"Delia Welegtabit discovered two things during her childhood on a South Pacific island: her love for mathematics and a novel that isn't supposed to exist. But the elusive book proves unexpectedly dangerous. Oskar Lens, a science fiction-obsessed mobster in the midst of an existential crisis, will stop at nothing to find the novel. After Delia's husband Levi goes missing, she seeks help from Daniel Chase, a young, face-blind book dealer. The infamous novel Lode Stars was written by the infamous Eugene Charles Hartley: legendary pulp science-fiction writer and founder of the Church of the All-Seeing Eyes. In Hartley's novel, a doppelganger of Delia searches for her missing father in a strange star system. But is any of Lode Stars real? Was Hartley a cynical conman on a quest for wealth and immortality, creating a religion he did not believe in? Or was he a visionary who truly discovered the secrets of the universe?"--

Madame is an unexpected gem: a novel about Poland during the grim years of Soviet-controlled mediocrity, which nonetheless sparkles with light and warmth. Our young narrator-hero is suffering through the regulated boredom of high school when he is transfixed by a new teacher -- an elegant "older woman" (she is thirty-two) who bewitches him with her glacial beauty and her strict intelligence. He resolves to learn everything he can about her and to win her heart. In a sequence of marvelously funny but sobering maneuvers, he learns much more than he expected to -- about politics, Poland, the Spanish Civil War, and his own passion for theater and art -- all white his loved one continues to elude him. Yet without his realizing it, his efforts -- largely bookish and literary -- to close in on Madame are his first steps to liberation as an artist. Later, during a stint as a teacher-in-training in his old school, he discovers that he himself has become a legendary figure to a new generation of students, and he begins to understand the deceits and blessings of myth, and its redemptive power. A winning portrait of an artist as a young man, Madame is at the same time a moving, engaging novel about strength and weakness, first love, and the efforts we make to reconcile, in art, the opposing forces of reason and passion.

Three powerful political plays in one volume - with a substantial introduction by Ariel Dorman. In Death and the Maiden, a woman seeks revenge when the man she believes to have been her torturer happens to re-enter her life. A classic of 20th-century theatre, the play ran for a year in the West End, was a hit on Broadway and was filmed by Roman Polanski. In Reader, first performed at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in July 1995, a censor discovers that the subversive novel he is about to ban is describing his own life and hinting that a terrible fate awaits his son. He must hunt down the author before it comes true... Widows is a smouldering political allegory about a political protest in a country ruled by a military junta, written in collaboration with Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America. It was first staged by the Traverse Theatre Company at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in March 1997.

' The Thousand Deaths Of Mr Small is the best novel that Gerald Kersh has yet written... Charles Small, successful advertising expert and miserable man, turns over in his mind the 'stinking, sour, stagnant, untransmitted mass' which is his life... This book has a rich, warm quality; long and full of detail, it teems with humour, satire, incident, character; in a word, with life.' Yorkshire Post 'It see-saws from side-splitting dialogue to such catalogues of loathing and revulsion as have rarely been seen in print, from outrageous farce to sudden compassion for the Smalls of this world, who find Hell enough in 'the eternal contemplation of themselves as they made themselves.'' New York Herald Tribune 'With brilliant descriptive power and an emetic vocabulary, [Kersh] has produced a tormented and forceful work.' Commonweal

In a novel that’s part comic mystery, part political satire, and part case vignette, a psychiatrist reviews his involvement with a narcissistic national leader who has turned up dead on the consulting room couch. When Peter D. Kramer wrote about his work with psychiatric patients in books like Listening to Prozac and Should You Leave? , Joyce Carol Oates said, “To read his prose on virtually any subject is to be provoked, enthralled, illuminated.” When Kramer switched to fiction, Publishers Weekly wrote, “The depth, quality, and ambition of Kramer’s prose will surprise those expecting a superficial crossover effort.” In his new novel, Death of the Great Man , Kramer uses those literary skills to introduce readers to an unforgettable character, Henry Farber, a well-meaning psychiatrist forced into hiding when the nation’s chief executive—a narcissistic autocrat in his disastrous second term—is found dead on the consulting room couch. From an isolated bungalow, Farber sets out to clear his name while offering an intimate view of a flawed populist leader. What begins as comic mystery and political satire matures into a moving journey of self-exploration and a commentary on the fate of truth-telling in an era when lying has become a norm in public life.