Isle of Dreams
10 best books like Isle of Dreams (Keizō Hino): Invisible Cities, Collected Fictions, Unaccustomed Earth, Gravity's Rainbow, Concrete Island, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, The Complete Stories, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories, The Summer Book, Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine
| 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 | Jorge Luis Borges |
| ISBN | 0140286802 |
Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century. Now for the first time in English, all of Borges' dazzling fictions are gathered into a single volume, brilliantly translated by Andrew Hurley. From his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through...
| Author | Jhumpa Lahiri |
| ISBN | 0676979343 |
Eight stories—longer and more emotionally complex than any Lahiri has yet written—that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they enter the lives of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers.
From the internationally best-selling,...
| Author | Thomas Pynchon |
| ISBN | 0143039946 |
Advice for a first time reader of Gravity's Rainbow:
Gravity's Rainbow is a book you either love or hate, and if you hate it it's probably because you couldn't finish the damn thing. Though by no means impenetrable, the novel is daunting enough to merit a list of tips for those wishing to tackle...
On a day in April, just after three o'clock in the afternoon, Robert Maitland's car crashes over the concrete parapet of a high-speed highway onto the island below, where he is injured and, finally, trapped. What begins as an almost ludicrous predicament in Concrete Island soon turns into horror as...
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
| Author | Raymond Carver |
| ISBN | 0679723056 |
I'll announce the cliche of my loving this book before you beat me to it.
I'm an overeducated, mock-contemplative early-twenty-something with a penchant for strong male voices (despite my feminist leanings) and a distaste for anything too sentimental. I was raised in the tradition of "Show,...
| Author | Franz Kafka |
| ISBN | 0805210555 |
The Complete Stories brings together all of Kafka’s stories, from the classic tales such as “The Metamorphosis,” “In the Penal Colony,” and “A Hunger Artist” to shorter pieces and fragments that Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, released after Kafka’s death. With the exception...
Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
| Author | Raymond Carver |
| ISBN | 0679722319 |
By the time of his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver had established himself as one of the greatest practitioners of the American short story, a writer who had not only found his own voice but imprinted it in the imaginations of thousands of readers.
'Where I'm Calling From', his last collection,...
| Author | Tove Jansson |
| ISBN | 0954221710 |
An elderly artist and her six-year-old granddaughter while away a summer together on a tiny island in the gulf of Finland. Gradually, the two learn to adjust to each other's fears, whims and yearnings for independence, and a fierce yet understated love emerges - one that encompasses not only the summer...
Forty years ago I first linked up with Unguentine and we made love on twin-hulled catamarans, sails a-billow, bless the seas... So begins the courtship of a certain Unguentine to the woman we know only as Mrs. Unguentine, the chronicler of their sad, fantastical tale. For forty years, they sail the seas...
| Author | B.S. Johnson |
| ISBN | 0330484826 |
Christie Malry is a simple man. His job in a bank puts him next to, but not in possession of, money. As a clerk he learns the principles of Double-Entry Bookkeeping and adapts them in his own dramatic fashion to settle his personal account with society.
Under the column headed 'Aggravation' for...
| Author | Charles Simic |
| ISBN | 0062364766 |
From Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate Charles Simic comes a dazzling collection of poems as original, meditative, and humorous as the legendary poet himself.
This latest volume of poetry from Charles Simic, one of America’s most celebrated poets, demonstrates his revered...
The Monster Loves His Labyrinth
| Author | Charles Simic |
| ISBN | 1931337403 |
“Nabokovian in his caustic charm and sexy intelligence, Simic perceives the mythic in the mundane and pinpoints the perpetual suffering that infuses human life with both agony and bliss. . . . And he is the master of juxtaposition, lining up the unlikeliest of pairings and contrasts as he explores...
