"As a boarding school student in the early 1960s, Patrick Modiano lived among the troubled teenage sons of wealthy but self-involved parents. In this mesmerizing novel, Modiano weaves together a series of exquisitely crafted stories about such jettisoned boys at the exclusive Valvert School on the outskirts of Paris: abandoned children of privilege, left to create new family ties among themselves. Misfits and heroes, sports champions and good-hearted chums, the boys of Valvert misbehave, run away, get expelled, and engage in various forms of delinquency and disappearance. They emerge into adulthood tragically damaged, still tethered to their adolescent selves, powerless to escape the central loneliness of their lives in an ever-darkening spiral of self-delusion and grim consequence"--Back cover.

The haunting story of a woman who desires “something more, as if something more had been promised her that was not yet given.” Vivian Carpentier, confined by her role as an upper class woman in the 1940s, gleans meaning only from erotic love. Troubled by the elusiveness of men, yet convinced that they run the world, she can barely conceal her desperation to entice. Struggling with motherhood and the failure of marriage, she takes jobs to bridge intervals between lovers. She sings in a hotel bar, sells dresses, and nurses her father’s friend through his last illness, hoping to atone for a self-centered life. The constant in Vivian’s life is her son, David. Having seen her worst and best moments, he provides her with consolation and a reason for living.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Despite growing up with a widowed and reclusive mother, young Zoë Cunningham retains an unshakable faith in storybook happy endings. When her mother, Anne, finally decides to remarry, Zoë is thrilled with her prospective stepfather, Simon Gould, who is not only wealthy, but also kind and generous. Simon’s affection for his new family allows Zoë to pursue what she thinks is an independent life: her own apartment in a fashionable part of London, a university education, casual affairs, and carefree holidays at Simon’s villa in Nice. When a series of unexpected calamities intervene, Zoë learns that the idyllic freedom she enjoys has come at a steep price. To preserve both her mother’s and her own sense of wellbeing, Zoë must discern the real motives of the strangers on whom she now depends, including the silent and mysterious man whose nocturnal movements have attracted her attention.

Maud Gonthier yearns for an escape from the cocoon of the bourgeois modesty. The splendid, caddish David Tyler appears to offer one. In this stylish, deeply knowing novel by the Booker Prize winning author of Hotel du Lac, Maud's seduction creates a chemistry of longing, sensuality, and betrayal--with a surprising climax.

Literary criticism that ranges from Shakespeare to Salinger.

Written in the tradition of the classic American noir of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, In Praise of Lies is a brilliantly clever, fiendishly funny crime novel about a woman who raises poisonous snakes and the man who loves her enough to attempt murder.... Jose Guber is in love with a deadly woman. While writing his next crime novel, he is in search of a unique murder weapon, which is how he meets Melissa, a serologist who specializes in venomous snakes. Melissa becomes rather too interested in Jose's dastardly plots--unashamedly plagiarized from the classics: Chesterton, Poe, Dostoevsky, his editor none the wiser--and she especially likes the ones where diabolical women seduce and corrupt weak men. Melissa makes it clear that she would like to adapt one of the plots to dispose of her present husband, enabling Jose and Melissa to be together. But the course of true love and homicide does not always run smoothly, certainly not when the accomplice rattlesnake gets depressed and everything that can go wrong does go hilariously haywire. With sharp wit and impressive agility, Patricia Melo leads the reader into a teasing world of deviousness. Literary puzzles and comic swipes at book publishing trends are added pleasures in what is, above all, a glorious page-turner.

"The Crow's Dinner" is master novelist Jonathan Carroll's debut essay collection, and that is very good news. Gathering together hundreds of entries that initially appeared on the website Medium, "The Crow's Dinner" is at once a wide-ranging spiritual autobiography and an annotated guide to what Carroll calls "The Map of Me." Beginning with an appreciation of "The Invisibles," those insignificant moments we overlook at our peril, "The Crow's Dinner" encompasses an extraordinary range of incidents, ideas, and images that cumulatively illuminate the inner and outer weather of a major American artist. This generous volume contains fragments of autobiography, reflections on the nature of creativity, vivid recreations of chance encounters, and provocative meditations on the complexityand unpredictabilityof human relationships. It is a book filled with colorful vignettes, unexpected bursts of whimsy, and observations filtered through an utterly unique sensibility. Witty, compassionate, open at all times to the "momentary magic" of existence, it is a work of singular beauty that is unlike anything you have ever read. Since the publication of his first novel, "The Land of Laughs," in 1980, Jonathan Carroll has repeatedly offered us new and startling ways of looking at our familiar world. With "The Crow's Dinner," he speaks to us in direct, unmediated fashion about the things that matter most: love, lust, books, dogs, food, friendshipand the transforming power of the imagination. The result is an intimate, one-of-a kind tour of a lively, unfettered mind. Like the best of Carroll's fiction, "The Crow's Dinner" is a book that matters.

An inventive literary account of Cixous's remarkable journey to her mother's birthplace Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation For about eighty years, the Jonas family of Osnabrück were part of a small but vibrant Jewish community in this mid-size city of Lower Saxony. After the war, Osnabrück counted not a single Jew. Most had been deported and murdered in the camps, others emigrated if they could and if they managed to overcome their own inertia. It is this inertia and failure to escape that Hélène Cixous seeks to account for in Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem. Vicious anti-Semitism hounded all of Osnabrück's Jews long before the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. So why did people wait to leave when the threat was so patent, so in-their-face? Drawn from the stories told to Cixous by her mother, Ève, and grandmother, Rosalie (Rosi), this literary work reimagines fragments of Ève's and Rosi's stories, including the death of Ève's uncle, Onkel André. Piecing together the story of Andreas Jonas from what she was told and from what she envisages, Cixous recounts the tragedy of the one she calls the King Lear of Osnabrück, who followed his daughter to Jerusalem only to be sent away by her and to return to Osnabrück in time to be deported to a death camp. Cixous wanders the streets of the city she had heard about all her life in her mother's and grandmother's stories, digs into its archives, meets city officials, all the while wondering if she should have come. These hesitations and reflections in the present, often voiced in dialogues staged with her own son or daughter, are woven with scenes from her childhood in Algeria and the half-remembered, half-invented stories of the Jonas family, making Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem one of the author's most intensely engaging books. This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

"Ben Marcus, one of the most innovative and vital writers of this generation, delivers a stellar anthology of the best short fiction being written today in America In New American Stories, Ben Marcus has collected a diverse, exciting, and wholly unique book of contemporary American fiction writers. Herein are the luminaries of the form like Deborah Eisenberg, George Saunders, and Denis Johnson, as well as the best new voices of today, like Wells Tower, Claire Vaye Watkins and Rivka Galchen. Practitioners of deep realism like Anthony Doerr and Yilun Li brush shoulders with genre-bending wonders like Charles Yu and Kelly Link. Finally there are the true emerging stars, like Tao Lin and Rachel Glasser standing next to long established writer like Joy Williams. Nothing less than the American short story renaissance distilled down to its most relevant, daring, and interesting works, New American Stories puts on wide display the true art of the short story"--

"An unsuccessful writer and an inveterate alcoholic, Boris Alikhanov has recently divorced his wife Tatyana, and he is running out of money. The prospect of a summer job as a tour guide at the Pushkin Hills Preserve offers him hope of regaining some balance in life as his wife makes plans to emigrate to the West with their daughter Masha, but during Alikhanov's stay in the rural estate of Mikhaylovskoye, his life continues to unravel. Populated with unforgettable characters-including Alikhanov's fellow guides Mitrofanov and Pototsky, and the KGB officer Belyaev-Pushkin Hills ranks among Dovlatov's renowned works The Suitcase and The Zone as his most personal and poignant portrayal of the Russian attitude towards life and art. "--

""I was on my way to look for a life of my own." A brilliant, brutally honest autobiographical novel, long out of print, from one of the great artistic polymaths of the 20th century. This is a Sebaldian account of the narrator's attempt to break free of a repressive upper-middle-class upbringing and make his way as an artist and individual, written in a single incantatory paragraph. Leavetaking is the story of an upper-middle-class childhood and adolescence in Berlin between the wars. In the course of the book, Weiss plumbs the depths of family life: there is the early death of his beloved sister Margit, the difficult relationship with his parents, the fantasies of adolescence and youth, all set in the midst of an increasing anti-Semitism, which forces the Weiss family to move again and again, a peripatetic existence that only intensifies the narrator's growing restlessness. The young narrator is largely oblivious to world events and focused instead on becoming an artist, an ambition frustrated generally by his milieu and specifically by his mother, who, herself a former actress, destroys his paintings during one of the family's moves. In the end, he turns to an older mentor, Harry Haller, a fictionalized portrait of Hermann Hesse, who encouraged and supported Weiss, and with Haller's example before him, the narrator takes his first steps towards a truly independent life. Intensely lyrical, written with great imaginative power, Leavetaking is a vivid evocation of a world that has disappeared and of the narrator's developing consciousness. THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY champions books from around the world that have been overlooked, underappreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored. They are issued in handsome, well-designed editions at reasonable prices in hopes of their passing from one reader to another--and further enriching our culture"--

"Odile and Louis are leading a happy, bucolic life with their two children in the French countryside near the Swiss mountains. It is Odile's thirty-fifth birthday, and Louis's thirty-fifth birthday is a few weeks away. Then the story shifts back to their early years: Louis, just freed from his military service and at loose ends, taken up by a shady character who brings him to Paris to do some work for a friend who manages a garage; Odile, an aspiring singer, at the mercy of the kindness and unkindness of strangers. They move through a Paris saturated with the crimes and secrets of the past but breathing hopes for the future; they find each other and struggle together to create what, looking back, will have been their youth"--

"With The Player and The Return of the Player, Michael Tolkin established himself as the master novelist of modern Hollywood. In his new novel, NK3, the H LYW OD sign presides over a Los Angeles devastated by a weaponized microbe that has been accidentally spread around the globe, deleting human identity. In post-NK3 Los Angeles, a sixty-foot-tall fence surrounds the hills where the rich used to live, but the mansions have been taken over by those with the only power that matters: the power of memory. Life for the community inside the Fence, ruled over by the new aristocracy, the Verified, is a perpetual party. Outside the Fence, in downtown Los Angeles, the Verified use an invented mythology to keep control over the mindless and nameless Drifters, Shamblers, and Bottle Bangers who serve the gift economy until no longer needed. The ruler, Chief, takes his guidance from gigantic effigies of a man and a woman in the heart of the Fence. They warn him of trouble to come, but who is the person to watch: the elusive Eckmann, holed up with the last functioning plane at LAX; Shannon Squier, the chisel-wielding pop superstar from the pre-NK3 world, pulled from the shambling masses; a treacherous member of Chief's inner circle; or Hopper, the uncommon Drifter compelled by an inner voice to search for a wife whose name and face he doesn't know? Each threatens to upset the delicate power balance in this fragile world. In deliciously dark prose, Tolkin winds a noose-like plot around this melee of despots, prophets, and rebels as they struggle for command and survival in a town that still manages to exert a magnetic force, even as a ruined husk"--

A rediscovered gem from the Roaring Twenties, "Cutie: A Warm Mamma" offers a biting satire of social reformers and urban life in Chicago. Co-authored by Ben Hecht and Maxwell Bodenheim, this collection of short stories delivers sharp social commentary through humorous and literary fiction. Exploring themes of city life and societal change, the book provides a unique snapshot of the era. Readers will find insightful, and often droll, observations on human nature and the complexities of social interaction. "Cutie: A Warm Mamma" remains a relevant and engaging exploration of the tensions between idealism and reality, rendered with a distinctive voice from a pivotal moment in American history. Its enduring appeal lies in its ability to provoke thought and laughter, making it a timeless reflection on society and its discontents. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

"All is true," realist writers would say of their work, to which critics now respond: All is art and artifice. Offering a new approach to reading nineteenth-century realist fiction, Lilian R. Furst seeks to reconcile these contradictory claims. In doing so, she clarifies the deceptions, appropriations, intentions, and ultimately the power of literary realism.In close textual analyses of works ranging across European and American literature, including paradigmatic texts by Balzac, Flaubert, George Eliot, Zola, Henry James, and Thomas Mann, Furst shows how the handling of time, the presentation of place, and certain narrational strategies have served the realists’ claim. She demonstrates how readers today, like those a hundred years ago, are convinced of the authenticity of the created illusion by such means as framing, voice, perspective, and the slippage from metonymy to metaphor. Further, Furst reveals the pains the realists took to conceal these devices, and thus to protect their claim to be employing a simple form. Taking into account both the claims and the covert strategies of these writers, All Is True puts forward an alternative to the conventional polarized reading of the realist text—which emerges here as neither strictly an imitation of an extraneous model nor simply a web of words but a brilliantly complex imbrication of the two.A major statement on one of the most enduring forms in cultural history, this book promises to alter not only our view of realist fiction but our understanding of how we read it.

In the world of contemporary fiction, Irish writng is considered to be one of the most vibrant traditions, and one which continues to produce talented and exciting new writers every year. With this in mind, and the popularity of the short story in Ireland, Phoenix Irish short stories 1996 was initiated to select the very best Irish short fiction in a given year. This 3rd annual anthology reflects the healthy state of the Irish literary tradition. Sixteen new stories from established names like Eilis Ni Dhuibhne and talented newcomers like Blanaid Mckinney, on a variety of themes from sex to death, demonstrate the excellence of the contemproary form.

Before E. M. Forster's Maurice, written in 1914, introduced a new openness about the favorable depiction of homosexuality in English fiction, a number of novels and stories carried coded portraits of homosexuals and homosexuality. Many of these were, by necessity, published privately; still others were written to insure that the homosexual component would be recognizable to a select few; still others embedded homosexual content within such "safe" genres as the Western and the public school novel. There have been several recent anthologies of twentieth-century gay fiction, but David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell's fascinating book is the first to explore the texts that circulated before the "gay fiction" genre came into being, and before greater tolerance allowed writers to treat homosexual themes directly. Leavitt and Mitchell include extracts from stories and novels by well-known writers such as Herman Melville, Walter Pater, Henry James, Willa Cather, and D. H. Lawrence, as well as work from neglected figures such as Count Eric Stenbock, John Francis Bloxam, "Alan Dale," and Gerald Hamilton -- the inspiration for Christopher Isherwood's Mr. Norris. The result is an entertaining and revelatory anthology, and a valuable contribution to our understanding of the literary treatment of homosexuality.