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...

An old loner and his misfit dog spend a year on the road in this acclaimed Irish novel of "singing prose [and] two unlikely Beckettian wanderers" ( The Guardian, UK).It is springtime, and an isolated man shunned by his village has forged a connection with the one-eyed dog he's taken into his tightly shuttered life. But as their friendship grows, their small seaside community becomes suspicious. And when an accident is misconstrued as menace, this pair of o...

A tale of twisted love from Yoko Ogawa—author of The Diving Pool and The Housekeeper and the Professor.In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long sedu...

A perfect introduction to Mary Oliver’s poetry, this stunning collection features 26 nature poems and prose writings about the birds that played such an important role in the Pulitzer Prize winner’s life.Within these pages you will find hawks, hummingbirds, and herons; kingfishers, catbirds, and crows; swans, swallows and, of course, the snowy owl, among a dozen others-including ten poems that have never before been collected. She adds two beautifully crafted essay...

"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...

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...

"In Young's work, the big essential questions-mortality, identity, the meaning of life-aren't simply food for thought; they're grounds for entertainment."-Toronto Star"Surrealism seldom seems as much like real life as in Young's hilarious and cautionary poems."-BooklistBender gathers a generous selection of new work along with treasure from Dean Young's twelve volumes. Strongly influenced by Surrealism, Dean Young's poems flash with extravagant im...

Top short women's fiction from periodicals such as WOMEN'S WEEKLY, CLEO, WOMAN'S DAY, ARGOSY UK and ABC Books.There's 'The Sand Man' - an award-winning story about a crazily-in-love couple who build a huge sand man on the beach. What happens then will make you cryThere's 'The Snag' - a story about a man who can do anything, except relate to women.And 'Serpent for Celia'. Do sea serpents exist? Of course not. But still...And 'The Man Who Made Whistles' - where a...

“A reaffirmation of a back country of the spirit."—Kirkus ReviewsThis collection is made up of four sections: "Far West"—poems of the Western mountain country where, as a young man. Gary Snyder worked as a logger and forest ranger; "Far East"—poems written between 1956 and 1964 in Japan where he studied Zen at the monastery in Kyoto; "Kali"—poems inspired by a visit to India and his reading of Indian religious texts, particularly those of Shivaism and Tibe...

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...

Postcards from Here is a capturing of a community, a harsh and beautiful place, a family, and the internal experience of its author in the form of micro-essays. The book takes on the realities of rural New England life, the moments and details that stitch a community together, the politics of being gay and divorced in such a place, and the visceral details of raising children, gardening, porcupines, travel, marriage, and other hazards of living. Written in a coastal community at t...

Memory generates memory. Grief slumbers. There are membranes of regrettable sorrows. And, there is that catch-breath of love. Born in England, she was three and he was eleven when their family came to Canada. In a few years, he would be swept into the pulsing generation of peace and love. She remembers how he held her hand walking across College Street on the way to the Beatles concert. Once, he picked her up in the VW and they went to the country in search of the full moon.