The extraordinary life of Zhuang Zhou sits halfway between fable and philosophy.

“It was twenty-five centuries ago in the land of Song, between the Yellow River and the River Huai: Zhuang Zhou was born without a cry with his eyes wide open.”
 
Welcome to China in the fifth century BCE, a colorful, violent, unstable world into which Zhuang is born. Here royals raise huge armies, constantly waging wars against one another. They have slaves, concubines. Gold is everywhere. And so is hunger. Born rich and entitled, Zhuang learns to refuse any official function. His travels bring him closer to ordinary people, from whom he learns how to live a simple and useful life. This is how he will become one of the greatest Chinese philosophers who gave his name to his legendary book, the Zhuangzi, one of the two foundational texts of Taoism—a magnificent procession of lively stories in which we meet dwarfs, virtuous bandits, butchers, powerful lords in their castles, turtles, charming concubines, and false sages. In this remarkable bildungsroman, award-winning French novelist Patrick Rambaud spins out the extraordinary life of Zhuang Zhou—a poetic, cruel, and often humorous tale, halfway between fable and philosophy.

Richly imagined and recounted in vivid prose of extraordinary beauty, this book is a stunning illustration of Ransmayr’s talent for imbuing a captivating tale with intense metaphorical, indeed metaphysical force.

The world’s most powerful man, Qiánlóng, emperor of China, invites the famous eighteenth-century clockmaker Alister Cox to his court in Beijing. There, in the heart of the Forbidden City, the Englishman and his assistants are to build machines that mark the passing of time as a child or a condemned man might experience it and that capture the many shades of happiness, suffering, love, and loss that come with that passing.

Mystified by the rituals of a rigidly hierarchical society dominated by an unimaginably wealthy, god-like ruler, Cox musters all his expertise and ingenuity to satisfy the emperor’s desires. Finally, Qiánlóng, also known by the moniker Lord of Time, requests the construction of a clock capable of measuring eternity—a perpetuum mobile. Seizing this chance to realize a long-held dream and honor the memory of his late beloved daughter, yet conscious of the impossibility of his task, Cox sets to work. As the court is suspended in a never-ending summer, festering with evil gossip about the monster these foreigners are creating, the Englishmen wonder if they will ever escape from their gilded cage. More than a meeting of two men, one isolated by power, the other by grief, this is an exploration of mortality and a virtuoso demonstration that storytelling alone can truly conquer time.
 

A suspenseful novel that delves into the complexities of a father-son relationship and the timeless themes of guilt and forgiveness.
 
A longboat plummets over the Great Falls, drowning the five passengers on board. The Lockmaster, the heir to an ancient title and responsible for guiding river traffic safely around this natural barrier on the White River, ought to have prevented this tragedy. His son is convinced that it was not an accident. Is his irascible father a murderer? A hydraulic engineer all too familiar with the brute force of rivers, he sets out to discover the truth and find his missing father.
 
The Lockmaster is a dramatic tale set in a world where water has become a precious commodity and Europe has fractured into warring ethno-nationalist entities desperate to uphold the traditions and insignia of a so-called glorious bygone era. Christoph Ransmayr recounts this story in his trademark style, its epic force shot through with visions of future technology and reactionary politics amid a climate breakdown. At heart, though, this novel is the story of a father–son relationship straddling the fault lines between past and present, and an exploration of timeless questions of guilt and forgiveness.
 

A beautifully crafted novel set in the late 1960s and 1970s Italy, a tempestuous period that shaped the lives of generations to come in many countries.

What was it really like to be a teenager growing up in Italy in the 1970s, during a time it has become all too easy to file away under “years of lead,” as the fathers’ betrayed ideals came face to face with the sons’ and daughters’ rebellions? What was happening in schools, in assemblies, social centers, and occupied factories as the postwar “economic miracle” was being dismantled from within? What moved the foremost French intellectuals of the time to sign an appeal against the repression of the student and workers’ movement in Italy? What did the bullets and heroin bring to a halt, and where did they come from? How does it feel when strategies of terror and police brutality become as ordinary as a TV dinner and as eerie as the plots of the science fiction novels you are plagiarizing to impress a girl? How are metropolitan geographies alchemized in the muscles of a young body crossing the shady lines between ages and sexes?  
 
Luca Rastello raises these and other questions in an astonishing novel that splices chunks of plot and historical reconstruction into the free flow of memory and dream. Rain’s Falling Up tracks the trajectory of a generation while refusing to romanticize its protagonists or resolve the tensions that powered its volatile energy.

At once a narrative biography and a medical history, Manon’s World tells the story of a haunted young woman caught in the middle of a love triangle in interwar Germany.

Manon Gropius (1916–1935) was the daughter of Alma Mahler, the widow of Gustav Mahler, and the architect Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, and the stepdaughter of the writer Franz Werfel. In Manon’s World, James Reidel explores the life and death of a child at the center of a broken love triangle. The story takes a unique course, describing a peripheral figure but in a context where her significance and centrality in the lives of her famous parents and circles comes into relief. Reidel reveals a neglected and fascinating life in a world gone by—Vienna, Venice, and Berlin of the interwar years.
 
Not just a narrative biography, Manon’s World is also a medical history of the polio that killed Manon and a personal cultural history of the aspirations projected on her—and seen as lost by such keen observers as Elias Canetti, who devoted two chapters of his Nobel Prize–winning memoirs to his encounters with Manon and her funeral. That event led Alban Berg to dedicate his signature Violin Concerto “to an angel.” Reidel reveals a more complex image of a young woman who desired to be an actress and artist in her own right despite being her mother’s intended protégé, an inspiration to her father who rarely saw her, and her stepfather Franz Werfel, who obsessively wrote her into his novels, beginning with The Forty Days of Musa Dagh and as a revenant in all the books that followed.
 

Continuing where Reimann's earlier book of diaries, I Have No Regrets, left off, in 1964, this volume is a compelling and frank account of one woman’s life and loves in 1960s East Germany.

It All Tastes of Farewell is a frank account of one woman’s life and loves in 1960s East Germany. As a writer, Brigitte Reimann could not help but tell a compelling story, and that is born out here in her diaries, which are gripping as any novel. She recorded only what mattered: telling details, emotional truths, and political realities. Never written for publication and first published in full in German only after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these diaries offer a unique record of what it felt like to live in a country that no longer exists, was represented for years largely through Cold War propaganda, and is still portrayed in fairy-tale Stasi dramas. Here we get a sense of lived experience as if Doris Lessing or Edna O’Brien had been allowed in with their notebooks. This volume continues where her earlier book of diaries, I Have No Regrets, left off, in 1964. It sees Reimann grow wistful and at times bitter, as her love life, her professional life, and her health all suffer. Yet throughout she retains a lively appetite for new experiences and a dedication to writing. Finally, she finds security in a surprising new love, and although she died soon after this volume ends, the novel she was writing was to become a much-read cult hit after her death.
 
A remarkable document from a time and place that we still struggle to see clearly, It All Tastes of Farewell is unforgettable, a last gift from an essential writer.
 

An intimate glimpse into the life and letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the most important poets of the twentieth century.
 
In July 1921, displaced European poet Rainer Maria Rilke sequestered himself in the chateau of Muzot, a thirteenth-century medieval tower perched in the vineyards above the town of Sierre in the Canton Valais, Switzerland. In this sun-flooded landscape of the Rhone Valley, he found beguiling echoes of Spain and his beloved Provence. Here, the Duino Elegies were famously completed and the Sonnets to Orpheus followed.
 
During this time, Rilke’s correspondence also bloomed, and Letters around a Garden collects some of those letters together into English for the first time. One intriguing exchange from 1924 to 1926 was with a young aristocratic Swiss woman Antoinette de Bonstetten, a passionate horticulturist who had been recommended as a potential advisor for the redesign and upkeep of the Muzot rose garden. In twenty-two precious letters originally written in French, Rilke relishes the prospect of their elusive meeting, keenly discusses the plans for his garden, and wittily laments the trials of his plants. Beyond the encomium for Paul Valéry and poignant memory of place are passages of exquisite writing, in which Rilke evokes with trademark sensitivity the delicate relationship between the changing seasons and the natural world of his adopted region. We also witness the loving relationship evolve between these sometime-fugitive correspondents and how questions of solitariness and companionship impinge on one who faces unaccustomed challenges as his health tragically declines.
 

A collection of essays on the mysteries of the body from one of Italy’s leading postwar communist intellectuals.

Politician, translator, and journalist Rossana Rossanda was the most important female left-wing intellectual in post-war Italy. Central to the Italian Communist Party’s cultural wing during the 1950s and ’60s, she left an indelible mark on the life of the mind. The essays in this volume, however, bring together Rossanda’s reflections on the body—how it ages, how it is gendered, what it means to examine one’s own body. The product of a decades-long dialogue with the Italian women’s movement (above all with Lea Melandri, a vital feminist writer who provides an afterword to the current volume), these essays represent an honest and raw meeting between communist and feminist thought. Ranging from reflections on her own hands through to Chinese cinema, from figures such as the Russian cross-dressing soldier Nadezhda Durova to the Jacobin revolutionary Theroigne de Mericourt, here we see Rossanda’s fierce intellect and extraordinary breadth of knowledge applied to the body as a central question of human experience.

British satirist and cartoonist Martin Rowson’s acerbic chronicles of the evolution—or rather, regression—of politics in the last two decades.

 In 1997, on top of his regular visual contributions to the Tribune, Martin Rowson—the veteran mouthpiece of the Left of the British Labour Party—started writing a monthly column in the paper’s “As I Please” section, which was George Orwell’s slot fifty years earlier. Through his columns, Rowson chronicled the changing tides and tsunamis in the current political scene, documenting the rise of nationalism and the right-wing in these prescient musings. Over the next two decades, he pondered everything—the ideological battles inside Labour, the psychopathology of the Tory Party, the London Zoo, the British class system, Doctor Who, terrorism—and anything else that came to mind a day or so before the deadline.

Here, for the first time, a selection of these columns has been collected alongside Rowson’s other textual journalism, from tiny underground magazines in the United States to contributions to the Guardian, the Independent, and many other mainstream publications, on subjects ranging from the Charlie Hebdo massacre to his favorite books.

A strong and courageous novel that deftly tackles psychosis.

In Melbourne, Australia, a woman in her late thirties is diagnosed with her third episode of psychosis, amounting to schizophrenia. What follows is a frenzied journey from home to a community house to a hospital and out again. Sanya, the protagonist, finds herself questioning the diagnosis of her sanity or insanity, as determined and defined by a medical model which seems less than convincing to her. Having studied psychology herself, she wonders whether, even if the diagnosis is correct to some extent, the treatment should be different. Sanya tells her story in a deceptively calm, first-person voice, using conversations as the primary narrative mode, as she ponders if and when the next psychotic episode will materialize.

Based on real-life events and originally written in Bengali, Hospital is a daring first novel that unflinchingly depicts the precarity of a woman living with psychosis and her struggles with the definition of sanity in our society.