The classic pacifist novel by a major Polish writer, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize At the beginning of the twentieth century the villagers of the Carpathian mountains lead a simple life, much as they have always done. Among them is Piotr, a bandy-legged peasant, who wants nothing more from life than an official railway cap, a cottage, and a bride with a dowry. But then the First World War reaches the mountains and Piotr is drafted into the army. All the weight of imperial authority is used to mould him into an unthinking fighting machine, forced to fight a war he does not understand, for interests other than his own. The Salt of the Earth is a classic war novel and a powerfully pacifist tale about the consequences of war for ordinary men.

The best kind of mystery, the kind that never stops haunting you. Entertainment Weekly A work of melancholic beauty . . . Sincere, shattering, magnificent. L Express In the stillness of his Paris apartment, Jean Daragane has built a life of total solitude. Then a surprising phone call shatters the silence of an unusually hot September, and the threatening voice on the other end of the line leaves Daragane wary but irresistibly curious. Almost at once, he finds himself entangled with a shady gambler and a beautiful, fragile young woman, who draw Daragane into the mystery of a decades-old murder. The investigation will force him to confront the memory of a trauma he had all but buried. This masterly novel penetrates the deepest enigmas of identity and compels us to ask whether we ever know who we truly are. Moody . . . Lyrical . . . A pleasure. Kirkus Reviews A writer unlike any other and a worthy recipient of the Nobel. Wall Street Journal Patrick Modiano is the author of more than twenty novels, including several bestsellers. He has won the Prix Goncourt, the Grand Prix National des Lettres, and many other honors. In 2014 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. He lives in Paris. "

This novel by Nobel Prize–winning author Patrick Modiano is one of the most seductive and accessible in his oeuvre: the story of a man’s memories of fleeing responsibility, finding love, and searching for meaning in an uncertain world The narrator of Villa Triste , an anxious, roving, stateless young man of eighteen, arrives in a small French lakeside town near Switzerland in the early 1960s. He is fleeing the atmosphere of menace he feels around him and the fear that grips him. Fear of war? Of imminent catastrophe? Of others? Whatever it may be, the proximity of Switzerland, to which he plans to run at the first sign of danger, gives him temporary reassurance. The young man hides among the other summer visitors until he meets a beautiful young actress named Yvonne Jacquet, and a strange doctor, René Meinthe. These two invite him into their world of soirees and late-night debauchery. But when real life beckons once again, he finds no sympathy from his new companions. Modiano has written a haunting novel that captures lost youth, the search for identity, and ultimately, the fleetingness of time.

When Patrick Modiano was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for LIterature he was praised for using the 'art of memory' to bring to life the Occupation of Paris during the Second World War. The Night Watch is his second novel and tells the story of a young man of limited means, caught between his work for the French Gestapo informing on the Resistance, and his work for a Resistance cell informing on the police and the black market dealers whose seedy milieu of nightclubs, prostitutes and spivs he shares. Under pressure from both sides to inform and bring things to a crisis, he finds himself driven towards an act of self-sacrifice as the only way to escape an impossible situation and the question that haunts him - how to be a traitor without being a traitor. In this astonishing, cruel and tender book, Modiano attempts to exorcise the past by leading his characters out on a fantasmagoric patrol during one fatal night of the Occupation.

"A writer's notebook becomes the key that unlocks memories of a love formed and lost in 1960s Paris. In the aftermath of Algeria's war of independence, Paris was a city rife with suspicion and barely suppressed violence. Amid this tension, Jean, a young writer adrift, met and fell for Dannie, an enigmatic woman fleeing a troubled past. A half century later, with his old black notebook as a guide, he retraces this fateful period in his life, recounting how, through Dannie, he became mixed up with a group of unsavory characters connected by a shadowy crime. Soon Jean, too, was a person of interest to the detective pursuing their case--a detective who would prove instrumental in revealing Dannie's darkest secret. The Black Notebook bears all the hallmarks of this Nobel Prize-winning literary master's unsettling and intensely atmospheric style, rendered in English by acclaimed translator Mark Polizzotti. Once again, Modiano invites us into his unique world, a Paris infused with melancholy, uncertain danger, and the fading echoes of lost love"--

A haunting novel that probes the enigmas of time and memory, by Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick Modiano "Polizzotti's crisp and evocative translation keeps the reader hooked."-- Publishers Weekly In his acclaimed semi-autobiographical novella Suspended Sentences , Patrick Modiano recounted a dramatic season in his childhood, of the home he shared with sinister surrogate parents, the mysterious events that took place there, and an infamous heist that was never solved. In Scene of the Crime , Modiano conjures the aftermath of those years. A decade has passed, and Jean Bosmans, now in his early twenties, becomes aware of a set of disturbing coincidences involving an elusive woman, his childhood home, and a host of disquieting characters who seem inordinately interested in his past, for reasons he can't fathom. As he journeys into the echoes of memory, past and present become increasingly intertwined, forming a web spanning half a century. With the taut suspense of a detective novel, this book slowly peels away layers of time and forgetfulness to reveal the haunting, threatening, ultimately tragic legacies of what we think we know about our lives.

I’d tell him everything, about my mother, about Jean Borand, about the apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, and about the girl they used to call Little Jewel...The same terrifying panic that came over me in the street and woke me with a start at five in the morning. One day in the corridors of the metro, nineteen-year-old Thérèse sees a woman in a yellow coat. Could this be her mother? Who called her Little Jewel? But didn’t her mother die in Morocco years earlier? She follows the woman, hoping to find answers to questions that have haunted her since childhood. As Thérèse describes her elusive memories, travelling around Paris, she reveals how every corner of the city recalls the past. Little Jewel is a profound story about memory, childhood, betrayal, and the search for identity and connection. Called the ‘Marcel Proust of our time’, Modiano writes prose that is limpid, spare and elegant. The 2014 Nobel Prize committee awarded him the prize ‘for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation’.

Modern Japanese Short Stories is a remarkable collection of Japanese stories from the pioneers of contemporary Japanese literature. This volume's twenty-five stories by as many authors display a wide range of style and subject matter--offering a revealing picture of modern Japanese culture and society. The stories in this anthology include: "Tattoo" by Junichiro Tanizaki--a large spider tattooed on the back of a young woman results in unexpected changes "Autumn Mountain" by Ryunosuke Akutagawa--vivid memories of a beautiful painting leads a man to wonder if the it ever actually existed "The Priest and His Love" by Yukio Mishima--a Buddhist priest finds his path to enlightenment challenged after falling in love "The Moon on the Water" by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata--a young woman who cared for her ailing first husband through most of their marriage regrets remarrying after his death Featuring a new foreword by Japanese literary scholar Seiji Lippit and striking woodcut illustrations by Masakazu Kuwata, the stories are translated by the editor, Ivan Morris, and Edward Seidensticker, George Saito, and Geoffery Sargent. This collection of short stories shows why Japanese literature is so highly valued today--it teaches not only about Japan, but about the human condition and the possibilities of art.

"It was...unnecessary for me to fret about who the murderer was: Everybody was." A haunting, never-before-translated, autobiographical novella by the 2002 Nobel Prize winner. An unnamed narrator recounts a simple anecdote, his sighting of the Union Jack—the British Flag—during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in the few days preceding the uprising's brutal repression by the Soviet army. In the telling, partly a digressive meditation on "the absurd order of chance," he recalls his youthful self, and the epiphanies of his intellectual and spiritual awakening—an awakening to a kind of radical subjectivity. In his Nobel address Kertesz remembered: "I, on a lovely spring day in 1955, suddenly came to the realization that there exists only one reality, and that is me, my own life, this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alien forces, and circumscribed, marked up, branded—and which I had to take back from 'History', this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine alone..." The Contemporary Art of the Novella series is designed to highlight work by major authors from around the world. In most instances, as with Imre Kertész, it showcases work never before published; in others, books are reprised that should never have gone out of print. It is intended that the series feature many well-known authors and some exciting new discoveries. And as with the original series, The Art of the Novella, each book is a beautifully packaged and inexpensive volume meant to celebrate the form and its practitioners.

From the the Academy Award]-nominated screenwriter of "Breakfast at Tiffanys" and "The Manchurian Candidate" comes a story unavailable for almost 50 years. A New York literary agent in love with a Hollywood starlet risks his life to uncover the secret behind a Nobel Prize-winning authors lost final manuscript.

This novel, like Jurassic Park , hinges on the real-world technology incorporated in the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), one of the most important breakthroughs in biomedical science. The 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry recognized the immense significance of PCR, which is a process for quickly generating and then infinitely replicating fragments of genetic material. An impostor takes all of the credit in Carl Djerassi's fictionalized account of PCR's discovery and development. As the scientific community eventually discovers, Professor Diana Skordylis is not really one of their own, she is four of their own--three men and a woman--who publish their collaborative work under the Skordylis pseudonym. Two of them American, one Japanese, and one Austrian, they average around sixty-five years of age. Their archetype is a famous group of French mathematicians who actually have been publishing collectively for several decades under the nom de plume of Nicolas Bourbaki. Revenge is the Skordylis group's initial motivation. Victims of subtle age discrimination, they have all seen their research budgets and faculty privileges curtailed; two have been forcibly retired. Each Skordylis project they complete, each paper they publish under her name, is a satisfying poke at a scientific community that marginalized its senior members. But PCR is different. It is not only their best work, it is among the best work done by any scientist in recent memory. Professional jealousy soon threatens Diana Skordylis's life, as some group members struggle with the urge to claim their share of the fame and separately seek out PCR's most innovative applications. Djerassi writes engagingly--and from experience--about the collaborative nature at the heart of the scientific enterprise and the desire for personal recognition in the hearts of most scientists; about the graying of Western science; and about the human frailties and humanistic concerns of its practitioners.

"To This Day, Nobel prizewinner S. Y. Agnon's last novel (first published in Hebrew in 1952), is also his last to be translated into English. On the surface it is a comically entertaining tale of a young writer - a Galician Jew who has lived in Palestine, returns to Europe on the eve of World War I, and is now stranded in Berlin - who wanders from rented room to rented room in a city with a severe wartime housing shortage. On a deeper level it is a profound commentary on exile, Zionism, divine providence, human egoism, and other typically Agnonian concerns." --Book Jacket.

This award-winning novel is "a delightful, inventive tale" about the pursuit of love and literary fame from "a compassionate and witty satirist" ( Kirkus Reviews ). It's the opportunity of a lifetime for middle-aged Ezra Shultish--a chance to the meet his literary hero, Nobel Laureate Bar Nun, a writer Ezra has worshipped for most of his career as a teacher and translator. Hoping to get a recording of the author reading his story, The Yemenite Girl , Shultish travels to Israel, where he finds himself pursuing his own Yemenite girl, as well as the elusive author. But will Ezra get the girl--or his own glimpse of literary fame? Winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Book Award, The Yemenite Girl is Curt Leviant's comic novel on the nature of celebrity and the relationship between life and art. "Shultish is a man with a life of his own. . . . And the celebrity, too, is remarkably drawn. . . . [The book] is done with great tact, feeling, and skill." --Saul Bellow, Pulitzer Prize- and Nobel Prize for Literature-winning author "A passionate story . . . The charm of the text and the intensity of the subtext is what keeps the pages turning." -- The New York Times Book Review "Good comic writing and satire on the Hebrew literary scene with its jealous politicking for literary prizes." -- The Washington Post

A murder mystery featuring as sleuth an alternative 20th century Goethe. On winning the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, he travels to Stockholm where he investigates the murder of another winner of the prize. By the author of Kassandrus.