"McClanahan's prose is miasmic, dizzying, repetitive. A rushing river of words that reflects the chaos and humanity of the place from which he hails. [McClanahan] aims to lasso the moon… He is not a writer of half-measures. The man has purpose....
This powerful and often terrifying novel, the fruit of J.G. Ballard’s obsession with the motor-car, will shock and disturb many readers. Few products of modern technology excite as much fascination and interest as the automobile, but each year...
The Carson dynasty rules the ski-resort town of Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. Founded by patriarch Adam, the town is the site of the Mammoth Cup ski race — a qualifier for the Olympics. But when Wylie Welborn,...
When New Yorker Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home and quality time with the man she hopes to marry. But Nick has failed to give his girlfriend a few key details....
McGahern's command of the short story places him among the finest practitioners of the form, in a lineage that runs from Chekhov through Joyce and the Anglo-American masters. When the collection was first published in 1992, the Sunday Times said...
These nine stories reveal a dazzling variety of styles, tones and subject matter. Among them are some of Stanley Elkin's finest, including the fabulistic "On a Field, Rampant," the farcical "Perlmutter at the East Pole," and the stylized "A...
From the highly acclaimed author of Edisto and The Interrogative Mood, Padgett Powell’s new collection of stories, Cries for Help, Various, follows his mentor Donald Barthelme’s advice that “wacky mode” must “break their hearts.” The...
Yu Hua’s beautiful, heartbreaking novel Cries in the Drizzle follows a young Chinese boy throughout his childhood and adolescence during the reign of Chairman Mao.
The middle son of three, Sun Guanglin is constantly neglected ignored...
Rubem Fonseca’s Crimes of August offers the first serious literary treatment of the cataclysmic events of August 1954, arguably the most turbulent month in Brazilian history.
A rich novel, both culturally and historically, Crimes of August...