Seven Houses in France
10 best books like Seven Houses in France (Bernardo Atxaga): Tail of the Blue Bird, From the Mouth of the Whale, Thirst, Maybe This Time, Stained Glass Elegies, Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism, Stevenson Under the Palm Trees, The Brothers, The Tree with No Name, Vain Art of the Fugue
| Author | Nii Ayikwei Parkes |
| ISBN | 0224085743 |
Sonokrom, a village in the Ghanaian hinterland, has not changed for thousands of years. Here, the men and women speak the language of the forest, drink aphrodisiacs with their palm wine and walk alongside the spirits of their ancestors. The discovery of sinister remains; possibly human, definitely...
From the Mouth of the Whale
The year is 1635. Iceland is a world darkened by superstition, poverty and cruelty. Men of science marvel over a unicorn’s horn, poor folk worship the Virgin in secret and both books and men are burnt. Jónas Pálmason, a poet and self-taught healer, has been condemned to exile for heretical conduct,...
| Author | Ken Kalfus |
| ISBN | 1571310185 |
A few quite good stories, reminiscent of Calvino and Borges, surrounded by some okay stories. And then I remembered, Calvino and Borges do a pretty good Calvino and Borges as well--so I'll read them instead. If you only read one story from this collection, though read "Night And Day You Are The One"
I'll...
| Author | Alois Hotschnig |
| ISBN | 0956284051 |
A spellbinding short story collection by one of Austria's most critically acclaimed authors. A man becomes obsessed with observing his neighbors. A large family gathers for Christmas only to wait for the one member who never turns up. An old woman lures a man into her house where he finds dolls resembling...
| Author | Shūsaku Endō |
| ISBN | 0811211428 |
The arresting beauty of Shusaku Endo's fiction is best known in the West through his highly acclaimed novels The Samurai and Silence. His consummately wrought short stories, with their worlds of deep shadows and achieved clarity, are less familiar. The dozen stories of Stained Glass Elegies, selected...
| Author | Hans Fallada |
| ISBN | 0141195800 |
'...I stare at the coffee I poured myself, and I think: caffeine is a poison that stimulates the heart. There are plenty of instances of people killing themselves with coffee, hundreds and thousands of them. Caffeine is a deadly poison, maybe almost as deadly as morphine. Why didn't it ever occur to me...
| Author | Alberto Manguel |
| ISBN | 1841954497 |
'Stevenson Under the Palm Trees' is a vivid novella with Robert Louis Stevenson at its centre. Drawing on works produced by Stevenson at the end of his life, Manguel weaves a story about his life on Samoa, a philosophical investigation into morality, storytelling and reality. Manguel's story is filled...
Translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah
"I sensed that motherhood was terrible, perhaps sweet at times, but above all terrible. Not because one human child would be more horrendous than another, nor is it so that offspring cannot bring joy when little and be useful...
A diary recounting four decades’ worth of sexual exploits, the memoir of a mental institution attendant, and a familiar-looking bicycle dredged out of a river–the discovery of these artifacts sends an archivist on an obsessive quest to discover their owners’ identities and fates. Shifting...
| Author | Dumitru Țepeneag |
| ISBN | 1564784215 |
Clutching a bouquet of flowers, hurrying to catch his bus, and arguing with the driver once he's on, a man rushes to a train station platform to meet a woman. This sequence of events occurs and recurs in remarkably different variations in Vain Art of the Fugue.
In one version, the bus driver...
| Author | Hans Keilson |
| ISBN | 0374191956 |
Published when the author was just twenty-three, Life Goes On was Hans Keilson's literary debut, an extraordinary autobiographical novel that paints a dark yet illuminating portrait of Germany between the world wars. It is the story of Herr Seldersen—a Jewish store owner modeled on Keilson's...
| Author | Amos Oz |
| ISBN | 0547483368 |
Strange things are happening in Tel Ilan, a century-old pioneer village. A disgruntled retired politician complains to his daughter that he hears the sound of digging at night. Could it be their tenant, that young Arab? But then the young Arab hears the digging sounds too. Where has the mayor's wife...
| Author | Nihad Sirees |
| ISBN | 1590516451 |
Available in English for the first time, The Silence and the Roar is a funny, sexy, dystopian novel about the struggle of an individual over tyranny.
The Silence and the Roar follows a day in the life of Fathi Sheen, an author banned from publishing because he refuses to write propaganda...
| Author | Tom McCarthy |
| ISBN | 1846880335 |
Set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of communism, Men in Space follows a cast of dissolute Bohemians, political refugees, football referees, deaf police agents, assassins, and stranded astronauts as they chase a stolen icon painting from Sofia to Prague and beyond. The icon’s...
| Author | Pia Juul |
| ISBN | 0956284078 |
”I recognized the handwriting. I couldn’t breathe. That’s enough. Secret pregnant nieces. Secret rooms. And what kind of secret was this? Maverick? I know what goes on in Halland’s mind. I fell in love with him, of course I know. I can read his slightest passing thought; I can sense him without...
| Author | Tristan Garcia |
| ISBN | 0865479119 |
In a controversial first novel that took the French literary world by storm and won the Prix de Flore, Tristan Garcia uses sex, friendships, and love affairs to show what happens to people when political ideals--Marxism, gay rights, sexual liberation, nationalism--come to an end. As Elizabeth Levallois,...
From the Fatherland, with Love is set in an alternative, dystopian present in which the dollar has collapsed and Japan's economy has fallen along with it. The North Korean government, sensing an opportunity, sends a fleet of rebels in the first land invasion that Japan has ever faced. Japan can't cope...
| Author | Wisława Szymborska |
| ISBN | 0544126025 |
A new collected volume from the Nobel Prize–winning poet that includes, for the first time in English, all of the poems from her last Polish collection
One of Europe’s greatest recent poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize–winner Wislawa Szymborska draws...
| Author | Birgit Vanderbeke |
| ISBN | 3596137837 |
Angespannt wartet die Familie am gedeckten Tisch auf den Vater. Mutter, Tochter und Sohn sitzen vor einem Berg Muscheln, die allein das Oberhaupt der Familie gerne isst. Um die zähe Wartezeit zu überbrücken, beginnen sie miteinander zu reden. Je mehr sich der Vater verspätet, desto offener wird...
Warrior Lore: Scandinavian Folk Ballads
Warrior Lore is the second collection of Scandinavian folk ballads translated into English verse by Ian Cumpstey, following Lord Peter and Little Kerstin. These narrative ballads were part of an oral tradition in Scandinavia, and were first written down around 1600. Included in this book are stories...
Agotados tras quince horas de vuelo, dos jóvenes guatemaltecos esperan sus maletas en el aeropuerto Ben Gurión de Tel Aviv. Viajan a Jerusalén para asistir a la boda de su hermana pequeña con un judío ortodoxo de Brooklyn. Mientras que muchos viajan a Israel como a una tierra prometida, el narrador,...
| Author | Mercè Rodoreda |
| ISBN | 1940953227 |
Despite its title, there is little of war and much of the fantastic in this coming-of-age story, which was the last novel Mercè Rodoreda published during her lifetime.
We first meet its young protagonist, Adrià Guinart, as he is leaving Barcelona out of boredom and a thirst for freedom, embarking...
| Author | Manuel Rivas |
| ISBN | 1846551463 |
On 19 August 1936 Hercules the boxer stands on the quayside at Coruña and watches Fascist soldiers piling up books and setting them alight. It is a moment which transforms a young group of friends, who just weeks before had spent their days sunbathing beneath the lighthouse, into a broken generation....
| Author | Slavoj Žižek |
| ISBN | 0745672280 |
Where are we today and what is to be done? Slavoj Zizek ponders these questions in this unique and timely book. Based on live interviews, the book captures Zizek at his irrepressible best, elucidating such topics as the uprisings of the Arab Spring, the global financial crisis, populism in Latin America,...
| Author | Svetislav Basara |
| ISBN | 1934824585 |
The Cyclist Conspiracy tells the tale of a secret Brotherhood who meet in dreams, gain esoteric knowledge from contemplation of the bicycle, and seek to move in and out of history, manipulating events; the Brothers are part of a conspiracy so vast and so secret that, in many cases, the conspirators themselves...
