El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City

Author	Italo Calvino
ISBN	0156453800

"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." So...

Author	Luigi Pirandello
ISBN	1590171152

Mattia Pascal endures a life of drudgery in a provincial town. Then, providentially, he discovers that he has been declared dead. Realizing he has a chance to start over, to do it right this time, he moves to a new city, adopts a new name, and a new course of life—only to find that this new existence is as...

Author

Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology. and horoscope. When he died in 1935, Pessoa left behind a trunk filled with unfinished and unpublished writings, among which were the remarkable...

Author	Banana Yoshimoto
ISBN	0571212158

I can never tell if short stories are better when they have a beginning, middle and end like a full length novel, or if they are more powerful as little snippets of someone's life that don't actually 'end' per se.
Yoshimoto's short stories fall into the latter - they are moments/snapshots of lives...

Author	Wolfgang Schivelbusch
ISBN	0520203542

Wolfgang Schivelbusch tells the story of the development of artificial light in the nineteenth century. Not simply a history of a technology, Disenchanted Night revelas the ways that the technology of artificial illumination helped forge modern consciousness. In his strikingly illustrated and...