A fictional portrait of Jiang Ching follows her life from her youth as the unwanted daughter of a concubine, to her search for fame as an actress in Shanghai, to her marriage to revolutionary Mao Zedong, to her role in the turbulent Communist...
College students, recent graduates, and their parents work at Denny's, volunteer at a public library in suburban Florida, attend satanic ska/punk concerts, eat Chinese food with the homeless of New York City, and go to the same Japanese...
These stories, set in both real and unreal locales, arouse more faraway yearnings. All sooner or later come round to the subject of love, but none finds it anywhere we might ordinarily have expected. Bedlam lurks everywhere, from the streets to the...
In Bedlam Burning, Geoff Nicholson takes deadly satiric aim at the ivy-covered walls of academia and the rubber rooms of insane asylums. When the debut novel of Gregory Collins is accepted by a publisher he seems set on a course for literary...
Amy Yamada is one of the most prominent—and controversial—novelists in Japan today. She burst onto the scene in 1985 with her short novel “Bedtime Eyes,” which for critics embodied the spirit of the ‘shinjinru’—i.e. Generation X—in...
Always exploring the boundaries of race, identity, politics, memory, sexuality, and love with fearless insight and deep compassion, Nadine Gordimer has produced another masterpiece of short fiction. From a former anti-apartheid activist's search...
An international literary sensation about an arsonist on the loose in rural Norway and the young man haunted by the story
In 1970s Norway, an arsonist targets a small town for one long, terrifying month. One by one, buildings go up in flames....
Tessa has just months to live. Fighting back against hospital visits, endless tests, drugs with excruciating side-effects, Tessa compiles a list. It's her To Do Before I Die list. And number one is Sex. Released from the constraints of '-normal'...
Having grown up on the quiet island of Guernsey, Elizabeth Dean can't wait to start her new life in London. On a mission to find Clara Pickle - the mysterious beneficiary in her grandmother's will - she arrives in bustling and grungy 1990s Soho,...
Someone has opened the doors to the Village Archive, but what drives the sleepless out of their houses is not that which was stolen, but that which has escaped. Old stories, myths, and fairy tales are wandering about the streets with the people....