In this brilliant new novel by the Booker Prize-winning author of Hotel du Lac and Making Things Better, a young woman leaves her family and London to study in France--and, through friendships and love, is able to do the work of leaving home.

At the heart of Anita Brookner's new novel lies a double mystery: What has happened to Anna Durrant, a solitary woman of a certain age who has disappeared from her London flat? And why has it taken four months for anyone to notice? As Brookner reconstructs Anna's life and character through the eyes of her acquaintances, she gives us a witty yet ultimately devastating study of self-annihilating virtue while exposing the social, fiscal, and moral frauds that are the underpinnings of terrifying rectitude. "From the Trade Paperback edition.

Anita Brookner's first novel available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'Dr Weiss at forty knew that her life had been ruined by literature.' Ruth Weiss an academic is beautiful intelligent and lonely. Studying the heroines of Balzac in order to discover where her own childhood and adult life has gone awry she seeks not salvation but enlightenment. Yet in revisiting her London upbringing her friendships and doomed Parisian love affairs she wonders if perhaps there might not be a chance for a new start in life . . .

"A devastating novel about the attrocities of WWII, and the unspeakable things people did to survive, by one of Yugoslavia's great literary voices. Lamian is a survivor, but a survivor of a very special kind. He was a Kapo, a prisoner who served as a camp guard in order to save himself. But has Lamian saved himself? The war over, he resumes life in the Bosnian town of Banja Luka, works in a land-surveying office, rents a room, eats as many hot potatoes as he likes, not even bothering to salt them--the quantity is what matters. If only he could stop looking over his shoulder, and flinching on the street in the fear that some stranger will step forward, smack his face, and say in a loud voice, "Here's one!" If only he could stop worrying about Helena Lifka, who turned out to be Yugoslav too, and Jewish too, one of the women he made come naked into the toolshed where he hid the gold, and sit on his lap in exchange for bread and butter and a little warm milk. She could turn up any day, an old woman now, and point an accusing finger. In this masterful novel, Aleksandar Tišma shows step by step how fear can turn an ordinary human being into a monster"--

'I had this vision very clearly of a book in which I would record my total experience, and I knew how it should sound: with all the tones that no one ever admires, âe" the Gruesome, Tender, Needy, Sleazy, Boring, the Lurid and the Cute.âe(tm) In this way the hero of Adam Thirlwellâe(tm)s new novel describes the book you hold between your hands: a delirious tale of backchat and low tricks, all of which begin when our hero wakes beside a woman who is bleeding, unconscious and not, unfortunately, his wife... And then, of course, events get very much worse. SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2015 WINNER OF THE E.M. FORSTER AWARD 2015

The three novellas collected in Van Gogh's Room at Arles demonstrate once again Stanley Elkin's mastery of the English language, with exuberant rants on almost every page, unexpected plot twists, and jokes that leave readers torn between laughter and tears. Her Sense of Timing relates a destructive day in the life of a wheelchair-bound professor who is abandoned by his wife at the worst possible time, leaving him to preside -- helplessly -- over a party for his students that careens out of control. The second story in this collection tells of an unsuspecting commoner catapulted into royalty when she catches the wandering eye of Prince Larry of Wales. And in the title story, a community college professor searches for his scholarly identity in a land of academic giants while staying in Van Gogh's famous room at Arles and avoiding run-ins with the Club of the Portraits of the Descendants of the People Painted by Vincent Van Gogh.

Product Description According to News Week, in fifty years, the number of people over sixty-five will be greater than the number of people under twenty-five for the first time in history. This novella is a look at what MIGHT happen. Detective Vickey Grip has never been very fond of the elderly. She blames them for every bad thing that has ever happened to her, and holds them singularly responsible for ruining the United States. But even she never would have believed what's going on in the small town of Boiling Springs. There's something in the water, and it isn't good! About the Author Selina Rosen lives in rural Arkansas with her partner of over 8 years and her nearly grown son. Her work has appeared in several magazines and anthologies. Selina is also the author of several novels, QUEEN OF DENIAL from Meisha Merlin Publishing,and THE HOST, FRIGHT EATER, and GANG APPROVAL, from Yard Dog Press. All titles are available from Amazon.com. Selina's hobbies include gardening, sword fighting, and hanging out in bars. She's not much of a gardener, mediocre at sword fighting, however rumor has it that she is actually guite good at hanging out in bars. (For those of you who are humor challenged, that was a joke.)

In writing Le Livre de Promethea Hélène Cixous set for herself the task of bridging the immeasurable distance between love and language. She describes a love between two women in its totality, experienced as both a physical presence and a sense of infinity. The result is a stunning example of Pecriture feminine that won kudos when published in France in 1983. Its translation into English by Betsy Wing will extend the influence of a writer already famous for her novels and contributions to feminist theory. In her introduction Betsy Wing notes the contemporary emphasis on "fictions of presence." Cixous, in The Book of Promethea, works to "repair the separation between fiction and presence, trying to chronicle a very-present love without destroying it in the writing."

This collection of 37 stories by a master of the form features tales that are sometimes funny, sometimes violent, and sometimes weird and nightmarish: in short, it is quintessential Gerald Kersh. Kersh (1911-1968) published more than thirty books, including the noir classic Night and the City (1938) and Fowlers End (1957), which Anthony Burgess called "one of the great comic novels of the century," as well as hundreds of short stories which were once ubiquitous in British and American magazines. But though he has been championed by Angela Carter, Harlan Ellison, Ian Fleming, Michael Moorcock and others, Kersh has undeservedly fallen into neglect since his death. This is the first-ever reprint of Neither Man Nor Dog (1946), one of the author's scarcest volumes. Kersh's novels Fowlers End and The Great Wash and the short story collections Nightshade and Damnations , On an Odd Note , and Clock Without Hands are also available from Valancourt. "[B]rutal but highly talented ... at least one [story] is ... a little masterpiece, and all of them possess the virtue of being highly readable." - J.D. Beresford, The Guardian "[E]xplosive with violence . . . The best of them are very good. The unfailing fertility of his imagination is indeed to be wondered at . . . For entertainment of a strong kind, Mr. Kersh would be hard to beat." - Times Literary Supplement "Kersh tells a story, as such, rather better than anybody else." - Pamela Hansford Johnson, Daily Telegraph

The rabald new masterpiece by one of the world's great novelists -- an unflinching view of private lives in Roman of mid-20th century.

"Set in Vienna in the 1930s, Yellow Street is a novel in "five scenes" that captures the despair, poverty, enforced idleness, and crumbling moral values of those years just before the political catastrophes that led to World War II....Veza Canetti weaves together stories about the people of Yellow Street, the home of the leather-merchants in the Leopoldstadt district. Living cheek by jowl on the bustling thoroughfare, crabbed merchants, impoverished bourgeois, canny profiteers, and out-and-out criminals alike find no privacy respected and no secrets possible. Canetti's concern, however, is the victims--in the main seemingly helpless women and children, perhaps poor and exploited but grown streetwise and cagey, each protecting a core of integrity and dignity"--From p. 4 of cover.

"Through this dramatic history by Stefan Heym, we become intimate with the story of the maverick and internationalist Karl Radek, known as the editor of the newspaper of record throughout the Soviet era, Isvestia. Beginning as Lenin's companion at the dawning of the October Revolution, Radek later became Stalin's favorite intellectual - only to find himself entangled in the great purges of the late 1930s and scripting his own trial. In this, his last historical novel, Heym reveals Radek as a brilliant Bolshevik journalist and politician who found himself at every turn of the wheel of fate. A central figure of the communist world, Radek was such a controversial and perennially ambiguous personality that even his historical biography seems a work of fiction. With his thick glasses and most non-Aryan appearance, marked by what some might have seen as distinctively Jewish argumentative skills and humor, Radek's enormous talent as a writer, political acumen, and continuous curiosity carried him through event after event. In the struggles of the revolutionary movement Radek changed sides several times and came into conflict with Stalin, was exiled to Siberia, capitulated and resumed his editorial duties at Isvestia -- only to get caught up in the purge trials and sentenced to prison, where he died. As Heym sculpts credible conversations with Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Trotsky, Stalin, and many others (all seen from Radek's perspective) we come to know Radek as a man haunted by the fear that the insurgency will cease to move forward, living his life as a frenzied chase in pursuit of the continuation of the revolution, until the very end. Originally published in Munich in 1995, this first-ever English translation of Radek fashions the inner voice of a unique figure in the global revolutionary wave of the first half of the twentieth century"--

Nathan, a blind Jewish scribe, tells the story of the coming of the Messiah in the person of one Simon Stern—from his birth on the Lower East Side, through his career as a millionaire dealer in real estate, to his building of a refuge for the Jewish remnant of World War II. "A majestic work of fiction that should stand world literature's test of time, to be read and reread. A masterpiece."— Commonweal "This book ensnares one of the most extraordinarily daring ideas to inhabit an American novel in a number of years. For one thing, it is that risky devising, dreamed of only by the Thomas Manns of the world, a serious and vastly conceived fiction bled out of the theological imagination. For another, it is clearly an 'American' novel—altogether American, despite its Jewish particularity: it is not so much about the history of the Jews as it is about the idea of the New World as haven. . . . In its teeming particularity every vein of this book runs with a brilliance of Jewish insight and erudition to be found in no other novelist. Arthur Cohen is the first writer of any American generation to compose a profoundly Jewish fiction on a profoundly Western theme."—Cynthia Ozick, New York Times Book Review "This stately, ambitious amalgam of Jewish myth, history, theology, and speculations on the Jewish soul is like an enormous Judaic archeological ruin—often hard for the uninitiated to interpret, but impressive. . . . Intelligent, inventive, fascinating."— New Yorker

"In March 1953, four women meet in Room 408 of Moscow's deluxe Metropole Hotel. They have gathered, not altogether willingly, to reminisce about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet who in death had become a national idol of Soviet Russia. In life, however, he was a much more complicated figure. Each of these ladies loved Mayakovsky in the course of his life, and as they piece together their memories of him, a portrait of the artist emerges. From his early years as a leader of the Futurist movement to years as a propagandist for the Revolution, to the censorship battles that turned him against the State, Mayakovsky is revealed as a passionate, complex man who lived at the center of history and fought to hold onto his ideals even in the face of a world changing for the worse. The Mayakovsky Tapes is an ambitious, impressive novel that captures the tumultuous life of one of the most significant writers of the Soviet era"--

Historical Fiction At Its Best Ray Comfort and Anna Jackson have crafted a compelling novel of mystery and romance that breathes with suspense and intrigue. Greed over gold, a cold-blooded murder, overwhelming bitterness, abiding faith, romantic love, abuse, blackmail, secrecy, and intense personal struggles are the core elements of this great work that is set in the Wild West of the nineteenth century. How does Jake deal with his father's murder? How does it affect his relationships with his mother, his girlfriend, and God? What is Jake's fortune? Where does it come from? How does a blackmail plot threaten the central family of this book? What secret is being kept from Jake? This book is filled with intricate twists and turns that will surprise you as you read an keep reading. You will identify with Jake's inner turmoil as he endeavors to come to grips with evil in this world. You will be amazed to see how he learns to deal with his own bitterness and his tumultuous emotions. Jake's Fortune will open the door to spiritual understanding and truth, and your reading of this book will challenge you and inspire you to find solid answers for your own life.

Take chocolate candy, add a family business at war with itself, and stir with an outsider's perspective. This is the recipe for True Confections , the irresistible new novel by Katharine Weber, a writer whose work has won accolades from Iris Murdoch, Madeleine L'Engle, Wally Lamb, and Kate Atkinson, to name a few. Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky's marriage into the Ziplinsky family has not been unanimously celebrated. Her greatest ambition is to belong, to feel truly entitled to the heritage she has tried so hard to earn. Which is why Zip's Candies is much more to her than just a candy factory, where she has worked for most of her life. In True Confections , Alice has her reasons for telling the multigenerational saga of the family-owned-and-operated candy company, now in crisis. Nobody is more devoted than Alice to delving into the truth of Zip's history, starting with the rags-to-riches story of how Hungarian immigrant Eli Czaplinsky developed his famous candy lines, and how each of his candies, from Little Sammies to Mumbo Jumbos, was inspired by an element in a stolen library copy of Little Black Sambo, from which he taught himself English. Within Alice's vivid and persuasive account (is her unreliability a tactic or a condition?) are the stories of a runaway slave from the cacao plantations of C�te d'Ivoire and the Third Reich's failed plan to establish a colony on Madagascar for European Jews. Richly informed, deeply moving, and spiked with Weber's trademark wit, True Confections is, at its heart, a timeless and universal story of love, betrayal, and chocolate. From the Hardcover edition.

25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION Nadine Pagan's dyke sister Jane wants to find her. Her lover Rose wants to marry her. And her mother Fay wants to forget her. All Nadine wants is to stop the buzzing in her head. Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound follows Nadine's (née Morningstar) adventures as she escapes from her incendiary Jewish family into the lesbian town of New Chelm--and far beyond. This is the novel Isaac Bashevis Singer might have written if he'd been a lesbian with a keen eye for contemporary middle-class assimilation. It's Jewish magical lesbian realism, a good story, and a dynamic piece of writing. Includes an all new introduction by the author Judith Katz is the author of two published novels, The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound , which won the 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She teaches cultural studies and literature courses for the University of Minnesota's Center for Jewish Studies.

"Flames from the Earth is an autobiographical novel by Isaiah Spiegel, one of the most revered Yiddish authors to survive the Holocaust, depicting the complex web of relationships in and around the Łódź Ghetto"--

Starred reviews from Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Award-winning author Irina Reyn explores what it means to be a mother in a world where you can't be with your child Nadia's daily life in south Brooklyn is filled with small indignities: as a senior home attendant, she is always in danger of being fired; as a part-time nanny, she is forced to navigate the demands of her spoiled charge and the preschooler's insecure mother; and as an ethnic Russian, she finds herself feuding with western Ukrainian immigrants who think she is a traitor. The war back home is always at the forefront of her reality. On television, Vladimir Putin speaks of the "reunification" of Crimea and Russia, the Ukrainian president makes unconvincing promises about a united Ukraine, while American politicians are divided over the fear of immigration. Nadia internalizes notions of "union" all around her, but the one reunion she has been waiting six years for - with her beloved daughter - is being eternally delayed by the Department of Homeland Security. When Nadia finds out that her daughter has lost access to the medicine she needs to survive, she takes matters into her own hands. Mother Country is Irina Reyn's most emotionally complex, urgent novel yet. It is a story of mothers and daughters and, above all else, resilience.

Rose is dedicated, troubled and on the move. She is an Australian medievalist on sabbatical in modern France. Most of her attention is focused on her research, on buying books, and on the odd behavior of her boyfriend. She finds an inexplicable manuscript that tells the story of Ailinn and Guenloie, two women who lived in Arthurian Britain. Ailinn is determined to solve the world's problems and Guenloie searches for success, romance, and her father. Rose's world parallels theirs. And theirs is about to come to an agonizing close. "The way the past illuminates the present; the way in which human lives throughout the ages illuminate an unchanging, yet always complex, human nature; the way in which art illuminates life, and vice versa: these are some of the concerns at the heart of this very fine novel. Yet it is much more than that: it is a journey deep into the heart of Arthurian myth, of the numinous, and of the human soul. What's more, it is most readable, and layered in a most intriguing and mysterious manner, reminiscent of A.S. Byatt's 'Possession'." -Sophie Massonauthor of the Laylines Trilogy