“Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.”Dr. Max Aue, the man at the heart of Jonathan Littell’s stunning and controversial novel The Kindly Ones, personifies the evils of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Highly educated and cultured, he was an ambitious SS officer, a Nazi and mass murderer who was in the upper echelons of the Third Reich. He tells us of his experience during the war. He was present at Auschwitz and Babi Yar, witnesse...

A blistering firsthand account of the conflict in Homs by the internationally acclaimed author of The Kindly Ones“We fight for our religion, for our women, for our land, and lastly to save our skin. As for them, they’re only fighting to save their skin.”In 2012, Jonathan Littell traveled to the heart of the Syrian uprising, smuggled in by the Free Syrian Army to the historic city of Homs. For three weeks, he watched as neighborhoods were b...

The Prix Goncourtwinning author of the scandalous The Kindly Ones returns with four new novellas that offer startlingly fresh depictions of age-old obsessions: sex and love, desiring and gazing, and the memories that take a lifetime to process. In The Fata Morgana Books, Littell crafts unique narrative voices by letting sensual feelings take the fore, whether the slippery promise of silk underwear, the dizzy intensity of abstract art, the languid torpor of a French beach, the shock of a b...

The Woman in the Dunes, by celebrated writer and thinker Kobo Abe, combines the essence of myth, suspense and the existential novel.After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit. But when he attempts to leave the next morning, he quickly discovers that the locals have other plans. Held captive with seemingly no chance of escape, he is tasked with shoveling back...

Kobo Abe, the internationally acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes*,* combines wildly imaginative fantasies and naturalistic prose to create narratives reminiscent of the work of Kafka and Beckett.In this eerie and evocative masterpiece, the nameless protagonist gives up his identity and the trappings of a normal life to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Wandering the streets of Tokyo and scribbling madly on the interior walls of his box, he d...

This National Book Award–winning novel of power, libido, and morality is "a powerful and profoundly disturbing book" ( The New York Times).First published in 1968, Jerzy Kosinski's classic vision of moral and sexual estrangement captured the deviant undercurrents of the era's politics and culture. In this haunting novel, distinctions are eroded between oppressor and oppressed, perpetrator and victim, narcissism and anonymity. Kosinski portrays men and wome...

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize'A savagely short novel of immeasurable ambition and violent beauty. This is the language of genius.' Juan Pablos Villalobos'How often, honestly, does the unveiling in translation of a 'forgotten genius' live up to the hype? Well here's one that does: Raduan Nassar' Times Literary Supplement'Yes, bastard, you're the one I love'A pair of lover...

From the Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner comes a powerful collection from one of our most gifted and widely read poets—117 of her finest poems drawn from her seven published volumes.Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds’s poetry “pure fire in the hands” and cheered the “roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss.” This rich selection exhibits those qualit...

An “irresistible” (Los Angeles Times), “riotous” (The Seattle Times) novel about the adventures of three men growing marijuana in Northern California, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain“Consistently, effortlessly, intelligently funny.”—The New York TimesAll Felix Nasmyth and friends have to do is harvest a crop of Cannabis sativa and half a million tax-free dollars...

Doppelgängers, a murderer’s guilt, pulp noir, fanatical police, and impossible romances-these are the pieces from which German master Wolfgang Hilbig builds a divided nation battling its demons. Delving deep into the psyches of both East and West Germany, The Sleep of the Righteous reveals a powerful, apocalyptic account of the century-defining nation’s trajectory from 1945 to 1989. From a youth in a war-scarred industrial town to wearying labor as a factory stoker, surreal confro...

Ten years ago the narrator unlocked the door of a wrecked apartment, empty of any trace of his wife. As stunning as her disappearance is his response. He freezes on the facts of her, haunting his recollections. This is the story of a man unable to free himself enough from the idea of a woman to try to find her.Jac Jemc's work has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Caketrain, Handsome, and Sleepingfish, among others. She is the aut...

DEATH IN THE FAMILYBUT COME BACK SOON, the sign said. Obviously it was a lie. The people in the grocery store just wanted to make sure he couldn't buy the spice he needed to make the recipe he'd selected for that night (recipes must be followed exactly). Obviously they wanted him to eat out ... to meet the waitress, Marta, ... to see her horrible, unspeakable, unbearable ugliness. It was obvious to him: her maimed, twisted face was the living desire to be dead. He had to help Marta...