The Book of Jokes

Author	Philip Roth
ISBN	0099399016

The famous confession of Alexander Portnoy, who is thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality, yet held back at the same time by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood. Hilariously funny, boldly intimate, startlingly candid, Portnoy’s Complaint was an immediate bestseller upon...

Author	Vladimir Nabokov
ISBN	0141185260

The American poet John Shade is dead. His last poem, 'Pale Fire', is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous?...

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

Anne Carson

The award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.

Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red...

Author	W.G. Sebald
ISBN	0099448882

At first The Emigrants appears simply to document the lives of four Jewish émigrés in the twentieth century. But gradually, as Sebald's precise, almost dreamlike prose begins to draw their stories, the four narrations merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss.

Written with...

Author	Donald Barthelme
ISBN	0684824795

“Eccentric, dazzling…the literary conversation piece of the year.” –San Francisco Chronicle

An American short story writer and novelist acclaimed for his playful, postmodern style of short fiction, Barthelme’s first novel, Snow White, is a countercultural, experimental...

Author	Donald Barthelme
ISBN	1564784037

Simon, a middle-aged architect separated from his wife, is given the chance to live out a stereotypical male fantasy: freed from the travails of married life, he ends up living with three nubile lingerie models who use him as a sexual object.

Set in the 1980s, there's a further tension between...

Author	Noëlle Revaz
ISBN	1564787214

When reading With the Animals, one can imagine what it must have been like for sensitive Noëlle Revaz to grow up in Switzerland's rustic hinterland. How much contact with farms and farmers did she have? How much coarseness, brutality, hardship and violence did she witness?

In the...

Author	Paul Auster
ISBN	0571240763

Man in the Dark is Paul Auster’s brilliant, devastating novel about the many realities we inhabit as wars flame all around us.

Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter’s house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself...