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"A collection of flash fiction that feels seemingly arbitrary with an ache of human longing for connection peppered in. . . . These bizarre but beautiful stories transport you elsewhere with no intention of bringing you back." —Ashleah Gonzales, W magazine In this collection of compact fictions, Nicolette Polek transports us to a gently unsettling realm inhabited by disheveled landlords, a fugitive bride, a seamstress who forgets what people look like, and two rival falconers from neighboring towns. They find themselves in bathhouses, sports bars, grocery stores, and forests in search of exits, pink tennis balls, licorice, and independence. Yet all of her beautifully strange characters are possessed by a familiar and human longing for connection: to their homes, families, God, and themselves.
For readers of Roberto Bolaño's Savage Detectives and Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent, this "sublime" and "delightfully unhinged" metaphysical mystery disguised as a picaresque romp follows one poet's spectacular fall from grace to ask a vital question: Is everyone a plagiarist? (Nicolette Polek, author of Imaginary Museums). A scandal has shaken the literary world. As the unnamed narrator of Dead Souls discovers at a cultural festival in central London, the offender is Solomon Wiese, a poet accused of plagiarism. Later that same evening, at a bar near Waterloo Bridge, our narrator encounters the poet in person, and listens to the story of Wiese's rise and fall, a story that takes the ...
AN INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR An extraordinary book by a man with a unique and inspiring perspective, SCARP will change the way you view the places and spaces around you, and reveal a forgotten London you never knew existed. Nick Papadimitriou has spent a lifetime living on the margins, walking and documenting the landscapes surrounding his home in Child's Hill, North London, in a study he calls Deep Topography. Part meditation on nature and walking, part memoir and part social history, his arresting debut is first and foremost a personal inquiry into the spirit of a place: a 14-mile broken ridge of land on the fringes of Northern London known as Scarp. Conspicuous but largely forgotten, a...
A hauntingly insightful new short story collection from the Man Booker International Prize shortlisted author This is a collection resplendent with longing. In these pages, people meet without actually connecting, travellers set off but never seem to find home. We encounter them on the fjords of Norway, in the bustle of Los Angeles, and among the lights of Copenhagen. Outsiders yearn to be on the inside, insiders are desperate to be free. A writer befriends an ex-lover's mother. An elderly man offers his body to aging women. A woman's childhood memories of wild swimming draw her back to the water. In prose that is both elegantly spare and saturated with emotion, Dorthe Nors shines a light in...
In this dazzling literary debut, Rebecca Curtis displays the gifts that make her one of the most talented writers of her generation. Her characters—young women struggling to find happiness, love, success, security, and adventure—wait tables, run away from home, fall for married men, betray their friends, and find themselves betrayed as well. In "Hungry Self," a young waitress descends into the basement of a seemingly ordinary Chinese restaurant; in "Twenty Grand," a young wife tries to recover her lost fortune; in "Monsters," one family's paranoia leads to a sacrifice; and in "The Witches," an innocent swim on prom night proves more dangerous than anyone could have imagined. With elegant prose and a wicked sense of humor, these stories reveal Curtis's provocative and uncompromising view of life, one that makes her writing so poignant and irresistible.
Nothing interests Maman today, not even Jean, her favorite child ... She acts dumb, bewitched, like a goat that the neighborhood children have fed sorghum beer.' These extraordinary stories centre on African conflicts as seen through the eyes of children and describes their resilience and endurance in heartbreaking detail. From child trafficking to inter-religious conflicts, Uwem Akpan reveals in beautiful prose the resilience and endurance of children faced with the harsh consequences of deprivation and terror.
Shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection 2021 ‘Wickedly, exquisitely hilarious’ – Alexandra Kleeman ‘Open-source desire, self-replicating fantasy’ – Tom McCarthy ‘A brilliant and brilliantly strange and strangely funny and menacing debut!’ – Sam Lipsyte In this provocative, bitingly funny debut collection, people attempt to use technology to escape their uncontrollable feelings of grief, rage or despair, only to reveal their most flawed and human selves. An architect draws questionable inspiration from her daughter’s birth defect. A content moderator for ‘the world’s biggest search engine’, who spends her days culling videos o...
A New York Review Books Original In 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an important stage-set designer, and immediately threw himself into the vibrant social and cultural life of the city. Berlin Stories collects his alternately celebratory, droll, and satirical observations on every aspect of the bustling German capital, from its theaters, cabarets, painters’ galleries, and literary salons, to the metropolitan street, markets, the Tiergarten, rapid-service restaurants, and the electric tram. Originally appearing in literary magazines as well as the feuilleton sections of newspapers, the early stories are characterized by a joyous urgency and the generosity of an unconventional guide. Later pieces take the form of more personal reflections on the writing process, memories, and character studies. All are full of counter-intuitive images and vignettes of startling clarity, showcasing a unique talent for whom no detail was trivial, at grips with a city diving headlong into modernity.
The elusive narrator of this beautifully written, complex, and powerfully disconcerting novel is the scion of a decayed aristocratic family from the farther reaches of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. In five psychologically fraught episodes, he revisits his past, from adolescence to middle age, a period that coincides with the twentieth-century’s ugliest years. Central to each episode is what might be called the narrator’s Jewish Question. He is no Nazi. To the contrary, he is apolitical, accommodating, cosmopolitan. He has Jewish friends and Jewish lovers, and their Jewishness is a matter of abiding fascination to him. His deepest and most defining relationship may even be the strange dance of attraction and repulsion that throughout his life he has conducted with this forbidden, desired, inescapable, imaginary Jewish other. And yet it is just his relationship that has blinded him to–and makes him complicit in–the terrible realities his era. Lyrical, witty, satirical, and unblinking, Gregor von Rezzori’s most controversial work is an intimate foray into the emotional underworld of modern European history.
'It fizzes like a just-opened bottle of soda. It sprints like the Beatles running through a train station. It talks a mile a minute like a person swept away in the druggy lunacy of a serious crush... There have been moments when, for me, its effervescence has failed to rhyme with the despondency of these days. But far more often, Love and Other Poems has felt like a long-awaited remedy' New York Times Love and Other Poems is full of praise for the world we live in. Taking time as an overarching structure - specifically, the twelve months of the year - Alex Dimitrov elevates the everyday, and speaks directly to the reader as if the poem were a phone call or a text message. From the personal to the cosmos, the moon to New York City, the speaker is convinced that love is 'our best invention'. Dimitrov never resists joy, even in despair. These poems are curious about who we are as people and shamelessly interested in hope.