrom dismantled city to refugee haven and neo-Nazi hotbed, and eventually to a desirable seaside resort town. In the midst of that change, two episodes of devastating, fateful violence come to define the family forever. Moving seamlessly through decades and between the thoughts and lives of several unforgettable characters, Thomas GrattanΓÇÖs spellbinding novel The Recent East is a multigenerational epic that illuminates what it means to leave home, and what it means to return. Masterfully crafted with humor, gorgeous prose, and a powerful understanding of history and heritage, The Recent East is the profoundly affecting story of a family upended by displacement and loss, and the extraordinary debut of an empathetic and ambitious storyteller.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice“A grounded and expansive examination of the American economic divide . . . It takes a skillful journalist to weave data and anecdotes together so effectively.” —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles TimesAn award-winning journalist investigates Amazon’s impact on the wealth and poverty of towns and cities across the United States.In 1937, the famed writer and activist Upton Sinclair published a novel bearing the subtitle A Story of Ford-America. He blasted the callousness of a company worth “a billion dollars” that underpaid its workers while forcing them to engage in repetitive and sometimes dangerous assembly-line labor. Eight decades later, the market capitalization of Amazon.com has exceeded $1.5 trillion, while the value of the Ford Motor Company hovers around $30 billion. We have entered the age of one-click America—and as the coronavirus makes Americans more dependent on online shopping, Amazon’s sway will only intensify. Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment is not another exposé of our most conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation of the America that falls within that company’s growing shadow. As MacGillis shows, Amazon’s sprawling network of delivery hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is unraveling, and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated. In Seattle, high-paid workers in new office towers displace a historic Black neighborhood. In Ohio, cardboard makers supplant auto manufacturers, and in suburban Virginia, homeowners try to protect their town from the environmental impact of a new data center. When a warehouse replaces a fabled steel plant on the outskirts of Baltimore, a new model of work becomes visible. Fulfillment also shows how Amazon has become a force in Washington, D.C., ushering readers through a revolving door for lobbyists and government contractors and into CEO Jeff Bezos’s Kalorama mansion. With empathy and breadth, MacGillis demonstrates the hidden human costs of the other inequality—not the growing gap between rich and poor, but the gap between the country’s winning and losing regions. The result is an intimate account of contemporary capitalism: its drive to innovate, its dark, pitiless magic, its remaking of America with every click.

Rachel Cusk's second novel is a ruthless, surprising story of work, gender, and control.Ralph Loman is working in an unsatisfying job at a free London newspaper when Francine Snaith, a temporary secretary for a corporate finance firm, unexpectedly crosses his path at a party. Her beauty ignites a blaze of excitement in his troubled heart. But Francine is ravenous for attention, driven by a thirst for conquest, and when Ralph tries politely to extricate himself, he finds he is bound by chains of consequence from which it seems there is no escape. In The Temporary, Rachel Cusk paints a merciless portrait of the cut and thrust of modern romance, work, and life.

"e;Calamity Jane Eyre"e; arrives at "e;Cold Comfort Farm"e; when a hapless young woman with a mysterious past takes a job with an eccentric family of British gentry; a brilliant comedy of manners and identity by a Whitbread-winning young author.Stella Benson, eager to change her life, answers a classified ad and arrives in a tiny Sussex village that's home to a family slightly larger than life. Stella's hopes for the Maddens may be high, but her station among them--as au pair to their irascible son Martin--is undeniably low. What drove her to leave home, job, and life in London for such rural ignominy? Why has she severed all ties with her family? Why is she so reluctant to discuss her past? And who, exactly, is Edward?The Country Life is a rich and subtle novel about embarrassment, awkwardness, and being alone; about families, or the lack of them; and about love in some peculiar guises. Rachel Cusk, widely acclaimed in England, makes her American debut with an utterly charming, captivating novel about one young woman's adventures in self-discovery.

A Times Literary Supplement's Book of the Year 2020A New Statesman's Best Book of 2020A Bloomberg's Best Book of 2020A Guardian Best Book About Ideas of 2020The world-renowned philosopher and author of the bestselling Justice explores the central question of our time: What has become of the common good?These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favor of the already fortunate. Stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality give the lie to the American credo that "you can make it if you try". The consequence is a brew of anger and frustration that has fueled populist protest and extreme polarization, and led to deep distrust of both government and our fellow citizens--leaving us morally unprepared to face the profound challenges of our time.World-renowned philosopher Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the crises that are upending our world, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalization and rising inequality. Sandel shows the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgement it imposes on those left behind, and traces the dire consequences across a wide swath of American life. He offers an alternative way of thinking about success--more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility and solidarity, and more affirming of the dignity of work. The Tyranny of Merit points us toward a hopeful vision of a new politics of the common good.

Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics-an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil.In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner's many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.

From Paul Beatty, the author of the Man Booker Prize winner The Sellout, comes Tuff, a novel as fast-paced and hard-edged as the Harlem streets it portrays.Age nineteen and weighing in at 320 pounds, Winston "Tuffy" Foshay is an East Harlem denizen who breaks jaws and shoots dogs and dreams of earning millions from his idea for Cap'n Crunch: The Movie, starring Danny DeVito. His best friend is a disabled Muslim who wants to rob banks, his guiding light is an ex-hippie Asian woman who worked for Malcolm X, and he married his wife, Yolanda, over the phone from jail.He's funny and fierce, frustrated and feared. And when Tuff decides to run for City Council, this dazzling novel goes from astoundingly funny to acerbically sublime. By turns profound and irreverent, and populated with a hilarious supporting cast, Paul Beatty's Tuff is satire at its razor-sharp best."An extravagant, satirical cri de couer...Beatty's blunt, impious, streetwise eloquence has a kind of transfixing power." -The New York Times Book Review"Masterfully conceived and highly entertaining...Richly textured and unforgettable."-The Boston Globe

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEARA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, O Magazine, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times, Glamour, Shondaland, The New York Times Book Review, Boston Globe, Buzzfeed, Kirkus, Time, Good Housekeeping, InStyle, The Guardian, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Self, The New York Public Library, Town & Country, Wired, Boston.com, Happy Mag, New Statesman, Vox, Shelf Awareness, Chatelaine, The Undefeated, Apartment Therapy, Brooklyn Based, The End of the World Review, Exile in Bookville, Lit Reactor, BookPage, i-DA FAVORITE BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Barack ObamaA BEST BOOK FOR HOLIDAY GIFTS: AV Club, Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine/The Strategist, The RumpusWINNER of the NBCC John Leonard Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist AwardAN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER * LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER * WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER"So delicious that it feels illicit . . . Raven LeilaniΓÇÖs first novel reads like summer: sentences like ice that crackle or melt into a languorous drip; plot suddenly, wildly flying forward like a bike down a hill." ΓÇöJazmine Hughes, The New York Times Book ReviewΓÇ£An irreverent intergenerational tale of race and class thatΓÇÖs blisteringly smart and fan-yourself sexy.ΓÇ¥ ΓÇöMichelle Hart, O: The Oprah MagazineNo one wants what no one wants.And how do we even know what we want? How do we know weΓÇÖre ready to take it?Edie is stumbling her way through her twentiesΓÇösharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriageΓÇöwith rules.As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics werenΓÇÖt hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and invited into EricΓÇÖs homeΓÇöthough not by Eric. She becomes a hesitant ally to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie may be the only Black woman young Akila knows.Irresistibly unruly and strikingly beautiful, razor-sharp and slyly comic, sexually charged and utterly absorbing, Raven LeilaniΓÇÖs Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her lifeΓÇöher hunger, her angerΓÇöin a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent, and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way.

From the author of The Almost Nearly Perfect People, a lively tour through Japan, Korea, and China, exploring the intertwined cultures and often fraught history of these neighboring countries.There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain." However, in East Asia, there are three tigers on that mountain: China, Japan, and Korea, and they have a long history of turmoil and tension with each other. In his latest entertaining and thought provoking narrative travelogue, Michael Booth sets out to discover how deep, really, is the enmity between these three "tiger" nations, and what prevents them from making peace. Currently China's economic power continues to grow, Japan is becoming more militaristic, and Korea struggles to reconcile its westernized south with the dictatorial Communist north. Booth, long fascinated with the region, travels by car, ferry, train, and foot, experiencing the people and culture of these nations up close. No matter where he goes, the burden of history, and the memory of past atrocities, continues to overshadow present relationships. Ultimately, Booth seeks a way forward for these closely intertwined, neighboring nations.An enlightening, entertaining and sometimes sobering journey through China, Japan, and Korea, Three Tigers, One Mountain is an intimate and in-depth look at some of the world's most powerful and important countries.

Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR and Lit Hub. A Los Angeles Times Bestseller. A New York Times Book Review Editors'' Choice"In The Cactus League [Emily Nemens] provides her readers with what amounts to a miniature, self-enclosed world that is funny and poignant and lovingly observed." --Charles McGrath, The New York Times Book ReviewAn explosive, character-driven odyssey through the world of baseballJason Goodyear is the star outfielder for the Los Angeles Lions, stationed with the rest of his team in the punishingly hot Arizona desert for their annual spring training. Handsome, famous, and talented, Goodyear is nonetheless coming apart at the seams. And the coaches, writers, wives, girlfriends, petty criminals, and diehard fans following his every move are eager to find out whyΓÇöas they hide secrets of their own.Humming with the energy of a ballpark before the first pitch, Emily Nemens''s The Cactus League unravels the tightly connected web of people behind a seemingly linear game. Narrated by a sportscaster, GoodyearΓÇÖs story is interspersed with tales of Michael Taylor, a batting coach trying to stay relevant; Tamara Rowland, a resourceful spring-training paramour, looking for one last catch; Herb Allison, a legendary sports agent grappling with his decline; and a plethora of other richly drawn characters, all striving to be seen as the season approaches. ItΓÇÖs a journey that, like the Arizona desert, brims with both possibility and destruction.Anchored by an expert knowledge of baseballΓÇÖs inner workings, Emily Nemens''s The Cactus League is a propulsive and deeply human debut that captures a strange desert world that is both exciting and unforgiving, where the most crucial games are the ones played off the field.

A Best Book of 2020: Open Letters Review"AndrewsΓÇÖs writing is transportingly voluptuous, conjuring tastes and smells and sounds like her literary godmother, Edna OΓÇÖBrien . . . What makes her novel sing is its universal themes: how a young woman tries to make sense of her world, and how she grows up."ΓÇôPenelope Green, The New York Times Book ReviewThis ΓÇ£luminousΓÇ¥ (The Observer) feminist coming-of-age novel captures in sensuous, blistering prose the richness and imperfection of the bond between a daughter and her motherIt begins with our bodies . . . Safe together in the violet dark and yet already there are spaces beginning to open between us.From that first immaculate, fluid connection, through the ups and downs of a working-class childhood in northern England, the one constant in LucyΓÇÖs life has been her mother: comforting and mysterious, ferociously loving, tirelessly devoted, as much a part of Lucy as her own skin. Her mother''s lessons in womanhood shape LucyΓÇÖs appreciation for desire, her sense of duty as a caretaker, her hunger for a better, perhaps reckless life.At university in glamorous London, LucyΓÇÖs background sets her apart. And then she is finished, graduated, adrift. She escapes to a tiny house in Donegal left empty by her grandfather, a place where her mother once found happiness. There she will take a lover, live inside art and the past, and track back through her memories and her motherΓÇÖs stories to make sense of her place in the world.In ΓÇ£a stunning new voice in British literary fictionΓÇ¥ (The Independent) that lays bare our raw, dark selves, Jessica AndrewsΓÇÖs debut honors the richness and imperfection of the bond between a daughter and her mother. Intricately woven in lyrical vignettes, Saltwater is a novel of becoming-- a woman, an artist-- and of finding a way forward by looking back.

A renowned journalist and one-time economics editor of The Economist presents an unconventionally accessible, story-driven look at how forgotten corners of the globe hold vital clues to the world's economic future.

A 2020 LOCUS AWARD FINALISTJeff VanderMeer''s Dead Astronauts presents a City with no name of its own where, in the shadow of the all-powerful Company, lives human and otherwise converge in terrifying and miraculous ways. At stake: the fate of the future, the fate of EarthΓÇöall the Earths.A messianic blue fox who slips through warrens of time and space on a mysterious mission. A homeless woman haunted by a demon who finds the key to all things in a strange journal. A giant leviathan of a fish, centuries old, who hides a secret, remembering a past that may not be its own. Three ragtag rebels waging an endless war for the fate of the world against an all-powerful corporation. A raving madman who wanders the desert lost in the past, haunted by his own creation: an invisible monster whose name he has forgotten and whose purpose remains hidden.

NOW AN 8-EPISODE FREEVEE TELEVISION SERIES! ΓÇö From the iconic musicians Tegan and Sara comes a memoir about high school, detailing their first loves and first songs in a compelling look back at their humble beginnings.High School is the revelatory and unique coming-of-age story of Sara and Tegan Quin, identical twins from Calgary, Alberta, who grew up at the height of grunge and rave culture in the nineties, well before they became the celebrated musicians and global LGBTQ icons we know today. While grappling with their identity and sexuality, often alone, they also faced academic meltdown, their parentsΓÇÖ divorce, and the looming pressure of what might come after high school. Written in alternating chapters from both Tegan''s and SaraΓÇÖs points of view, the book is a raw account of the drugs, alcohol, love, music, and friendship they explored in their formative years. A transcendent story of first loves and first songs, High School captures the tangle of discordant and parallel memories of two sisters who grew up in distinct ways even as they lived just down the hall from each another. This is the origin story of Tegan and Sara.

An ordinary friendship between two extraordinary women

A CULT MASTERPIECE—THE ADVENTURE NOVEL THAT INSPIRED JOHN HUSTON''S CLASSIC FILM, BY THE ELUSIVE AUTHOR WHO WAS A MODEL FOR THE HERO OF ROBERTO BOLAÑO''S 2666.Little is known for certain about B. Traven. Evidence suggests that he was born Otto Feige in Schlewsig-Holstein and that he escaped a death sentence for his involvement with the anarchist underground in Bavaria. Traven spent most of his adult life in Mexico, where, under various names, he wrote several bestsellers and was an outspoken defender of the rights of Mexico''s indigenous people. First published in 1935, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is Traven''s most famous and enduring work, the dark, savagely ironic, and riveting story of three down-and-out Americans hunting for gold in Sonora.

A sweeping work of historical fiction from the New York Times–bestselling author Dominic Smith, The Electric Hotel is a spellbinding story of art and love.For more than thirty years, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films who started out as a concession agent for the Lumière brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days foraging for mushrooms in the hills of Los Angeles and taking photographs of runaways and the striplings along Sunset Boulevard. But when a film history student comes to interview Claude about The Electric Hotel—the lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended the career of his muse, Sabine Montrose—the past comes surging back. In his run-down hotel suite, the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated: celluloid fragments in desperate need of restoration, as well as Claude’s memories of the woman who inspired and beguiled him.The Electric Hotel is a portrait of a man entranced by the magic of moviemaking, a luminous romance, and a whirlwind trip through early cinema. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

Two books in one in a flip dos-à-dos format: The story of Aleksandar Hemon’s parents’ immigration from Sarajevo to Canada and a book of short memories of the author’s family, friends, and childhood in SarajevoIn My Parents, Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of his parents’ immigration to Canada—of the lives that were upended by the war in Bosnia and siege of Sarajevo and the new lives his parents were forced to build. As ever with his work, he portrays both the perfect, intimate details (his mother’s lonely upbringing, his father’s fanatical beekeeping) and a sweeping, heartbreaking history of his native country. It is a story full of many Hemons, of course—his parents, sister, uncles, cousins—and also of German occupying forces, Yugoslav partisans, royalist Serb collaborators, singing Ukrainians, and a few befuddled Canadians.My Parents is Hemon at his very best, grounded in stories lovingly polished by retelling, but making them exhilarating and fresh in writing, summoning unexpected laughs in the midst of the heartbreaking narratives. This Does Not Belong to You, meanwhile, is the exhilarating, freewheeling, unabashedly personal companion to My Parents—a perfect dose of Hemon at his most dazzling and untempered in a series of beautifully distilled memories and observations and explosive, hilarious, poignant miniatures. Presented dos-à-dos with My Parents, it complements and completes a major work from a major writer.In the words of Colum McCann, “Aleksandar Hemon is, quite frankly, the greatest writer of our generation.” Hemon has never been better than here in these pages. And the moment has never been more ready for his voice, nor has the world ever been more in need of it.

More than just a travelogue, Travels in Siberia is also an account of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union and a personal reflection on the all-around amazingness of Russia, a country that still somehow manages to be funny.

"A great Faustian fable, and a literary endeavor of historical ingenuity that we now may start to characterize as Krachtian." -Karl Ove Knausgaard The follow-up to Christian Kracht's acclaimed novel Imperium (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year), The Dead mines the feverish early years of the Nazis' rise to power for a Gothic tale of global conspiracy, personal loss, and historical entanglements large and small. In Berlin, Germany, in the early 1930s, the acclaimed Swiss film director Emil Nägeli receives the assignment of a lifetime: travel to Japan and make a film to establish the dominance of Adolf Hitler's Nazi empire once and for all. But his handlers are unaware that Nägeli has colluded with the Jewish film critics to pursue an alternative objective-to create a monumental, modernist, allegorical spectacle to warn the world of the horror to come. Meanwhile, in Japan, the film minister Masahiko Amakasu intends to counter Hollywood's growing influence and usher in a new golden age of Japanese cinema by exploiting his Swiss visitor. The arrival of Nägeli's film-star fiancée and a strangely thuggish, pistol-packing Charlie Chaplin-as well as the first stirrings of the winds of war-soon complicates both Amakasu's and Nägeli's plans, forcing them to face their demons . . . and their doom."The Dead is the beautiful, brilliant, and utterly mad novel that Thomas Mann would have written had he known the East like Yukio Mishima and loved his adopted Hollywood with the gusto of Nathanael West." -Joshua Cohen"The Dead is a story of love and sadness in times when the weak were broken by the unforgiving ideologies of fascism and National Socialism . . . I read The Dead twice in a row, first for the story and then for the beauty of the prose." -Sjón