A “comic extravaganza” (Washington Post Book World) from one of the most acclaimed voices in American avant-garde literature, Tlooth follows its narrator on a fantastical, globe-trotting quest for revenge.Opening on a baseball game in a Siberian prison camp, Harry Mathews’s Tlooth is absurdist from the jump.  The narrator, a three-fingered dental assistant who escapes from Russia to find the criminal surgeon who took the other two fingers...

A “cool, humorous, and affectionate” book of vignettes about a practice that is universal and universally taboo: masturbation.In sixty-one vignettes, Harry Mathews records the imaginative varieties of this solitary activity in prose that is playful, intimate, and humane. The soloists range in age from nine to eighty; the locales from Australia to Zaire; the means from the commonplace to the bizarre. There is the young man in Gaza with his hair dryers, the woman in ...

Cigarettes is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State.Though nothing is as simple as it might appear to be, we could describe this as a story about Allen, who is married to Maud but having an affair with Elizabeth, who lives with Maud. Or say it is a story about fraud in the art world, horse racing, and sexual intrigues. Or, as one critic did, compa...

A remarkable and unusual novel by “one of the most remarkable prose stylist presently writing in English.” —The San Francisco ChronicleAt a dinner party hosted by a wealthy New Yorker, a guest receives an ancient golden weapon as a prize. When the mysterious host of this party dies the next day, his fortune is left to whomever it was that received the prize at the party. The only requirement: the owner must answer three cryptic questions relating to the artifact's ...

It is 1936, and Albert B. is one of the first French citizens to join the Fascist party. During the war, he becomes a collaborator. It's only a matter of time before he dons a German uniform himself.Taking place in the limbo between the moment of Albert's initial "fall" and his inevitable capture, following the Allied invasion of Mainau, The Laurels of Lake Constance is the story not only of Albert himself, but of his daughter, who must endure the paradox of loving a man w...

A woman falls into a coma. Perhaps she's going to die. Becoming the sleeper's shadow, the woman's daughter will accompany her mother through six weeks of agony, bearing witness to the prolonged death imposed upon her by the monstrous machine of modern medicine. During this final voyage through the fog, the narrator attempts to recover the vivacious woman she knew before this illness: the mad lover, the romantic spouse, the musician who sacrificed her dreams to the reality of life with her ...

Set against the backdrop of Europe's slide into Fascism, Blue of Noon is a blackly compelling account of depravity and violence. As its narrator lurches despairingly from city to city in a surreal sexual and mental nightmare of squalor, sadism and drunken encounters, his internal collapse mirrors the fighting and marching on the streets outside. Exploring the dark forces beneath the surface of civilization, this is a novel torn between identifying with history's victims and being ...

The New York Times bestseller and basis for the #1 smash hit movie starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana GrandeWith millions of copies in print around the world, Gregory Maguire’s Wicked is established not only as a commentary on our time but as one of the great fantasy novels to revisit for years to come. Wicked relishes the inspired inventions of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, while playing sleight of hand with our collecti...

Henry Miller's famously banned book is "a matter-of-fact celebration of chucking one's dreary life and following your heart to Paris" (Richard Price).Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in...

'A feel-good book of the first order. One to curl up with... Read it' OBSERVERIn the small French village of Lansquenet, nothing much has changed in a hundred years. Then an exotic stranger, Vianne Rocher, blows in on the changing wind with her small daughter, and opens a chocolate boutique directly opposite the church. Soon the villagers cannot keep away, for Vianne can divine their most hidden desires.But it's the beginning of Le...

An 'utterly gripping' tale of love and espionage in Occupied France by the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Glass Room (Daily Mail)Marian Sutro is an outsider: the daughter of a diplomat, brought up on the shores of Lake Geneva and in England, half French, half British, naive yet too clever for her own good. But when she is recruited from her desk job by SOE, the Special Operations Executive, to go undercover in wartime France, it seems ...

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...