{"title":"Fiction \u0026 Literature - F to L","description":"\u003cp\u003eBrowse alphabetical by author: \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/fiction-literature-a-to-e\" data-mce-href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/fiction-literature-a-to-e\"\u003eA to E\u003c\/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/fiction-literature-f-to-l\" data-mce-href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/fiction-literature-f-to-l\"\u003eF to L\u003c\/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/fiction-literature-m-to-s\" data-mce-href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/fiction-literature-m-to-s\"\u003eM to R\u003c\/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/fiction-literature-s-t\" data-mce-href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/fiction-literature-s-t\"\u003eS to Z\u003c\/a\u003e, and \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/fiction-literature-anthologies\" data-mce-href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/fiction-literature-anthologies\"\u003eanthologies\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"guilty-the-lost-classic-novel","title":"Guilty - Anna Kavan","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eGuilty by Anna Kavan \/ ISBN 9780720612875 \/ paperback from Peter Owen (UK)\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e***\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSet in an unspecified but eerily familiar time and landscape, this is the story of Mark, a protagonist who struggles against the machinations of a hostile society and bureaucracy. Suffering at first from the persecution of his father as a conscientious objector, his life quickly comes under the control of the Machiavellian Mr. Spector, an influential government minister who arranges Mark's education, later employment, and even accommodation. It is when Mark tries to break free from Spector's influence that his life begins to unravel.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnna Kavan was one of the greatest unsung enigmas in 20th-century British literature. Born Helen Ferguson, a fraught childhood and two failed marriages led her to change her name to that of one of her characters. Despite struggling with mental illness and heroin addiction for most of her life, she was still able to write fiction that was as powerful and memorable as any English female writer of the last 150 years.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Peter Owen Publishers","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39271814955184,"sku":"9780720612875","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/AnnaKavan_Guilty1a.jpg?v=1621746461"},{"product_id":"a-life-full-of-holes","title":"A Life Full of Holes - Larbi Layachi","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA Life Full of Holes by Driss ben Hamed Charhadi aka Larbi Layachi \/ ISBN 9780862419493 \/ Canongate UK edition \/ light wear on these discounted books\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e***\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne of the most unusual literary innovations ever produced, A Life Full of Holes is the result of a singular collaboration between two remarkable individuals: Driss ben Hamed Charhadi [Larbi Layachi], an illiterate North African servant and street vendor, and legendary American novelist and essayist Paul Bowles. The powerful story of a shepherd and petty trafficker struggling to maintain hope as he wrestles with the grim realities of daily life, it is the first novel ever written in the Arabic dialect Moghrebi, faithfully recorded and translated into English by Bowles. Straightforward yet rich in complex emotions, it is a fascinating inside look at an unfamiliar culture—harsh and startling, yet interwoven with a poignant, poetic beauty.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Canongate","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39302512935088,"sku":"9780862419493","price":9.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Charhadi-ALifeFullOfHoles1.jpg?v=1622061206"},{"product_id":"copy-of-the-complete-stories-of-leonora-carrington","title":"Exposition - Nathalie Leger","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eExposition by Nathalie Léger, translated by Amanda DeMarco \/ ISBN 9781948980036 \/ 160-page paperback from Dorothy Project\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst sentence: \"Surrender, premeditate nothing, want nothing, neither discern nor dissect nor stare, but rather shift, dodge, lose focus, and--slowing down--consider the only material that presents itself, as it presents itself, in its disorder and even in its order.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e***\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eExposition is the first in a triptych of books by the award-winning writer and archivist Nathalie Léger that includes Suite for Barbara Loden and The White Dress. In each, Léger sets the story of a female artist against the background of her own life and research—an archivist’s journey into the self, into the lives that history hides from us. Here, Léger’s subject is the Countess of Castiglione (1837–1899), who at the dawn of photography dedicated herself to becoming the most photographed woman in the world, modeling for hundreds of photos, including “Scherzo di Follia,” among the most famous in history. Set long before our own “selfie” age, Exposition is a remarkably modern investigation into the curses of beauty, fame, vanity, and age, as well as the obsessive drive to control and commodify one’s image.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNathalie Léger is the award-winning author of Suite for Barbara Loden and The White Dress, as well as an editor and archivist. She has curated exhibitions on Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett for the Centre Pompidou, and is Director of the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine, an organization dedicated to preserving the archives of modern French writers.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dorothy Project","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39371683365040,"sku":"9781948980036","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/9781948980036-Exposition-Leger2.jpg?v=1615651420"},{"product_id":"the-suspended-vocation","title":"The Suspended Vocation - Pierre Klossowski","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Suspended Vocation by \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e \u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePierre Klossowski \/ \u003c\/span\u003eTranslated by Jeremy M. Davies and Anna Fitzgerald, with an introduction by Brian Evenson \/ slim paperback \/ ISBN 9781734838206\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Seventy years after it was written, Pierre Klossowski’s first novel, The Suspended Vocation, has finally found its way into English, providing the occasion to reassess his subterranean, but nevertheless profound, influence on post-war fiction and philosophy.\"--from \"\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/daily\/2020\/08\/08\/pierre-klossowski-brilliant-brother-of-balthus\/\" target=\"_blank\"\u003ePierre Klossowski, Brilliant Brother of Balthus\u003c\/a\u003e\" by Ryan Ruby in the NYR\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMade available in English for the very first time by NY based Small Press, Pierre Klossowski's debut novel, The Suspended Vocation, fictionalizes and satirizes the great erotic artist, philosopher, and iconoclast's brief, wartime flirtation with the priesthood, portraying the Church as a haven for conspiracy, idolatry, perversion, and even atheism.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWritten in the form of a disapproving monograph on an anonymous, confessional novel (itself titled The Suspended Vocation), it is the story of the hapless Jérôme, whose lust for holiness leads him astray in a cloistered world full of ideological and physical temptations.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSometimes a knowing critique of \"religious fiction,\" sometimes a wicked self-parody of Klossowski's own lifelong obsessions, and sometimes a sacerdotal spy novel, The Suspended Vocation is one of the strangest and most audacious debuts in twentieth-century literature.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Small Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39373438091440,"sku":"9781734838206","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/SuspendedVocation-Klossowski.jpg?v=1621913799"},{"product_id":"copy-of-guilty-the-lost-classic-novel","title":"Machines in the Head - Selected Stories - Anna Kavan (light wear)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMachines in the Head: Selected Stories by Anna Kavan \/ ISBN 9781681374147 \/ paperback from New York Review of Books Classics\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e***\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEnter the strange and haunting world of Anna Kavan, author of mind-bending stories that blend science fiction and the author's own harrowing experiences with drug addiction, in this new collection of her best short stories. Anna Kavan is one of the great originals of twentieth-century fiction, comparable to Leonora Carrington and Jean Rhys, a writer whose stories explored the inner world of her imagination and plumbed the depths of her long addiction to heroin. This new selection of Kavan’s stories gathers the best work from across the many decades of her career, including oblique and elegiac tales of breakdown and institutionalization from Asylum Piece (1940), moving evocations of wartime from I Am Lazarus (1945), fantastic and surrealist pieces from A Bright Green Field (1958), and stories of addiction from Julia and the Bazooka (1970). Kavan’s turn to science fiction in her final novel, Ice, is reflected in her late stories, while “Starting a Career,” about a mercenary dealer of state secrets, is published here for the first time.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Entering this haunting realm, the reader will crave to plunge deeper into her metallic and poetically surreal universe.\"--Patti Smith\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKavan experimented throughout her writing career with results that are moving, funny, bizarre, poignant, often unsettling, always unique. Machines in the Head offers American readers the first full overview of the work of a fearless and dazzling literary explorer.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39389695213744,"sku":"9781681374147","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/AnnaKavan-MachinesNYRB.jpg?v=1622082361"},{"product_id":"memoirs-of-a-space-traveler","title":"Memoirs of a Space Traveler - Stanislaw Lem","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMemoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy, by \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/search?q=stanislaw+lem\"\u003eStanislaw Lem\u003c\/a\u003e \/ ISBN 9780262538503 \/ paperback from MIT Press\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe travels of Ijon Tichy, a Gulliver of the space age, who encounters faulty time machines, intelligent washing machines, suicidal potatoes, and other puzzling phenomena. Memoirs of a Space Traveler follows the adventures of Ijon Tichy, a Gulliver of the space age, who leads readers through strange experiments involving, among other puzzling phenomena, faulty time machines, intelligent washing machines, and suicidal potatoes. The scientists Tichy encounters make plans that are grandiose, and strike bargains that are Faustian. They pursue humanity's greatest and most ancient obsessions: immortality, artificial intelligence, and top-of-the-line consumer items.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy turns satirical, philosophical, and absurd, these stories express the most starkly original and prescient notions of a master of speculative fiction.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStanisław Lem (1921–2006), a writer called “worthy of the Nobel Prize” by the New York Times, was an internationally renowned author of novels, short stories, literary criticism, and philosophical essays. His books have been translated into forty-four languages and have sold more than thirty million copies.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39392588595376,"sku":"9780262538503","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Lem-SpaceTraveler2.jpg?v=1615646927"},{"product_id":"copy-of-memoirs-of-a-space-traveler","title":"The Invincible - Stanislaw Lem","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Invincible by \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/search?q=stanislaw+lem\"\u003eStanislaw Lem\u003c\/a\u003e \/ ISBN 9780262538473 \/ paperback from MIT Press. I'm glad MIT Press brought some Lem back into print in nice editions.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA space cruiser, in search of its sister ship, encounters beings descended from self-replicating machines.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the grand tradition of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, Stanisław Lem's The Invincible tells the story of a space cruiser sent to an obscure planet to determine the fate of a sister spaceship whose communication with Earth has abruptly ceased. Landing on the planet Regis III, navigator Rohan and his crew discover a form of life that has apparently evolved from autonomous, self-replicating machines—perhaps the survivors of a “robot war.” Rohan and his men are forced to confront the classic quandary: what course of action can humanity take once it has reached the limits of its knowledge? In The Invincible, Lem has his characters confront the inexplicable and the bizarre: the problem that lies just beyond analytical reach.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStanisław Lem (1921–2006), a writer called “worthy of the Nobel Prize” by the New York Times, was an internationally renowned author of novels, short stories, literary criticism, and philosophical essays. His books have been translated into forty-four languages and have sold more than thirty million copies.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39392595116208,"sku":"9780262538473","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Lem-Invincible2.jpg?v=1615646538"},{"product_id":"dark-domain","title":"The Dark Domain - Stefan Grabinski","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Dark Domain by Stefan Grabinski \/ ISBN 9781909232044 \/ 153-page paperback from Dedalus European Classics\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"...reading The Dark Domain by Stefan Grabinski is such a revelatory experience. Because here is a writer for whom supernatural horror is manifest precisely in modernity - in electricity, fire-stations, trains:the uncanny as the bad conscience of today. Sometimes Grabinski is known as the Polish Poe but this is misleading. Where Poe's horror is agonised, a kind of extended shriek, Grabinski's is cerebral, investigative. His protagonists are tortured and aghast, but not because they suffer at the caprice of Lovecraftian blind idiot gods: Grabinski's universe is strange and its principles are perhaps not what we expect, but they are principles - rules- and it is in their exploration that the mystery lies. This is horror as rigour.\" -- China Mieville in The Guardian\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Grabinski's commitment to a marriage of the newly announced unconscious with the supernatural gives his extravagances some conviction. These short stories offer the pleasure of myths we can crack and skillfully chilling denouements.\"--David Buckley in The Observer\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Psycho-fantasies, doom-saturated tales of lonely men lost in hostile terrain, but the melancholy lifts to provide wonderful odd scenes, like the watchmaker whose death stops all the town clocks and the phantom train that always turns up unannounced, surprising the station staff\"--Time Out\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStefan Grabinski (1887-1936) Polish short story writer and novelist. Studied at Lvov University before becoming a teacher. He published seven volumes of short stories, three plays and three novels all within the fantasy genre.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dedalus Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39394454536368,"sku":"9781909232044","price":13.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/DarkDomain-Grabinski.jpg?v=1615646335"},{"product_id":"nightmares-of-an-ether-drinker","title":"Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker - Jean Lorrain","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eNightmares of an Ether-Drinker by Jean Lorrain \/ ISBN 9781943813025 \/ 261-page paperback from Snuggly Books \/ This publisher unearths some bizarre writers and books, and this one has by far the best title.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNone of Jean Lorrain’s biographers has contrived to discover exactly when or why he began taking ether, or how much of it he took before realizing (too late) that it was an extremely bad idea. The drug certainly helped provide the feverish, nightmarish atmosphere of these wonderfully decadent and sophisticated tales, and many of the apparitions with which they are populated.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBrian Stableford’s superb translations represent the first appearance in English of Jean Lorrain’s ether-inspired ‘nightmares’, originally collected as Sensations et Souvenirs in 1895. The later tales also translated here for the first time are in the tradition of the contes cruel, and in them the influence of ether-drinking is still very much apparent.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn his authoritative Introduction Brian Stableford presents Lorrain as one of the select band of literary figures “whose life and art were bound together into the most seamless whole. He was the man who embodied, more intimately and more inescapably than any other, the absurdities, affectations, paradoxes and perversities of the Decadent style and the Decadent world-view.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSearch 50 Watts for \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/search?q=snuggly\"\u003eSnuggly Books\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Snuggly Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39436845088944,"sku":"9781943813025","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/JeanLorrain-Nightmares.jpg?v=1616204966"},{"product_id":"rogomelec","title":"Rogomelec - Leonor Fini","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eRogomelec by Leonor Fini \/ ISBN 9781939663481 \/ small paperback with flaps published by \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/spotlight-collection-wakefield-press\"\u003eWakefield Press\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003c\/em\u003eOriginally published in French in 1979, \u003cem\u003eRogomelec\u003c\/em\u003e was the third of Leonor Fini’s novels. All the qualities of the paintings for which she is famed can be found in it: an undermining of patriarchy, the ambiguities of gender and the slipperiness of desire, along with darker hints of cruelty and the voluptuousness of fear.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis novella’s ambiguous narrator sets off for the isolated locale of Rogomelec―where a crumbling monastery serves as a sanatorium and offers a cure involving a diet of plants and flowers―and moves through a waking dream of strangely scented monks, vibratory concerts in a cavernous ossuary and ritualist pomp with costumes of octopi and shining beetles. As the days unfold, the narrator discovers that the “the celebration of the king” is approaching, the events of which will lead to a shocking discovery in Rogomelec’s Gothic ruins.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis first English translation includes 14 drawings by Fini that accompanied the novella’s original publication.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBorn in Argentina and raised in Italy, Leonor Fini (1907–96) concluded a rebellious youth with a move to Paris, where there followed six decades of work as artist, illustrator, designer and author with ties to the Surrealist movement. Rejecting the role of muse, her work focused on portrayals of women as subjects with desire rather than objects of desire. She was featured in MoMA’s landmark 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, and imagery from her painting Le Bout du Monde was used by Madonna in her 1994 video \"Bedtime Story.\" Fini’s first Paris show was curated by Christian Dior; while working for Schiaparelli she designed the bottle for Shocking, the designer’s top-selling perfume (and the acknowledged inspiration for Gaultier's torso-shaped bottles). She also designed the costumes for two films, Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet (1954) and John Huston's A Walk with Love and Death (1968). Fini is also well known for her illustrations for Pauline Reage’s Story of O (one of her costumes inspired the book’s final scene).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wakefield Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39463451623600,"sku":"9781939663481","price":12.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Leonor-Fini-Rogomelec-cov.jpg?v=1621715109"},{"product_id":"the-sufferings-of-prince-sternenhoch","title":"The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch - Ladislav Klima","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch by Czech author \u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eLadislav Klima \/ \u003c\/span\u003e204-page paperback from Twisted Spoon Press \/ ISBN 9788086264554\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"As a story of one man's madness, this work is up there with Dostoevsky and Kafka, though with a bitter sense of humor and absurdist, almost maniacal outlook on life.\"--The Modern Novel\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePhilosopher, novelist, essayist, eccentric, no other Czech author has had a greater impact on underground culture than Ladislav Klima (1878-1928). Mentor to artists as varied as Bohumil Hrabal and the Plastic People of the Universe, Klima's philosophy was radically subjectivist, and he felt it should be lived rather than merely spoken or written about. With Nietzsche as his paragon, he embarked upon a lifelong pursuit to become God, or Absolute Will, elucidating this quest in many letters, aphorisms, and essays. Yet among Klima's fictional texts, the apotheosis of his philosophy is The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch, his most acclaimed novel. Ostensibly a series of journal entries, the tale chronicles the descent into madness of Prince Sternenhoch, the German Empire's foremost aristocrat and favorite of Kaiser Willy. Having become the 'lowliest worm' at the hands of his estranged wife, Helga, the Queen of Hells, Sternenhoch eventually attains an ultimate state of bliss and salvation through the most grotesque perversions. Klima explores here the paradoxical nature of pure spirituality with a humor that is as darkly comical as it is obscene. This volume also includes his notorious text 'My Autobiography.'\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Twisted Spoon Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39581118988464,"sku":"9788086264554","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Klima-SufferingsOfPrinceSternenhoch.jpg?v=1622081493"},{"product_id":"a-gothic-soul","title":"A Gothic Soul - Jiri Karasek","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA Gothic Soul by Jiri Karasek \/ I\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cem\u003eSBN 9788086264462 \/ Lovely 141-page hardcover from Twisted Spoon Press\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"The translator, Kirsten Lodge, has retained the seductive, absorbing effect of Karasek's prose...Indeed, this handsome hardback edition, complete with evocative prints by Sascha Schneider, deserves to be one of the most successful ventures of Twisted Spoon Press.\"--TLS\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA Gothic Soul is the most acclaimed work of Czech Decadent prose. Expressing concerns that are unique to the Czech movement while alluding creatively and ironically to Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature, the novella is set in Prague, which is portrayed as a dead city, a city peopled by shades, who, like the protagonist -- a nihilist and the \"last scion of a noble line\" -- are only a dim reflection of the city's medieval splendor. The man lives in a dreamworld, the labyrinth of his soul giving rise to visions. In his quest for meaning, he walks the city, often hallucinating, while pondering questions of religious fervor and loss of faith, the vanity of life, his own sense of social alienation, human identity and its relationship to a \"nation,\" the miserable situation of the Czechs under Habsburg rule, and Prague's loss of its soul on the cusp of modernity as old sections, such as much of the squalid Jewish Quarter, are demolished to make way for gaudy new buildings and streets. With a history of madness running in the family and afraid the same fate awaits him, he ultimately retreats into seclusion, preferring the monastic way of life as the epitome of unity and wholeness and a tonic to present-day fragmentation. Yet Karasek eschews the mawkish, opting instead for darker tones that play with the tropes and motifs of Decadence while conflating the same-sex desires of his protagonist, the fatalism and futility of such an existence within the social construct of the day, with concerns for the dual fates of his nation and city.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGiven his importance for Czech literature and for European Decadence, very little of Karasek's work has been translated into English. Kirsten Lodge included translations of his poetry in Solitude, Vanity, Night: An Anthology of Czech Decadent Poetry, and her translations of some of his shorter prose have been made available online. 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Translated into English from the Russian for the first time, these two late stories expose the nefarious absurdity of racial persecution and warmongering and the lengths social and political structures will go to underpin them.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Twisted Spoon Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39581210017968,"sku":"9788086264400","price":23.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/LegsOfIzoldaMorgan2.jpg?v=1618501554"},{"product_id":"counternarratives","title":"Counternarratives - John Keene","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eCounternarratives by John Keene \/ ISBN 9780811225526 \/ 320-page paperback from New Directions\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow in paperback, a bewitching collection of stories and novellas that are “suspenseful, thought-provoking, mystical, and haunting” (Publishers Weekly)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRanging from the seventeenth century to the present, and crossing multiple continents, Counternarratives draws upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, and interrogation transcripts to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present. “An Outtake” chronicles an escaped slave’s take on liberty and the American Revolution; “The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows” presents a bizarre series of events that unfold in Haiti and a nineteenth-century Kentucky convent; “The Aeronauts” soars between bustling Philadelphia, still-rustic Washington, and the theater of the U. 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Taking the form of directives, largely absurd, the poems mock communist society’s officialese while offering readers an opportunity to create their own poetics by performing the given directions. The collages on the facing pages to the poems are composed of layered documents, image cutouts, newspaper clippings, announcements, letter fragments, reports, or decontextualized words, oftentimes forming concrete patterns or the outlines of figures, to create a sort of “evidential” report on the year. Text and image taken together, the volume displays Kolar’s enduring interest in extracting poetry from the mundane to demolish the barrier separating art from reality, or even to elevate reality itself through this dual poetics to the level of art. 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A half century after its first appearance, Kavan’s fever dream of a novel is beginning to seem all too real.\" -The New Yorker\u003c\/p\u003e\n \n\u003cp\u003eIn a frozen, apocalyptic landscape, destruction abounds: great walls of ice overrun the world and secretive governments vie for control. Against this surreal, yet eerily familiar broken world, an unnamed narrator embarks on a hallucinatory quest for a strange and elusive “glass-girl” with silver hair. He crosses icy seas and frozen plains, searching ruined towns and ransacked rooms, all to free her from the grips of a tyrant known only as the warden and save her before the ice closes all around. 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Few contemporary novelists could match the intensity of her vision.\"  —J.G. Ballard\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e“There is nothing else like it.” —Doris Lessing\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Penguin Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39897133220016,"sku":"9780143131991","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Anna-Kavan-Ice-book.jpg?v=1622775408"},{"product_id":"the-thiefs-journal","title":"The Thief's Journal - Jean Genet","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Thief's Journal by Jean Genet, with an intro by Patti Smith \/ ISBN 9780802128270 \/ 272-page paperback from Grove Press\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst published in France in 1949, The Thief’s Journal is Jean Genet’s iconic work of autobiographical fiction. This new edition brings his legendary genius to future generations of readers, with an introduction by Genet’s great admirer, Patti Smith.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFrom a prison cell, the journal’s narrator recounts his travels across Europe in the 1930s―as a vagabond, pickpocket, and occasional prostitute―in pursuit of spiritual fulfillment through erotic trysts and evil deeds. Worshipping his own holy trinity of homosexuality, theft, and betrayal, he conducts every burglary, and each sexual encounter, with the elaborate, reverent ritual of a religious ceremony. 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On the Origin of Species makes available for the first time in English some of Kim’s most acclaimed stories, as well as an essay on science fiction. Her strikingly original, thought-provoking work teems with human and non-human beings, all of whom are striving to survive through evolution, whether biologically, technologically or socially. Kim’s literature of ideas offers some of the most rigorous and surprisingly poignant reflections on posthuman existence being written today.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBo-Young Kim (born 1975) won the inaugural Korean Science \u0026amp; Technology Creative Writing Award with her first published novella in 2004 and has gone on to win the annual South Korean SF Novel Award three times. In addition to writing, she regularly serves as a lecturer, juror and editor of sci-fi anthologies, and served as a consultant to Parasite director Bong Joon Ho's earlier sci-fi film Snowpiercer. She has novellas forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2021. She lives in Gangwon Province, South Korea, with her family.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Kaya Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40087042490544,"sku":"9781885030719","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Bo-Young-Kim-Origin-of-species-Kaya.jpg?v=1625171498"},{"product_id":"fair-play","title":"Fair Play - Tove Jansson","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eFair Play by Tove Jansson \/ ISBN 9781590173787 \/ paperback from New York Review of Books Classics\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e***\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“This novel is about creativity from the very start—about how to take a day...and make it really new and fresh, no matter what age you are, what life you’re in.” —Ali Smith, From the Introduction\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Jansson reveals the ambiguities in every encounter. There are no easy moral judgments. Only the very finest art can show us so many shades of psychological nuance, yet make them visible with such clarity.” —Damion Searls, Harper’s\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eFair Play\u003c\/em\u003e is the type of love story that is rarely told, a revelatory depiction of contentment, hard-won and exhilarating.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMari is a writer and Jonna is an artist, and they live at opposite ends of a big apartment building, their studios connected by a long attic passageway. They have argued, worked, and laughed together for decades. Yet they’ve never really stopped taking each other by surprise. Fair Play shows us Mari and Jona’s intertwined lives as they watch Fassbinder films and Westerns, critique each other’s work, spend time on a solitary island (recognizable to readers of Jansson’s The Summer Book), travel through the American Southwest, and turn life into nothing less than art.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTove Jansson (1914–2001) was born in Helsinki into Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority. Her father was a sculptor and her mother a graphic designer and illustrator. Winters were spent in the family’s art-filled studio and summers in a fisherman’s cottage on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, a setting that would later figure in Jansson’s writing for adults and children. Jansson loved books as a child, and set out from an early age to be an artist; her first illustration was published when she was fifteen years old; four years later a picture book appeared under a pseudonym. 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Here Jansson takes a darker look at the subjects that animate the best of her work, from her sensitive tale of island life, The Summer Book, to her famous Moomin stories: solitude and community, art and life, love and hate.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSnow has been falling on the village all winter long. It covers windows and piles up in front of doors. The sun rises late and sets early, and even during the day there is little to do but trade tales. This year everybody’s talking about Katri Kling and Anna Aemelin. Katri is a yellow-eyed outcast who lives with her simpleminded brother and a dog she refuses to name. She has no use for the white lies that smooth social intercourse, and she can see straight to the core of any problem. Anna, an elderly children’s book illustrator, appears to be Katri’s opposite: a respected member of the village, if an aloof one. Anna lives in a large empty house, venturing out in the spring to paint exquisitely detailed forest scenes. But Anna has something Katri wants, and to get it Katri will take control of Anna’s life and livelihood. By the time spring arrives, the two women are caught in a conflict of ideals that threatens to strip them of their most cherished illusions.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTove Jansson (1914–2001) was born in Helsinki into Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority. Her father was a sculptor and her mother a graphic designer and illustrator. Winters were spent in the family’s art-filled studio and summers in a fisherman’s cottage on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, a setting that would later figure in Jansson’s writing for adults and children. Jansson loved books as a child, and set out from an early age to be an artist; her first illustration was published when she was fifteen years old; four years later a picture book appeared under a pseudonym. 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It is the Tower of Babel of the sciences, where all the diverse, opposing, and absolute doctrines—each having its own language—demonstrate the powerlessness of effort, the vanity of affirmation, and the ever eternal 'misery of everything.'” (Guy de Maupassant)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“In Bouvard and Pécuchet, Flaubert created an encyclopedia of the sciences in a way that emphasizes all the laws and failures of knowledge, and at the same time, he did so in a way that breaks the forms of literature itself.” (Claudine Cohen - Alliage)\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dalkey Archive","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40450228879536,"sku":"9781564783936","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Flaubert-Bouvard-and-Pecuchet-Dalkey.jpg?v=1630283295"},{"product_id":"songs-of-a-dead-dreamer-and-grimscribe","title":"Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe - Thomas Ligotti","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eSongs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti, foreword by Jeff VanderMeer \/ ISBN 9780143107767 \/ 464-page paperback from Penguin\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTwo terrifying classics by “the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction” (The Washington Post)\u003c\/p\u003e\n \n\u003cp\u003eThomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction.  Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepest, existential, levels.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLigotti’s stories take on decaying cities and lurid dreamscapes in a style ranging from rich, ornamental prose to cold, clinical detachment. His raw and experimental work lays bare the unimportance of our world and the sickening madness of the human condition. 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There is light wear to the dustjacket (remnants of a price sticker), which is now protected in mylar \/ not price-clipped \/ Jacket design by Keith Cunningham\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"A writer of such chillingly matter-of-fact, unself-pitying vigour that her vision transcends itself.\"--New Yorker.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn this powerful fantasy, Kavan describes the life of an individual who cannot face the harsh impact of modern civilization. Exploring the shifting territory between the concrete world and the world of dreams, she questions both the ultimate reality of personal identity and of existence itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"First published in 1957 and now re-issued, this novel is one of the finest examples of Anna Kavan's powers to explore 'the nocturnal worlds of our dreams, fantasies, imagination and non-reason'\" (Anais Nin in The Novel of the Future)\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Peter Owen Publishers","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40625789468848,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Anna-Kavan-Eagles-Nest-Peter-Owen.jpg?v=1631564542"},{"product_id":"kalpa-imperial","title":"Kalpa Imperial - Angelica Gorodischer","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eKalpa Imperial by Angélica Gorodischer \/ ISBN 9781931520058 \/ 246-page paperback from Small Beer Press\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e***\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the first of Argentinean writer Angélica Gorodischer's nineteen award-winning books to be translated into English. In eleven chapters, Kalpa Imperial's multiple storytellers relate the story of a fabled nameless empire which has risen and fallen innumerable times. Fairy tales, oral histories and political commentaries are all woven tapestry-style into Kalpa Imperial: beggars become emperors, democracies become dictatorships, and history becomes legends and stories.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut this is much more than a simple political allegory or fable. It is also a celebration of the power of storytelling. Gorodischer and translator Ursula K. Le Guin are a well-matched, sly and delightful team of magician-storytellers. Rarely have author and translator been such an effortless pairing. 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Gorodischer has a sizeable body of work to be discovered, with eighteen books yet to reach English readers, and this is an impressive introduction.\"—Review of Contemporary Fiction\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Borges and Cortázar are alive and well.\"—Bridge Magazine\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Those looking for offbeat literary fantasy will welcome Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was, by Argentinean writer Angélica Gorodischer. Translated from the Spanish by Ursula Le Guin, this is the first appearance in English of this prize-winning South American fantasist.\"—Publishers Weekly\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"It's always difficult to wrap up a rave review without babbling redundant praises. This time I'll simply say \"Buy this Book!\"\"—Locus\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"The elaborate history of an imaginary country...is Nabokovian in its accretion of strange and rich detail, making the story seem at once scientific and dreamlike.\"—Time Out New York\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKalpa Imperial has been awarded the Prize \"Más Allá\" (1984), the Prize \"Sigfrido Radaelli\" (1985) and also the Prize Poblet (1986). It has had four editions in Spanish: Minotauro (Buenos Aires), Alcor (Barcelona), Gigamesh (Barcelona), and Planeta Emecé Editions (Buenos Aires).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Small Beer Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40633667780784,"sku":"9781931520058","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Angelica-Gorodischer-Kalpa-Imperial-Small-Beer.jpg?v=1631643571"},{"product_id":"a-dark-stranger-vintage-uk-hardcover","title":"A Dark Stranger - Julien Gracq (vintage UK hardcover)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA Dark Stranger (vintage UK hardcover) \/ Translated by W. J. Strachan \/ Jacket design by Don Smith \/ 2nd impression of a 1950 Peter Owen edition (oddly, the title page says \"Lindsay Drummond: London\") -- the price printed on the dustjacket alerts me that this was made in the 50s and is not the 80s reprint. The book is in excellent condition, with no marks inside. There is light wear to the dustjacket, which is now protected in mylar \/ not price-clipped\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"A Dark Stranger, Julien Gracq’s second novel, is an unsettling allegory of the terrible fascination history exerts upon individuals caught up in its inexorable and merciless unfolding. Set amid the interwar opulence of a Breton seaside resort, the novel focuses (as always with Gracq, it’s a soft focus) on Allan Murchison, the dark stranger of the title, who arrives at the Hôtel les Vagues accompanied by his ethereal lover Dolores, bearing the weight of a \"great resolution.\" Mirroring the catastrophe Gracq was witnessing while writing the book—he worked on it while imprisoned in a German POW camp in 1944—the horrific nature of this resolution grows clear only gradually to a small coterie of tourists who find themselves drawn into Murchison’s magnetic sphere of influence. 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A strange tale of violence.\"--Irish Times\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Peter Owen","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40641180565680,"sku":"50W-Used-0001","price":100.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Julien-Gracq-A-Dark-Stranger-Peter-Owen.jpg?v=1631723515"},{"product_id":"complete-stories","title":"Complete Stories - Clarice Lispector","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eComplete Stories by Clarice Lispector \/ ISBN 9780811227933 \/ a 650-page paperback from New Directions\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e***\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne of the most phenomenally acclaimed and successful books of recent years is now available as a paperback―with three just-discovered stories\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere, gathered in one volume, are the stories that made Clarice a Brazilian legend. Originally a cloth edition of eighty-six stories, now we have eighty- nine in all, covering her whole amazing career, from her teenage years to her deathbed. In these pages, we meet teenagers becoming aware of their sexual and artistic powers, humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies, old people who don’t know what to do with themselves― and in their stories, Clarice takes us through their lives―and hers―and ours.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"A dangerous book to read quickly or casually because it’s so consistently delirious. Her Complete Stories is a remarkable book, proof that she is one of the true originals of Latin American literature.\" ― Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times Book Review\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eClarice Lispector (1920–1977), the greatest Brazilian writer of the twentieth century, has been called “astounding” (Rachel Kushner), “a penetrating genius” (Donna Seaman, Booklist), and “one of the twentieth century’s most mysterious writers” (Orhan Pamuk).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New Directions","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40680384495792,"sku":"9780811227933","price":21.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Clarice-Lispector-Complete-Stories-New-Directions.jpg?v=1632275271"},{"product_id":"the-black-spider","title":"The Black Spider - Jeremias Gotthelf","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf, translated by Susan Bernofsky \/ ISBN 9781590176689 \/ 120-page paperback from New York Review of Books Classics\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e***\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAn NYRB Classics Original\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\"Gotthelf spins his horrifying tale patiently, serenely, with full confidence, it seems, that it will be strong enough to bear all the allegorical weight he can load on it. His confidence is justified. The Black  Spider is scary as hell, and the evil it portrays with such apparent simplicity seems, in the end, a more complex phenomenon than we might have thought….He does something only the best horror writers, and the best preachers, can do: he puts the fear of God in you.\" —Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times Book Review\n\n\u003cp\u003e“There is scarcely a work in world literature that I admire more.” —Thomas Mann\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIt is a sunny summer Sunday in a remote Swiss village, and a christening is being celebrated at a lovely old farmhouse. One of the guests notes an anomaly in the fabric of the venerable edifice: a blackened post that has been carefully built into a trim new window frame. Thereby hangs a tale, one that, as the wise old grandfather who has lived all his life in the house proceeds to tell it, takes one chilling turn after another, while his audience listens in appalled silence. Featuring a cruelly overbearing lord of the manor and the oppressed villagers who must render him service, an irreverent young woman who will stop at nothing, a mysterious stranger with a red beard and a green hat, and, last but not least, the black spider, the tale is as riveting and appalling today as when Jeremias Gotthelf set it down more than a hundred years ago. The Black Spider can be seen as a parable of evil in the heart or of evil at large in society (Thomas Mann saw it as foretelling the advent of Nazism), or as a vision, anticipating H. P. Lovecraft, of cosmic horror. There’s no question, in any case, that it is unforgettably creepy.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40708072374448,"sku":"9781590176689","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Gotthelf-Black-Spider-NYRB.jpg?v=1632603526"},{"product_id":"ferdydurke","title":"Ferdydurke - Witold Gombrowicz","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eFerdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz \/ ISBN 9780300181678 \/ 320-page paperback from Yale University Press\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Extravagant, brilliant, disturbing, brave, funny—wonderful... Long live its sublime mockery.\"—Susan Sontag, from the foreword\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“This promises to be, at last, the English translation of Ferdydurke that we have all been waiting for.”―Stanislaw Baranczak, Harvard University\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"[An] irreducibly, brilliantly original novel. It is a book that bristles with indefatigable resources of satire, parody and irony. . . . We must admire the courage of Danuta Borchardt who offers us the first English text of the novel that is taken directly from the Polish and that . . . is faithful to the substance of the original and gives the reader a good, zesty flavor of Gombrowicz’s inspired idiosyncrasy. . . . A genuinely astonishing masterwork that is bound to last.\"—Eva Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn this bitterly funny novel by the renowned Polish author Witold Gombrowicz, a writer finds himself tossed into a chaotic world of schoolboys by a diabolical professor who wishes to reduce him to childishness. Originally published in Poland in 1937, Ferdydurke became an instant literary sensation and catapulted the young author to fame. Deemed scandalous and subversive by Nazis, Stalinists, and the Polish Communist regime in turn, the novel (as well as all of Gombrowicz’s other works) was officially banned in Poland for decades. It has nonetheless remained one of the most influential works of twentieth-century European literature.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFerdydurke is translated here directly from the Polish for the first time. Danuta Borchardt deftly captures Gombrowicz’s playful and idiosyncratic style, and she allows English speakers to experience fully the masterpiece of a writer whom Milan Kundera describes as “one of the great novelists of our century.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWitold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) wrote three other novels, Trans-Atlantyk, Pornografia, and Cosmos, which together with his plays and his three-volume Diary have been translated into more than thirty languages.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Yale Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40708254073008,"sku":"9780300181678","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Witold-Gombrowicz-Ferdydurke.jpg?v=1632606055"},{"product_id":"the-tiled-house-tales-of-the-supernatural-by-j-s-lefanu","title":"The Tiled House - Tales of the Supernatural by J. S. 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Ellis in 1916, ‘retains his own special place and fame as the Master of Horror and the Mysterious.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eToday, Le Fanu’s reputation is as high as ever amongst connoisseurs of supernatural and mystery fiction and well deserves the enthusiastic praise lavished on him by some of the most accomplished ghost fiction writers of the twentieth century – including E.F. Benson and M.R. James.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBorn in 1814, the son of an Anglo-Irish Protestant clergyman, Le Fanu single-handedly created a new kind of fictional ghost story. Gone are the sheeted spooks rattling rusty chains and the peripatetic headless ladies that infest Gothic fiction. In their place Le Fanu created formidably real supernatural presences that emerge from within, as well as invade from without.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLe Fanu was the first writer to explore seriously the psychological dimensions of the ghost story; at the same time he was adept at invoking the physical presence of supernatural malevolence. The world in which his characters move is a hostile one, his stories surrounded by an infinity of outer darkness. Private anguish undoubtedly underlies these public fictions.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAnd yet Le Fanu’s stories – be they of ghosts or tales of mystery – are also of the good old-fashioned type, best enjoyed in the sort of setting he himself described – ‘the old-fashioned parlour fire-side and its listening circle of excited faces, and, outside, the wintry blast and the moan of leafless boughs . . .’\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Collins","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40729325600944,"sku":"9780008283117","price":8.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Sheridan-Le-Fanu-Ghost-Stories-Tiled-House1.jpg?v=1632874665"},{"product_id":"ennemonde","title":"Ennemonde - Jean Giono","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eEnnemonde by Jean Giono \/ ISBN 9781953861122 \/ 171-page small paperback with flaps from Archipelago\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne of the final novellas by the acclaimed French writer Jean Giono, Ennemonde is a fierce and jubilant portrait of a life intensely lived\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEnnemonde Girard: Obese. Toothless. Razor-sharp. Loving mother and murderous wife: a character like none other in literature. In telling us Ennemonde’s astounding story of undetected crimes, Jean Giono immerses us in the perverse and often lurid lifeways of the people of the High Country, where vengeance is an art form, hearts are superfluous, and only boldness and cunning such as Ennemonde’s can win the day. A gleeful, broad sardonic grin of a novel.\u003c\/p\u003e\n \n\u003cp\u003e\"Roads move cautiously around the High Country...\" So begins the story of Ennemonde, but also of her sons, daughters, neighbors, lovers, and enemies, and especially of the mountains that stand guard behind their home in the Camargue. This is a place of stark and terrifying beauty, where violence strikes suddenly, whether from the hand of a neighbor or from the sky itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\n \n\u003cp\u003eGiono captures every wrinkle, glare, and glance with wry delight, celebrating the uniquely tough people whose eyes sparkle with the cruel majesty of the landscape. Full of delectable detours and startling insights, Ennemonde will take you by the hand for an unforgettable tour of this master novelist's singular world.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Archipelago Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40748794380464,"sku":"9781953861122","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Jean-Giono-Ennemonde-Archipelago.jpg?v=1633050592"},{"product_id":"dear-cyborgs","title":"Dear Cyborgs - Eugene Lim","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eDear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim \/ ISBN 9780374537111 \/ 163-page paperback from FSG Originals\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Wondrous . . . [A] sense of the erratic and tangential quality of everyday life―even if it’s displaced into a bizarre, parallel world―drifts off the page, into the world you see, after reading Dear Cyborgs.\" ―Hua Hsu, The New Yorker\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn a small Midwestern town, two Asian American boys bond over their outcast status and a mutual love of comic books. Meanwhile, in an alternative or perhaps future universe, a team of superheroes ponder modern society during their time off. Between black-ops missions and rescuing hostages, they swap stories of artistic malaise and muse on the seemingly inescapable grip of market economics.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGleefully toying with the conventions of the novel, Dear Cyborgs weaves together the story of a friendship’s dissolution with a provocative and timely meditation on protest. Through a series of linked monologues, a lively cast of characters explores narratives of resistance―protest art, eco-terrorists, Occupy squatters, pyromaniacal militants―and the extent to which any of these can truly withstand and influence the cold demands of contemporary capitalism. All the while, a mysterious cybernetic book of clairvoyance beckons, and trusted allies start to disappear.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEntwining comic-book villains with cultural critiques, Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs is a fleet-footed literary exploration of power, friendship, and creativity. Ambitious and knowing, it combines detective pulps, subversive philosophy, and Hollywood chase scenes, unfolding like the composites and revelations of a dream.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"FSG","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40749618004144,"sku":"9780374537111","price":14.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Eugene-Lim-Dear-Cyborgs.jpg?v=1633065935"},{"product_id":"the-truth-and-other-stories","title":"The Truth and Other Stories - Stanislaw Lem","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Truth and Other Stories by \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/search?q=stanislaw+lem\"\u003eStanislaw Lem\u003c\/a\u003e \/ ISBN 9780262545068 \/ 326-page paperback from MIT Press, published 2023\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTwelve stories by science fiction master Stanisław Lem, nine of them never before published in English.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOf these twelve short stories by science fiction master Stanisław Lem, only three have previously appeared in English, making this the first \"new\" book of fiction by Lem since the late 1980s. The stories display the full range of Lem's intense curiosity about scientific ideas as well as his sardonic approach to human nature, presenting as multifarious a collection of mad scientists as any reader could wish for. Many of these stories feature artificial intelligences or artificial life forms, long a Lem preoccupation; some feature quite insane theories of cosmology or evolution. All are thought provoking and scathingly funny.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWritten from 1956 to 1993, the stories are arranged in chronological order. In the title story, \"The Truth,\" a scientist in an insane asylum theorizes that the sun is alive; \"The Journal\" appears to be an account by an omnipotent being describing the creation of infinite universes--until, in a classic Lem twist, it turns out to be no such thing; in \"An Enigma,\" beings debate whether offspring can be created without advanced degrees and design templates. Other stories feature a computer that can predict the future by 137 seconds, matter-destroying spores, a hunt in which the prey is a robot, and an electronic brain eager to go on the lam. These stories are peak Lem, exploring ideas and themes that resonate throughout his writing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"The Truth and Other Stories, a new collection of Lem's previously untranslated stories, shows that even the 'scatterings from his workshop,' as Kim Stanley Robinson puts it in his foreword, could outstrip a typical writer's lifetime of creation.\" --The New York Times Book Review\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40800843202736,"sku":"9780262545068","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Stanislaw-Lem-Truth-Stories-cover.jpg?v=1633804275"},{"product_id":"maldoror","title":"Maldoror and the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautreamont","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMaldoror and the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont, translated by Alexis Lykiard \/ ISBN 9781878972125 \/ 340-page paperback from Exact Change\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eEqual parts dark, destructive and brilliant, Maldoror blazed the way for the 20th century's boldest adventures in art, music and literatur\u003c\/em\u003ee\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAndré Breton described \u003cem\u003eMaldoror\u003c\/em\u003e as \"the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential.\" Little is known about its pseudonymous author, aside from his real name (Isidore Ducasse), birth in Uruguay (1846) and early death in Paris (1870). Lautréamont bewildered his contemporaries, but the Surrealists modeled their efforts after his black humor and poetic leaps of logic, exemplified by the oft-quoted line, \"As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.\" Maldoror's shocked first publisher refused to bind the sheets of the original edition―and perhaps no better invitation exists to this book, which warns the reader, \"Only the few may relish this bitter fruit without danger.\" This is the only complete annotated collection of Lautréamont's writings available in English, in Alexis Lykiard's superior translation. For this latest edition, Lykiard updates his introduction to include recent scholarship.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Exact Change","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40843390156976,"sku":"9781878972125","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Lautreamont-Maldoror-Exact-Change.jpg?v=1634494649"},{"product_id":"the-open-road","title":"The Open Road - Jean Giono","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Open Road by Jean Giono \/ ISBN 9781681375106 \/ 224-page paperback from NYRB Classics, published 2022\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA nomad and a swindler embark on an eccentric road trip in this picaresque, philosophical novel by the author of The Man Who Planted Trees.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe south of France, 1950: A solitary vagabond walks through the villages, towns, valleys, and foothills of the region between northern Provence and the Alps. He picks up work along the way and spends the winter as the custodian of a walnut-oil mill. He also picks up a problematic companion: a cardsharp and con man, whom he calls “the Artist.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe action moves from place to place, and episode to episode, in truly picaresque fashion. Everything is told in the first person, present tense, by the vagabond narrator, who goes unnamed. He himself is a curious combination of qualities—poetic, resentful, cynical, compassionate, flirtatious, and self-absorbed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhile The Open Road can be read as loosely strung entertainment, interspersed with caustic reflections, it can also be interpreted as a projection of the relationship of author, art, and audience. But it is ultimately an exploration of the tensions and boundaries between affection and commitment, and of the competing needs for solitude, independence, and human bonds. As always in Jean Giono, the language is rich in natural imagery and as ruggedly idiomatic as it is lyrical.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40872618852528,"sku":"9781681375106","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Jean-Giono-Open-Road-NYRB.jpg?v=1635014651"},{"product_id":"his-masters-voice","title":"His Master's Voice - Stanislaw Lem","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eHis Master's Voice by \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/search?q=stanislaw+lem\"\u003eStanislaw Lem\u003c\/a\u003e \/ ISBN 9780262538459 \/ 259-page paperback from MIT Press\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eScientists attempt to decode what may be a message from intelligent beings in outer space.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy pure chance, scientists detect a signal from space that may be communication from rational beings. How can people of Earth understand this message, knowing nothing about the senders—even whether or not they exist? Written as the memoir of a mathematician who participates in the government project (code name: His Master's Voice) attempting to decode what seems to be a message from outer space, this classic novel shows scientists grappling with fundamental questions about the nature of reality, the confines of knowledge, the limitations of the human mind, and the ethics of military-sponsored scientific research.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Such deadly wit, such deadly playful tightrope walking…a modern European version of Swift or Voltaire.” —Peter S. Beagle, New York Times\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"The release of these new volumes seems to expand the possibilities of what a university publisher can do.\" —LitHub\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"This thorough, intellectual take on a classic hard sci-fi trope is Lem at his best.\" —STARRED REVIEW, Publishers Weekly\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Fourteen years after his death, the universe is still struggling to catch up with the vast creative force that was Stanisław Lem. And for my money, it won't be surpassing him anytime soon…Enjoying the genius of Lem requires readerly dexterity and a willingness to go wherever the author takes you…These marvelous, absorbing and often hilarious books make our weary universe seem pale and undistinguished by comparison.\" —The Washington Post\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStanisław Lem (1921–2006), a writer called “worthy of the Nobel Prize” by the New York Times, was an internationally renowned author of novels, short stories, literary criticism, and philosophical essays. His books have been translated into forty-four languages and have sold more than thirty million copies.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40902882820272,"sku":"9780262538459","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Stanislaw-Lem-His-Masters-Voice.jpg?v=1635642705"},{"product_id":"the-life-and-opinions-of-the-tomcat-murr","title":"The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr - E.T.A. Hoffmann (light wear)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr by E.T.A. Hoffmann, translated by Anthea Bell \/ ISBN 9780140446319 \/ 384-page paperback from Penguin Classics\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis book is truly a classic, and I haven't found another remotely like it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTomcat Murr is a loveable, self-taught animal who has written his own autobiography. But a printer's error causes his story to be accidentally mixed and spliced with a book about the composer Johannes Kreisler. As the two versions break off and alternate at dramatic moments, two wildly different characters emerge from the confusion - Murr, the confident scholar, lover, carouser and brawler, and the moody, hypochondriac genius Kreisler. In his exuberant and bizarre novel, Hoffmann brilliantly evokes the fantastic, the ridiculous and the sublime within the humdrum bustle of daily life, making \u003cem\u003eThe Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr\u003c\/em\u003e (1820-22) one of the funniest and strangest novels of the nineteenth century.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/search?q=hoffmann\"\u003eE.T.A. Hoffmann\u003c\/a\u003e (1776 - 1822) was born in Konigsberg and became one of the best known and influential authors of his time. He exploited the grotesque and the bizarre in a manner unmatched by any other Romantic writer. Anthea Bell has received many awards for her translations including the Mildred L. Batchelder Award in 1979, 1990 and 1995.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Penguin Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40902947176624,"sku":"9780140446319","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Hoffmann-Life-and-Opinions-of-the-Tomcat-Murr.jpg?v=1635645919"},{"product_id":"the-mill-a-cosmos","title":"The Mill - A Cosmos - Bess Brenck Kalischer","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Mill: A Cosmos by Bess Brenck Kalischer, translated by W.C. Bamberger \/ ISBN 9781939663719 \/ 67-page paperback with flaps from \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/spotlight-collection-wakefield-press\"\u003eWakefield Press\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe hallucinatory English-language debut of an overlooked German Expressionist poet\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBess Brenck Kalischer’s only work of prose was first published in German in 1922. Narrated by a woman being held in a sanitarium after a mental breakdown, The Mill is less a novel than a rhythmic, hallucinatory and fractured sequence of prose poems. On its publication, the German author Mynona described it as “more a mill, a cosmos flower, a lyricism and romantic spell than it is a ‘novel.’” Shifting from pedestrian concerns to cosmic visions, from the setting of a basement mushroom farm to scenes on Sirius, Kalischer’s narrator weaves together literary satire, anguished dream states and shifting subjectivities. As much Maldoror as Munchausen, The Mill describes an unstable journey to psychic restoration that is as radically experimental today as when it was first published a century ago.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBess Brenck Kalischer (1878–1933) was born Betty Levy in Rostock. Although she began publishing her first poems in 1905, she began to make a name for herself as part of the second generation of German Expressionists in Dresden, cofounding the Expesstionistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dresden (Expressionist Working Group of Dresden) alongside such members as Conrad Felixmüller. Later relocating to Berlin, she was a friend of Salomo Friedlaender\/Mynona, who used her as a model in several stories and novels. She died of a “nervous disease” in 1933, her grave left without a headstone until 2014.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wakefield Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40936179925168,"sku":"9781939663719","price":13.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/The-Mill-a-Cosmos-Bess-Brenck-Kalischer.jpg?v=1636511428"},{"product_id":"the-weird-tales-of-william-hope-hodgson","title":"The Weird Tales of William Hope Hodgson","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Weird Tales of William Hope Hodgson, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes \/ From the British Library's \"\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/search?q=%22Tales+of+the+Weird%22\"\u003eTales of the Weird\u003c\/a\u003e\" series \/ ISBN 9780712352338 \/ 236-page paperback\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe splash from something enormous resounds through the sea-fog. 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A half century after its first appearance, Kavan’s fever dream of a novel is beginning to seem all too real.\" -The New Yorker\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn a land devastated by war, a nameless narrator pursues an elusive white-haired woman in the clutches of a government official known only as \"The Warden.\" Neither will giver her up, but a freak ecological apocalypse is indifferent to their rival claims. As a terrifying wall of ice continues its incursion, freezing everything in its path, it seems that only the white-haired woman is truly resigned to the fate of the world. Ice is hailed as classic of science fiction and a definitive work of the slipstream genre. As part of the new and improved Cased Classics, this edition features a false die cutting of a triangle on the dust jacket, while printed on the cover board is the striking artwork of contemporary artist Naomi Frears.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKavan’s 1967 novel has built a reputation as an extraordinary and innovative work of literature, garnering acclaim from China Miéville, Patti Smith, J. G. Ballard, Anaïs Nin, and Doris Lessing, among others. With echoes of dystopian classics like Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and J. G. Ballard’s High Rise, Ice is a necessary and unforgettable addition to the canon of science fiction classics.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"One of the most mysterious of modern writers, Anna Kavan created a uniquely fascinating fictional world. Few contemporary novelists could match the intensity of her vision.\" —J.G. Ballard\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“There is nothing else like it.” —Doris Lessing\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Peter Owen Publishers","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42070218375393,"sku":"9780720620139","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Anna-Kavan-Ice-Peter-Owen-hardcover.jpg?v=1637253873"},{"product_id":"michael-kohlhaas","title":"Michael Kohlhaas - Heinrich von Kleist","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMichael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist, translated by Michael Hofmann \/ ISBN 9780811228343 \/ 144-page paperback from New Directions\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e***\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Sometimes you find a brother, and you instantly know that you are no longer alone. I experienced this with Kleist.\" ― Werner Herzog\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAn extraordinary masterpiece of German literature, now in a gripping new English translation\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMichael Kohlhaas has been wronged. First his finest horses were unfairly confiscated and mistreated. And things keep going worse―his servants have been beaten, his wife killed, and the lawsuits he pursues are stymied―but Kohlhaas, determined to find justice at all costs, tirelessly persists. 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And this unique collaboration boasts beautiful full-color paintings by Max Neumann and―reaching out of the book proper―the wildly percussive music of Szilveszter Miklós scored for each chapter (to be accessed by the reader via QR codes).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature and the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement, László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New Directions","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42070709600481,"sku":"9780811227971","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Laszlo-Krasznahorkai-Chasing-Homer.jpg?v=1637270365"},{"product_id":"hill-nyrb-classics-discounted","title":"Hill (discounted) - Jean Giono","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eHill by Jean Giono, translated by Paul Eprile \/ ISBN 9781590179185 \/ 144-page paperback from NYRB Classics \/ remainder dot but otherwise in excellent condition\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDeep in Provence, a century ago, four stone houses perch on a hillside. 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A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández’s mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man’s face on the magazine’s cover with the words “I Tortured People.” His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian. Like a secret service agent from the future, through extraordinary feats of the imagination, Fernández follows the “man who tortured people” to places that archives can’t reach, into the sinister twilight zone of history where morning routines, a game of chess, Yuri Gagarin, and the eponymous TV show of the novel’s title coexist with the brutal yet commonplace machinations of the regime.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHow do crimes vanish in plain sight? How does one resist a repressive regime? 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