"An amazing, glittering, glowing, Proustian, Conradian, Borgesian, diamond-faceted, language-studded, myth-drowned Dream!"—Cynthia OzickThese mysterious, interrelated stories create a portrait of the author's life, both real and imagined, as he appears in each tale variously as hero, bystander, artist, and ghost, yielding an enchanting autobiography of the imagination.Fantasy and reality collide as the book's principal characters—two lovers—meet, part, and r...

A metaphysical noir and enthralling tale of love from a master stylistCalled to Mexico City by the alluring and enigmatic wife of a vanished billionaire, a private investigator with unusual “sympathetic powers” agrees to solve the mystery of the man’s disappearance. Ludovico Cruz was admired by many for his commitment to social justice, but were his protectors his true friends or in the pay of his enemies? Had he fled, or been kidnapped or murdered by the ...

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICEAn incomparable storyteller serves up an enchanting concoction of art, love, and longingIn fifteen masterful stories, Frederic Tuten entertains questions of existential magnitude, pervasive yearning, and the creative impulse. A wealthy older woman reflects on her relationship with her drowned husband, a painter, as she awaits her own watery demise. An exhausted artist, feeling stuck, reads a b...

A revolutionary comic masterpiece, an icon of literature as American pop art, and a book unlike any other, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March breaks all frames.An icon of literature as American Pop Art, Frederic Tuten’s Adventures of Mao on the Long March is a triumphantly witty and subversive novel. The New York Times called it “almost too good to be true.” Tuten’s deadpan textbook narrative of Mao’s Long March is peppered with loving parodi...

In this elegant and sensual novel, Frederic Tuten explores the ageless tension between a life of passion and a desire for ease. Set in Paris and New York, The Green Hour tells the story of Dominique, an art historian who struggles to choose between two men who embody the critical schism in her life: unquenchable idealism and material happiness.The novel etches the career of this extraordinary woman from her rebellious college years to the present. What unfolds is a passion...

**Winner of the National Book Award"The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II." —The New Republic**“A screaming comes across the sky. . .” A few months after the Germans’ secret V-2 rocket bombs begin falling on London, British Intelligence discovers that a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, corresponds identically to a map showing the V-2 impact sites. The implication...

In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, the bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman ("Elegant and scrupulous"—New York Times Book Review) and Krakatoa ("A mesmerizing page-turner"—Time) brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world's most technologically advanced country.No cloistered don, this tall, married...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the National Book Award–winning author of Just Kids: a “sublime collection of true stories … and wild imaginings that take us to the very heart of who Patti Smith is” (Vanity Fair), told through the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. Patti Smith calls this bestselling work “a roadmap to my life.”M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, r...

The thrilling Cold War masterwork by the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Gulag Archipelago, published in full for the first time."Solzhenitsyn's best novel. . . . A great and important book, whose qualities are finally fully available to English-speaking readers." —Washington PostMoscow, Christmas Eve, 1949. In this tense Cold War thriller, the Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy by a Russi...

In the Cities of Coin and Spice and In the Night Garden introduced readers to the unique and intoxicating imagination of Catherynne M. Valente. Now she weaves a lyrically erotic spell of a place where the grotesque and the beautiful reside and the passport to our most secret fantasies begins with a stranger’s kiss.…Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a...

Anthem is Ayn Rand’s classic tale of a dystopian future of the great “We”—a world that deprives individuals of a name or independence—that anticipates her later masterpieces, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.They existed only to serve the state. They were conceived in controlled Palaces of Mating. They died in the Home of the Useless. From cradle to grave, the crowd was one—the great WE.In all that was left of humanity there wa...

A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects.Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas*: How in your opinion are we to prevent war?*"For a long time some people believe...