'Meet girls. Take drugs. Listen to music.' In Rave, cult German novelist Rainald Goetz takes a headlong dive into nineties techno culture. From the cathartic release on the dance floor to the intense conversations in corners of nightclubs and the after-parties in the light of dawn, this exhilarating, fragmentary novel captures the feeling of debauchery from within. Dazzling and intimate, Rave is an unapologetic embrace of nightlife from an author unafraid to lose himself ...

Translated for the first time into English, cult German author Rainald Goetz's debut novel Insane draws upon his clinical psychiatric experience to paint a portrait of the asylum as a total institution. We follow a young psychiatrist, Dr Raspe, who enters the profession dreaming of revolutionising its methods. Confronted by day-to-day practices and the reality of life in the psychiatric hospital, Raspe begins to fray at the edges. The very concept of madness is called into questio...

**Finalist for the 2014 Man Booker Prize“J is a snarling, effervescent, and ambitious philosophical work of fiction that poses unsettling questions about our sense of history, and our self-satisfied orthodoxies. Jacobson’s triumph is to craft a novel that is poignant as well as troubling from the debris.” —Independent (UK)**Man Booker Prize–winner Howard Jacobson’s brilliant and profound new novel, J, “invites comparison with George Orwell’s 1...

In this deeply smart and sneakily poignant collection of essays, the bestselling author of Fraud and Don’t Get Too Comfortable makes an inspired case for always assuming the worst—because then you’ll never be disappointed.Whether he’s taking on pop culture phenomena with Oscar Wilde-worthy wit or dealing with personal tragedy, Rakoff’s sharp observations and humorist’s flair for the absurd will have you positively reveling in the untapped power of negativity.

Stories exploring a world of ordinary people caught between the pincers of aggressors, leading to actions at once deplorable, perplexing, and heroic.In the fall of 1944, the Red Army encircled Budapest, surrounding tens of thousands of German and Hungarian troops, and nearly a million civilians. The ensuing months witnessed one of the most brutal sieges of World War II, with block-to-block guerilla warfare followed by widespread disease, starvation, and unspeakable ...

"Something heavy is going on -- the past is erupting -- my two lives, night and day, are joining. I need to talk." Irv Yalom's old medical school friend was making a plea for help. In their fifty years of friendship, Bob Berger had never divulged his nocturnal terrors to his close comrade. Now, finally, he found himself forced to.In I'm Calling the Police, Berger recounts to Yalom the anguish of a war-torn past: By pretending he was a Christian, Berger survived the Holocau...

In this collection of short stories, drawing heavily from the authors own experiences as a medical graduate on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Bulgakov describes a young doctors turbulent and often brutal introduction to his practice in the backward village of Muryovo. Using a sharply realistic and humorous style, Bulgakov reveals his doubts about his own competence and the immense burden of responsibility, as he deals with a superstitious and poorly educated people struggling to enter ...

In this spellbinding book, the man described by the Daily Telegraph as 'possibly the best living writer in Britain' takes on his biggest challenge yet: unlocking the film that has obsessed him all his adult life. Like the film Stalker itself, it confronts the most mysterious and enduring questions of life and how to live.

A New York Times Notable Book. This "harrowing, lyrical autobiographical memoir . . . is a striking meditation on the distorting effects of our culture's preoccupation with physical beauty" (Publishers Weekly).It took Lucy Grealy twenty years of living with a distorted self-image and more than thirty reconstructive procedures before she could come to terms with her appearance after childhood cancer and surgery that left her jaw disfigured. As a yo...

"A cleareyed, insightful account of how she felt during her nosedives into despair . . . shot through with a self-awareness that helps readers cheer her on."— The New York TimesA New York Times Book Review Favorite Read of the Year"Despair is always described as dull," writes Daphne Merkin, "when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver." This Close to Happy—Merkin's rare, vividl...

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011In 1989, the year the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his morning run finds a corpse on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This scene opens a novel of extraordinary scope and depth, a masterwork that traces the fate of myriad Europeans—Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies—across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century.Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories

THE FIRST KISZKA AND KERSHAW MYSTERYA naked girl has washed up on the banks of the River Thames. The only clue to her identity is a heart-shaped tattoo encircling two foreign names. Who is she – and why did she die?Life’s already complicated enough for Janusz Kiszka, unofficial 'fixer' for East London’s Polish community: his priest has asked him to track down a young waitress who has gone missing; a builder on the Olympics site owes him a pile of money; and he’s falling for...