Best European Fiction 2010
10 best books like Best European Fiction 2010 (Aleksandar Hemon): Hopeful Monsters, Am I a Redundant Human Being?, Basic Writings of Existentialism, Night Soul and Other Stories, Melancholy, Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers: An Anthology, Dukla, Esplendor de Portugal, Siamese, Passages
| Author | Nicholas Mosley |
| ISBN | 1564782425 |
-- A sweeping, comprehensive epic, Hopeful Monsters tells the story of the love affair between Max, an English student of physics and biology, and Eleanor, a German Jewess and political radical. Together and apart, Max and Eleanor participate in the great political and intellectual movements which...
| Author | Mela Hartwig |
| ISBN | 1564785815 |
Aloisia Schmidt is an ordinary secretary with a burning question: am I a redundant human being? She’s neither pretty nor ugly (though she wishes she were hideous: at least that would be something), has no imagination, and is forced to live vicariously through “borrowed” fantasy—fantasy,...
| Author | Gordon Daniel Marino |
| ISBN | 0375759891 |
Edited and with an Introduction by Gordon Marino
Basic Writings of Existentialism, unique to the Modern Library, presents the writings of key nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers broadly united by their belief that because life has no inherent meaning humans can discover, we must...
| Author | Joseph McElroy |
| ISBN | 1564786021 |
Best known for his complex and beautiful novels—regularly compared to those of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo—Joseph McElroy is equally at home in the short story, having written numerous pieces over the course of his career that now, collected at last, serve as an ideal introduction...
| Author | Jon Fosse |
| ISBN | 1564784517 |
karen's book club says:
** edit to include excerpt because it is hard to explain how painful this book is without making you guys feel it, too. **
no. this book is not for me. but i learned the value of maybe not just buying every book with a nice cover, or put out by dalkey, or that...
| Author | Alane Salierno Mason |
| ISBN | 1400079756 |
Featuring the work of more than 28 writers from upwards of 20 countries, Words Without Borders: The World through the Eyes of Writers transports us to the frontiers of the new literature for the twenty-first century.
In these pages, some of the most accomplished writers in world literature–among...
| Author | Andrzej Stasiuk |
| ISBN | 1564786870 |
At several points in the haunting Dukla, Andrzej Stasiuk claims that what he is trying to do is “write a book about light.” The result is a beautiful, lyrical series of evocations of a very specific locale at different times of the year, in different kinds of weather, and with different human landscapes....
| Author | António Lobo Antunes |
| ISBN | 8478446141 |
La ironia del titulo -frase tomada de una estrofa del himno nacional- ya anuncia lo que sera el desarrollo y el proposito de esta novela de Lobo Antunes: mostrar el otro lado de ese B+esplendorB; , desvelar sin paliativos la verdad a uno y otro lado del espectro politico, a traves de dos espacios narrativos...
| Author | Stig Sæterbakken |
| ISBN | 1564783251 |
A brutally comic portrait of marriage, taken to extremes reminiscent of the work of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. Edwin Mortens is almost blind, but has good hearing; his wife Erna is hard of hearing, but has excellent eyes. Paralyzed from the waist down, Edwin sits locked in his bathroom all day,...
| Author | Ann Quin |
| ISBN | 1564782794 |
A poetic book of voices, landscapes and the passing of time, Ann Quin's finely wrought novel reflects the multiple meanings of the very word "passages." Two characters move through the book--a woman in search of her brother, and her lover (a masculine reflection of herself) in search of himself. The...
| Author | Jean-Philippe Toussaint |
A European man arrives in Shanghai, ostensibly on vacation, yet a small task given him by his Parisian girlfriend Marie starts a series of complications. There is a mysterious Chinese man and a manila envelope full of cash. Later, he meets a woman at an art gallery and they agree to travel together to Beijing,...
| Author | William H. Gass |
| ISBN | 0465026206 |
In the words of the late Walker Percy, William Gass is a “totally committed, totally uncompromising, and extraordinarily gifted writer.” His latest work is a suite of four novellas that explore Mind, Matter, and God.In the title story, God is a writer in a constant state of fumble, Mind is a housewife...
| Author | Orly Castel-Bloom |
| ISBN | 0952942607 |
Fucked up. At times brilliant, at times hilarious. I was not horrified because I immediately read it as an allegory of internal states. It is curious that unlike other unreliable narrators (closest comparison that comes to my mind is Beckett's narrators), Dolly knows she's crazy and reflects on her...
O. Henry Prize Stories 2008
| Author | Laura Furman |
| ISBN | 0307280349 |
An annual collection of the twenty best contemporary short stories selected by series editor Laura Furman from hundreds of literary magazines, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008 is studded with extraordinary settings and characters: a teenager in survivalist Alaska, the seed keeper of a doomed Chinese...
| Author | Jacques Roubaud |
| ISBN | 1564785467 |
Devastated by the death of his young wife, Alix, the author conceives a project that will allow him not only to continue writing, but to continue living - writing a book that leads him to confront his terrible loss as well as examine the lonely world in which he now seems, increasingly, to exist: that of...
| Author | Ishmael Reed |
| ISBN | 1564782387 |
"Folks. This here is the story of the Loop Garoo Kid. A cowboy so bad he made a working posse of spells phone in sick. A bullwhacker so unfeeling he left the print of winged mice on hides of crawling women. A desperado so onery he made the Pope cry and the most powerful of cattlemen shed his head to the Executioner's...
| Author | Harry Mathews |
| ISBN | 1564782336 |
I am drawn to Harry Mathews—eighty-year-old Anglo-French poet, essayist, novelist and American Oulipian—largely because the Dalkey Archive Press publish a large wodge of his novels, and I respect the Dalkey Archive Press more than I respect all the world’s leaders and notable persons. So...
| Author | Raymond Queneau |
| ISBN | 1564782093 |
First published in France in 1937, this brilliant, moving novel is about the devastating psychological effects of war, about falling in love, about politics subverting human relationships, and about life in Paris during the early 1930s amid intellecturals and artists whose activities range from...
| Author | Stanley Elkin |
| ISBN | 1564783421 |
A quintessential Elkin protagonist, Ellerbee is a good husband, a good employer, a good sport who cares greatly about his fellow human beings--until he is killed during a senseless liquor-store hold-up. Suddenly smote by a deity as indifferent as history, Ellerbee is off on a whirlwind tour of a distressingly...
| Author | Lars Fredrik Händler Svendsen |
| ISBN | 1564785718 |
Despite the overuse of the word in movies, political speeches, and news reports, “evil” is generally seen as either flagrant rhetoric or else an outdated concept: a medieval holdover with no bearing on our complex everyday reality. In A Philosophy of Evil, however, acclaimed writer/philosopher...
Most of these stories focus on the small, quiet or unspoken intricacies of human relationships rather than grand dramas. The use of metaphor is delicate and subtle; often the women are strong and capable and the men less so; shallow and selfish motives are exposed.
The dates of these stories range...
A young writer has his heart set on his aunt's large apartment. With this seemingly simple conceit, the characters of The Planetarium are set in orbit and a galaxy of argument, resentment, and bitterness erupts. Telling the story from various points of view, Sarraute focuses below the surface, on the...
| Author | Dave Eggers |
| ISBN | 1934781487 |
Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly will be a one-time-only, Sunday-edition sized newspaper—the San Francisco Panorama. It'll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes...
