Tor Ulven is one of the most renowned Norwegian authors of the twentieth century, beginning his career writing poetry and ending it with unclassifiable explorations of the possibilities of prose, reminiscent of writers such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Peter Handke. Replacement, his only novel, published two years before Ulven's suicide, is a miniature symphony, wherein the perspectives of unrelated characters are united into what seems a single narrative voice: each personality, dire...

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 1Q84 and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle comes a relentlessly inventive novel that dives deep into the very nature of consciousness.“Fantastical, mysterious, and funny . . . a fantasy world that might have been penned by Franz Kafka.”—The Philadelphia InquirerAcross two parallel narratives, Murakami draws readers into a mind-bending universe in which Lauren Baca...

A New York Times bestselling author—and “a mythmaker for the millennium, a wiseacre wiseman” (New York Times Book Review)—delivers a surreal and elaborate quest that takes readers from Tokyo to the remote mountains of northern Japan, where the unnamed protagonist has a surprising confrontation with his demons.An advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend and casually appropriates the image for an advertisement. What he doesn’t realize...

A wonderful sui generis novel about a visiting cat who brings joy into a couple’s life in TokyoA bestseller in France and winner of Japan’s Kiyama Shohei Literary Award, The Guest Cat, by the acclaimed poet Takashi Hiraide, is a subtly moving and exceptionally beautiful novel about the transient nature of life and idiosyncratic but deeply felt ways of living. A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo; they ...

This World Fantasy Award winner in the vein of Animal Farm delves into a lab worthy of a mad Nazi scientist—but run by a brilliantly sadistic rodent.In the annals of American literature, there has never been a character quite like Doctor Rat, PhD. From one of the most indispensable storytellers in speculative fiction, this biting satire introduces a narrator of learned charm and humor, and a twisted logic that is absolutely chilling.Doctor Rat is a ...

The world of horsemanship is teeming with women and girls who are totally devoted to their trusty steeds. Often, fathers or husbands are involved as well, dragged unwillingly and unknowingly into this alternate reality. One such man is the author of this book, whose life revolves entirely around his wife and her horses. He really doesn't feel connected to horses in any way; he doesn't speak the jargon, and he is locked in an unending struggle with stables, horse trailers, and arenas. Regul...

At several points in the haunting Dukla, Andrzej Stasiuk claims that what he is trying to do is "write a book about light." The result is a beautiful, lyrical series of evocations of a very specific locale at different times of the year, in different kinds of weather, and with different human landscapes. Dukla, in fact, is a real place: a small resort town not far from where Stasiuk now lives. Taking an usual form—a short essay, a novella, and then a series of brief portraits of l...

"Probe[s] deeply below the surfaces of familiar Japanese stereotypes . . . A compassionate and insightful story of dysfunction, despair and friendship" (Ruth Ozeki, award-winning author of A Tale for the Time Being).Twenty-year-old Taguchi Hiro has spent the last two years of his life living as a hikikomori—a shut-in who never leaves his room and has no human interaction—in his parents' home in Tokyo. As Hiro tentatively decides to reenter the world, he sp...

Poetry that explores how accidental voyeurism can force reconsideration and reconciliationWhite⋅out: n. a surface condition … in which no object casts a shadow, the horizon cannot be seen, and only dark objects are discernible …Whiteout: when the heavy weather of daily life establishes the measure of the measureless; when the predatory nature of the accidental conjures cowboys and the comatose; when the sickly sweet pop of life underfoot contrasts the televised ima...

Set in contemporary Nagasaki, the six short stories in this collection draw a chilling portrait of the ongoing trauma of the detonation of the atomic bomb. Whether they experienced the destruction of the city directly or heard about it from survivors, the characters in these tales filter their pain and alienation through their Catholic faith, illuminating a side of Japanese culture little known in the West. Many of them are descended from the "hidden Christians" who continued to practice t...

Ted Kooser sees a writer’s workbooks as the stepping-stones on which a poet makes his way across the stream of experience toward a poem. Because those wobbly stones are only inches above the quotidian rush, what’s jotted there has an immediacy that is intimate and close to life.Kooser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. The Wheeling Year offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and...

Mean is a stunning exploration of the threshold and divide between our primeval origins and the meanness of our everyday lives. In this collection, the pastoral collides with the concrete terrain of motorbikes, prisons, and chainlink to capture our constructed isolation and our buried, yet resonant, connection to the land and seascapes that surround us.Ken Babstock's poetic voice is wholly original -- searing and pure in its realism, evocative and affecting in its search f...