A number of European authors who survived concentration camps, ghettos, and besieged cities in the middle of the twentieth century chose not to write straightforward memoirs or testimonials but instead to fictionalize their experiences. By manipulating narrative time and point of view and altering biographical facts, these writers produced literary texts that challenge common notions of what constitutes an appropriate representation of collective trauma. How might such works provide a deep...

Compared to Kafka and a member of the Surrealists, Richard Weiner is one of European literature’s best-kept secrets. The Game for Real marks the long overdue arrival of his dreamlike, anxiety-ridden fiction into English.The book opens with The Game of Quartering, where an unnamed hero discovers his double. Surely, he reasons, if he has a double, then his double must also have a double too, and so on . . . What follows is a grotesquely hilarious, snowballi...

From bestselling, internationally acclaimed author Dorota Masłowska comes a hilarious and devastating satire of consumer culture. Set in a bizarro, all-too-real imaginarium of American pop culture, Honey, I Killed the Cats introduces us to two independent young women struggling to live the lives that television and glossy magazines have promised them. In a collision of street slang and mass-media sloganeering, Masłowska's electrifying prose drives a propulsive story about spiritual longing...

In a beautifully illustrated story for adults that is playful, philosophical, and with a wink of naughtiness, two characters—the Not-So-Little-Prince and Prickly Pear—consider the nature of happiness.Much more than a tale of sweet indulgence, Prince in a Pastry Shop touches on a fundamental question important to us all, from preschooler to pensioner: what does it mean to be happy? Is happiness to be found in the smallest, most visceral of experiences like ...

Yuri Lotman (1922-1993) was one of the most prominent and influential scholars of the twentieth century working in the Soviet Union. A co-founder of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics, he applied his mind to a wide array of disciplines, from aesthetics to literary and cultural history, narrative theory to intellectual history, cinema to mythology. This collection provides a stand-alone primer to his intellectual legacy in both semiotics and cultural history. It includes new translations ...

A landmark, eclectic, leviathan-sized anthology of fiction's wilder, stranger, darker shores.The Weird features an all star cast of authors, from classics to international bestsellers to prize winners:Ben OkriGeorge R.R. MartinAngela CarterKelly LinkFranz KafkaChina MiévilleClive Barker

Few works of contemporary literature are so universally acclaimed as central to our understanding of the human experience as Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett’s famous trilogy.Molloy, the first of these masterpieces, appeared in French in 1951. It was followed seven months later by Malone Dies and two years later by The Unnamable. All three have been rendered into English by the author.The first novel of Samuel Beckett’s mordant a...

Two terrifying classics by “the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction” (The Washington Post)Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepes...

A novel of creeping horror that “resonates with both suggestive psychological complexity and the emotional coloring of an ancient ballad or folktale” (Kirkus Reviews).Alone with their authoritarian father on a vast estate where time has stopped, two siblings speak a language and inhabit a surreal universe of their own making, shaped by their reading of philosophy and tales of chivalry. When their father dies and the children set out to bury him, they encou...

**“A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut … Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. … [It]reminds us that small things have great depths.”–New York Times Book Review"Dazzling…exquisitely written and daring ." –O, the Oprah Magazine**Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. A deceptively s...

Perfectly paced and brimming with passion - twenty-two tales from a master storyteller of the twentieth centuryIn this indispensable collection of short stories, Stefan Zweig captures the best and worst of human nature. At the heart of these tales lies passion - from a humble waiter's love for an aristocratic guest to an exiled Frenchwoman's longing for the glitter of court life, and a bookseller's fatal lust for print in wartime Vienna.Translated by the aw...

From the Nobel Prize–winning author: "One of the great short novels of the 20th century" ( The Wall Street Journal).Internationally acclaimed as one of the world's most influential writers, Kenzaburō Ōe brings to the fore the post-WWII rage and anxiety of a decorous society in this "deathly black comedy . . . dripping with nuclear terror" ( The Japan Times).Bird is an antisocial twenty-seven-year-old intellectual hanging ...