The Piano Teacher, the most famous novel of Elfriede Jelinek, who was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a shocking, searing, aching portrait of a woman bound between a repressive society and her darkest desires. Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the prestigious and formal Vienna Conservatory, who still lives with her domineering and possessive mother. Her life appears to be a seamless tissue of boredom, but Erika, a quiet thirty-eight-year-old, secretly visits Turkish peep shows at night to watch live sex shows and sadomasochistic films. Meanwhile, a handsome, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old student has become enamored with Erika and sets out to seduce her. She resists him at first, but then the dark passions roiling under the piano teacher's subdued exterior explode in a release of sexual perversity, suppressed violence, and human degradation. Celebrated throughout Europe for the intensity and frankness of her writings and awarded the Heinrich Böll Prize for her outstanding contribution to German letters, Elfriede Jelinek is one of the most original and controversial writers in the world today. The Piano Teacher was made into a film, released in the United States in 2001, was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.

"The long-awaited final volume in the acclaimed Penguin translation of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time-one of the world's most beloved works of literature. "The greatest literary work of the twentieth century."-The New York Times. Ian Patterson's acclaimed new translation of Finding Time Again introduces a new generation of American readers to the literary riches of Marcel Proust. The seventh and final volume in Penguin Classics' superb new edition of In Search of Lost Time-the first completely new translation of Proust's masterpiece since the 1920s-brings us a more comic and lucid prose than readers of English have previously been able to enjoy. In Finding Time Again, Marcel discovers his world destroyed by war and those he knew transformed by the march of time. An exquisite picture of France in the throes of the First World War, and containing, in the "Bal des têtes" sequence, one of Proust's most devastating set-pieces, Finding Time Again triumphantly describes the paradox of facing mortality yet overcoming it through the act of writing. As Marcel rediscovers his vocation, he realizes that he can live on by writing down the story of his own memories and of his quest to recapture the past"--

Alfred Kazin burst onto the American literary scene in 1942, when his first book, "On Native Grounds," announced the arrival of an important new literary critic. "A Walker in the City," his second, signaled the other direction his career would follow: author of several intense, intimate, and lyrical memoirs. Years later he would admit how he struggled writing it. He thought he wanted to concentrate on New York itself, describing a series of walks around the city. But what emerged was the story of his own boyhood encounters with it, starting from Brownsville, the Brooklyn Jewish neighborhood of his birth, then stretching out to alluring, mysterious Manhattan and from there to the world. Each walk is simultaneously a journey out and a journey in: outward, from the neighborhood to the land beyond, the great, electric, canyoned streets of the city; inward, into his own soul, as it grows and falls in love with books and language and literature, with music and metaphysics and politics, with the city and the country and the world and rapturously tries to take them all in.

Nowhere in Africa is the extraordinary tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya. Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany, Walter Redlich, his wife Jettel, and their five-year-old daughter, Regina, each deal with the harsh realities of their new life in different ways. Attorney Walter is resigned to working the farm as a caretaker; pampered Jettel resists adjustment at every turn; while the shy yet curious Regina immediately embraces the country—learning the local language and customs, and finding a friend in Owuor, the farm's cook. As the war rages on the other side of the world, the family’s relationships with their strange environment become increasingly complicated as Jettel grows more self-assured and Walter more haunted by the life they left behind. In 1946, with the war over, Regina's fondest dream comes true when her brother Max is born. Walter's decision, however, to return to his homeland to help rebuild a new Germany puts his family into turmoil again. Visit the Web site for the film at www.nowhereinafrica.com

A warrior woman and her dark twin are destined to remake the world in this "powerful" tale, the first in a trilogy by a World Fantasy Award winner ( Newsweek ). Legend foretold the child named Jenna, who was three-times orphaned before she could crawl, a fate that would leave her in the hands of women who worshipped the benevolent goddess Great Alta. In this world without men, Jenna comes of age, learning quickly the skills of close combat. But her most powerful gift lies elsewhere: a mirror sister who emerges only in the darkness--a twin named Skada--and shares the soul of the young, white-haired warrior who might well be the goddess reborn. But if Jenna is, in truth, the one whose coming is awaited, there is cause for great alarm among those who rule the Dales, for the prophecy speaks of upheaval and change, and a devastating end of all things. An incomparable world-builder and one of America's premier fantasists, the remarkable Jane Yolen begins a three-part saga as inventive, intelligent, and exciting as anything that has ever been produced in the literature of the fantastic. Brilliantly contrasting the "true" story of Jenna with the later myths, poetry, and so-called scholarship that her coming engendered, Yolen creates a culture as richly imagined as those found in the acclaimed novels of Ursula K. Le Guin. A truly magnificent work, Sister Light, Sister Dark takes fantasy fiction to wondrous places it has never gone before.

~ An Anne Izard Storytellers' Choice Award Winner~ A Storytelling World Honor BookOnce, when young Nasruddin was acting up in class by distracting his friends with endless antics, jests, and stories, his irate teacher uttered a curse: "Whatever you do or say, people will only laugh at you." Now, eight centuries later, children, adults, and wise fools everywhere are still laughing at Nasruddin (Nasreddin Hoca), one of the world's most beloved folk characters. This entertaining and insightful retelling of more than a year's worth of daily Mullah stories brings the famed Persian legend into the Twenty-First Century. Storytellers, folklorists, Sufis, comedians, wisdom seekers, and everyone who loves to laugh will be enriched and enlightened by the timeless wit, inscrutable wisdom, and uncommon sense of humor of Mullah Nasruddin."Suresha identifies the real strength of Nasruddin's stories in context to world literatureand story performance, that is, its power to build bridges between cultures. ... The point of these stories is to speak to the audience in the language and metaphors that are familiar." - Storytelling, Self, Society"A contemporary reworking of the tales (the stories fit for a general audience, at least) ... to Suresha's credit he has maintained the direct, unadorned style that is a hallmark of folk tales. ... a delightful break from the everyday world for an hour or two." - Green Man Review"A fine pick and very highly recommended." - Midwest Book Review"These hilarious, and at times, ribald folk tales of the Turkish wise fool take the reader to another time and place, and share the spiritual lessons of Nasruddin. ...The teaching stories included in this volume help to build bridges between cultures by exemplifying Arabic wisdom and universal human humor." - from the Preface by Ann Shapiro, Executive Director, Connecticut Storytelling Center

The final volume of In Search of Lost Time chronicles the years of World War I, when, as M. de Charlus reflects on a moonlit walk, Paris threatens to become another Pompeii. Years later, after the war's end, Proust's narrator returns to Paris, where Mme. Verdurin has become the Princesse de Guermantes. He reflects on time, reality, jealousy, artistic creation, and the raw material for literature-his past life.

"He again had the sense that all this order, balance and security in his life were really an illusion and a lie".... "Everything seemed to be slipping from his grasp; everything was becoming increasingly unreal, even his home, his wife, his child, his profession, his very identity." Originally published in 1926, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel is a psychological novella written by Arthur Schnitzler. Following Doctor Fridolin and his wife, Albertine, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel sees the couple embark on a two-day odyssey in the erotic underworld. One night a successful doctor, Fridolin, and his beautiful wife, Albertine, attend a masked masquerade ball. Seeing naked men and women and propositioned for sex, the lust-filled couple are inspired to make love to one another; and Albertine-in the heat of passion-admits a sexual fantasy she had the previous summer. Taken slightly back, Fridolin admits his own fantasies to his wife and begins to question his place in their marriage, the strength of their love and the middle class life he has found himself living. Filled with erotic fun, secrets, and sensuality, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel is a psychoanalytic novella that explores sexual guilt, fantasy, love and death. This edition of Rhapsody: A Dream Novel is a classic of erotic literature reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

An authentic literary great, Singer was an author whose extraordinary talents won him a worldwide audience. And with this impressive novel, he proved that he was at the height of his creative power until his recent death at age 86. Scum evokes the teeming life of 1906 Warsaw's backstreets. Max Barabander, distraught over the recent death of his son, flees the life of wealth and respectability he has attained in Buenos Aires, to return to the poverty and shadows of his youth spent in Warsaw. He fears impotence which leads him to the pursuit of mindless sex with five different women who view him only as an escape from their drab lives. The author recalls the teeming life of 1906 Jewish Warsaw in this impressive novel of changing mores and values. . .

Written in alternating chapters, W or the Memory of Childhood , tells two parallel tales, in two parts. One is a story created in childhood and about childhood. The other story is about two people called Gaspard Winckler: one an eight-year-old deaf-mute lost in a shipwreck, the other a man despatched to search for him, who discovers W, an island state based on the rules of sport. As the two tales move in and out of focus, the disturbing truth about the island of W reveals itself. Perec combines fiction and autobiography in unprecedented ways, allowing no easy escape from these stories, or from history.

New York Times Notable Book of the Year Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1997 With an Introduction by Robert Giroux, The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud is "an essential American book," Richard Stern declared in the Chicago Tribune when the collection was published in hardcover. His praise was echoed by other reviewers and by readers, who embraced the book as they might a displaced person in one of Malamud's stories, now returned to us, complete and fulfilled and recognized at last. The volume gathers together fifty-five stories, from "Armistice" (1940) to "Alma Redeemed" (1984), and including the immortal stories from The Magic Barrel and the vivid depictions of the unforgettable Fidelman. It is a varied and generous collection of great examples of the modern short story, which Malamud perfected, and an ideal introduction to the work of this great American writer.

A penetrating study of ordinary people resisting the Nazi occupation - and, true to its title, a dark comedy of wartime manners - Comedy in a Minor Key tells the story of Wim and Marie, a Dutch couple who first hide a Jew they know as Nico, then must dispose of his body when he dies of pneumonia. This novella, first published in 1947 and now translated into English for the first time, shows Hans Keilson at his best- deeply ironic, penetrating, sympathetic, and brilliantly modern, an heir to Joseph Roth and Franz Kafka. In 2008, when Keilson received Germany's prestigious Welt Literature Prize, the citation praised his work for exploring 'the destructive impulse at work in the twentieth century, down to its deepest psychological and spiritual ramifications.' Published to celebrate Keilson's hundredth birthday, Comedy in a Minor Key - and The Death of the Adversary , reissued in paperback - will introduce American readers to a forgotten classic author, a witness to World War II and a sophisticated storyteller whose books remain as fresh as when they first came to light.

"For fans of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, a propulsive literary novel about sexual obsession in which a meek Harvard freshman becomes dangerously infatuated with a classmate. David Federman has never felt appreciated. One of the most painfully forgettable members of his New Jersey high school class--yet the only one accepted to Harvard--shy, witty David arrives in Cambridge fully expecting to embrace, and be welcomed by, a new tribe of like-minded peers. But at first, beyond the friendly advances of a plain-looking girl named Sara, his social status seems devastatingly unlikely to change. Then he meets Veronica Morgan Wells. Instantly infatuated, struck by both her beauty and her brains, David falls feverishly in love with the woman he sees as a charismatic goddess. Determined to stop at nothing to win her attention and a coveted invite into her glamorous Upper East Side world, David begins compromising his own moral standards, tossing everything aside for this one, great chance at happiness. But neither Veronica nor David, it turns out, are exactly as they seem... A darkly comic and riveting portrayal of psychosexual obsession from one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation, Loner also turns the traditional campus novel on its head as it explores contemporary gender politics and class--and discovers just what we're capable of when our greatest enemies turn out to be ourselves"--

"Dreams play a powerful role in Indigenous culture, serving as warning, insight, guidance, solace, or hope. Bawaajigan - an Anishinaabemowin word for dream or vision - is a collection of powerful literary short fiction by Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. Stories about the connection between the spirit world and everyday life and the rest of the cosmos; urban-fantasy and high-fantasy worlds; alternative histories, and alternative realities; brushes with the supernatural, the prophetic, the hallucinatory, and the surreal. Among these themes we find stories ranging from the gritty, the gothic, the comedic, and the heart-wrenchingly tragic: a tale about the state of sleep-deprivation that conjures an uncertainty as to where dream ends and reality begins; the ominous tension of television static that conjures a certainty of something terrible about to happen; encounters with spirit guides, and spirit enemies; confrontations with ghosts haunting residential school hallways, and ghosts looking on from the afterlife; and with concepts based on Ouija boards, bead-dreamers, Haudenosaunee wizards, talking eagles, giant snakes, sacred white buffalo calves, spider's silk, a burnt and blood-stained diary, longings for what could-have-been, worm holes fallen through reality, poppy-induced deliriums, imaginary friends, and knowledge revealed. Unifying everything: these are stories about the strength and power of dreams."--

Already considered a classic of Holocaust literature, The Seventh Well is a novel of total absorption, a heroic achievement, and one destined for literary transcendence. Fred Wander demonstrates that the survival of a single man is a collaborative enterprise, and The Seventh Well, named after the well of truth, recalls Dante's Inferno with its mesmerizing descent into evil. Its existence is a miracle.

It's 1922 and David Bendiger, an aspiring eighteen-and-a-half-year-old writer, arrives in Warsaw, penniless and homeless. His only contacts are Sonya, a young woman with whom he has had amorous dealings in the village they have left, and a Zionist functionary who informs him he has qualified for a certificate permitting him to emigrate to Palestine. But in order to make the journey David must enter into a fictitious marriage with a woman so eager to get to Palestine that she will pay all the expenses. While David waits for his certificate, he becomes involved not only with Sonya but with Edusha, the sexually avant-garde Communist Party member in whose apartment he finds a temporary haven; and with Minna, the well-to-do young woman who wants to join her fiance in Palestine and agrees to "marry" David. Grappling with romantic, political, and youthful turmoil, David also confronts his literary future and religious past when his older brother - a writer disillusioned by a recent sojourn in Russia - and his father, an Orthodox rabbi, both turn up in Warsaw. The Certificate was serialized in Yiddish in 1967, but may have been written much earlier. The translator, Leonard Wolf, in a postscript calls it "a very young man's book" and "certainly the most playful of Singer's long fictions", with its alternately comic and poignant shifts in plot. Young David's passions for women, philosophizing, Jewish religious speculation, and Walter Mitty-like fantasies make The Certificate a captivating novel in the great tradition of a master storyteller.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'Why should I bother to invent things? My life has been far more exciting and wonderful than any fairy-tale' In the heart of the English countryside, surrounded by irritatingly polite relatives and hopeless sycophants, Lady L. is celebrating her eightieth birthday. But as the guests disperse, she feels the undeniable pull of a mysterious pavilion in the lush grounds, and the terrible secret she buried there many years ago . . .

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, Nelson Algren's A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called 'Walking the Wild Side of Life.' I've stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since." Perhaps the author's own words describe this classic work best: "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind."

In the streets of an ordinary Italian town, the people go about their everyday lives. In an old apartment block above them, a young man pores over photographs and plans, dedicated to his life's most important project. Day by day, in his imagination, he is rehearsing for his greatest performance. Yet when his moment comes, nothing could have prepared him for what happens...

Isaac Asimov's death on April 6, 19892, was a great loss to the world of both science and literature. This collection of essays reflects Asimov's extraordinary skill in disseminating knowledge from across the spectrum of human thought. Included are thoughtful and touching tributes from colleagues and friends who discuss Asimov's work and his inspiration and impact on others. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.