What I am interested in, says Abdullah Hussein, is how people survive. How they invent ways and means of dealing with their situation in given circumstances and what happens to them in the course of it, how they stand of fall. All writers, I believe, are interested in modes of survival.This collection includes three long short stories—Night, The Little Brook and The Sea—all examining, in one way or the other, the limits of human endurance.In language that abounds in rich, sensuous imagery, Ab...

"The undisputed master of the modern Indian short story." —Salman RushdieStories encircling the marginalized, forgotten lives of Bombay, set against the backdrop of the India-Pakistan Partition.By far the most comprehensive collection of stories by this twentieth century master available in English.A master of the short story, Saadat Hasan Manto opens a window onto Bombay's demimonde—its prostitutes, rickshaw drivers, artists, and s...

'A comfortable chair and a Mary Stewart: total heaven. I'd rather read her than most other authors.' Harriet EvansLegend has it that when the Gabriel Hounds run howling over the crumbling palace of Dar Ibrahim, high in the Adonis Valley of Lebanon, death will follow on their heels. When rich, spoilt Christie Mansel arrives at the decaying palace to look after her eccentric Aunt Harriet, she arrives to the sound of howling dogs. The palace is riddled with hidden pas...

When Arcade Publishing originally contracted this extraordinary collection of poetry and literature, the Department of the Treasury was attempting to censor the publication of works from countries on America’s “enemies list.” Arcade, along with the PEN American Center, the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, and the Association of American University Presses, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the United States government. Their landmark...

A psychologically penetrating story of a love affair between a rich South African and the undocumented immigrant she picks up on a whim, from the Nobel Prize–winning author."Brilliant. . . . Gordimer's stark sentences and emotional depth make most modern fiction seem trivial." — The Times (London)A New York Times Notable Book

Finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Fiction: a major literary debut that explores class, culture, power, and desire among the ruling and servant classes of Pakistan.Passing from the mannered drawing rooms of Pakistan’s cities to the harsh mud villages beyond, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s linked stories describe the interwoven lives of an aging feudal landowner, his servants and managers, and his extended family, industrialists who have lost touch with the land. In the spirit of Jo...

Witty, acerbic, insightful musings from Robert Dessaix, one of Australia's finest writers.One Sunday night in Sydney, Robert Dessaix collapses in a gutter in Darlinghurst, and is helped to his hotel by a kind young man wearing a T-shirt that says FUCK YOU. What follows are weeks in hospital, tubes and cannulae puncturing his body, as he recovers from the heart attack threatening daily to kill him.While lying in the hospital bed, Robert chances upon Philip L...

A literary discovery: an uproarious tragicomedy of modernization, in its first-ever English translationPerhaps the greatest Turkish novel of the twentieth century, being discovered around the world only now, more than fifty years after its first publication, The Time Regulation Institute is an antic, freewheeling send-up of the modern bureaucratic state.At its center is Hayri Irdal, an infectiously charming antihero who becomes entangled with an ec...

Rumi is regarded by many as the world's greatest poet. This selection by Arthur Scholey provides a taster of Rumi's great work. Here are stories plucked from friends and folk tales and real life, embodying Sufi wisdom, kindness, courtesy and candour.

By the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature**'Demands to be read and reread, for its humour, generosity of spirit and clear-sighted vision'**Evening Standard'Gurnah zooms in on individual acts of violence ... and unexpected acts of kindness' Daily Telegraph________________________Demoralised by small persecutions and the squalor and poverty of his life, Daud takes refuge in his imagi...

Winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Nuruddin Farah is one of Africa's most respected contemporary writers. Maps is the first novel in his acclaimed Blood in the Sun trilogy, set in his native land. Askar lost his father in the bloody war between Ethiopia and Somalia, and his mother died giving birth to him. Taken in by Misra, a kindhearted woman, he grows up in a small village. But as an adolescent, a true child of his times, he begins to feel suffocated the...

In this finely wrought memoir of life in postcolonial Pakistan, Suleri intertwines the violent history of Pakistan's independence with her own most intimate memories—of her Welsh mother; of her Pakistani father, prominent political journalist Z.A. Suleri; of her tenacious grandmother Dadi and five siblings; and of her own passage to the West."Nine autobiographical tales that move easily back and forth among Pakistan, Britain, and the United States. . . . She forays lightly into Pak...