Results by title

Adamastor is a freshly divorced, frustrated bureaucrat trying to reinvent his life. Richie is a young, struggling actor. Together with Ernesto, a rakish, expat Argentine showman, they create Eden-Brazil, an ecotourism destination in a stunning swath of coastal rainforest. Inspired to provide visitors with the ultimate return to nature, they decide to stage the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, complete with Adam, Eve, snake, apple, the works. But recreating an earthly paradise as something more than another roadside attraction is no easy feat. In this charming, tragicomic tale, Moacyr Scliar employs his signature humor and talent for crisp storytelling, weaving together a playfully serious parable of environmentalist ideals clashing with the realities of local politics, global consumer culture, and competing visions of authentic nature.

Winner of the 1926 Nobel Prize for Literature

After serving time in mainland Italy for a minor theft, Elias Portolu returns home to Nuoro, in rural Sardinia. Lonely and vulnerable after his prison exile, he falls in love with his brother's fiancée. But he finds himself trapped by social and religious strictures, his passion and guilt winding into a spiral of anguish and paralyzing indecision. For guidance he turns first to the village priest, who advises him to resist temptation; then he turns to the pagan "father of the woods," who recognizes the weakness of human will and urges him to declare his love before it is too late.

An American literary take on the Nordic noir genre

Unfolding during the moody Pacific Northwest winter of 1951, we follow Bernadette Baston, scholar of child development and language acquisition, as she travels to a penitentiary on the remote island Elita in the Puget Sound to consult on a curious case: two guards have discovered an animal-like adolescent girl living alone in the cold woods beyond the prison’s walls. There are few answers, but many people who know more than they are saying. According to official reports, the girl, dubbed Atalanta, does not speak. Is her silence protecting someone? The prison warden, court-appointed guardian, and police detective embroil Bernadette in resolving a secret that the tight-knit island community has long held, and her investment in the girl’s case soon becomes more personal than professional. As a mother, wife, and woman bound by mid-twentieth-century expectations, Bernadette strategizes to retain the fragile control she has over her own freedom, identity, and future, which becomes inextricably tied to solving Atalanta’s case.

For those who care about literature or simply love a good laugh (or both), Charles Portis has long been one of America’s most admired novelists. His 1968 novel True Grit is fixed in the contemporary canon, and four more have been hailed as comic masterpieces. For the first time, his other writings—journalism, travel stories, short fiction, memoir, and even a play—were brought together in Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany, published in 2012 as his first new book in more than twenty years. This revised edition includes a new afterword by best-selling author Donna Tartt, who first published her remembrance in the New York Times following Portis’s death in 2020.

All the familiar Portis elements are in this collection: picaresque adventures, deadpan humor, an expert eye for detail and keen ear for the spoken word, and encounters with oddball characters both real and imagined. The collection encompasses the breadth of his fifty-year writing career, from his gripping reportage of the civil rights movement for the New York Herald Tribune to a comic short story about the demise of journalism in the twenty-first century. His three-act play, Delray’s New Moon, was performed onstage in 1996 and published in Escape Velocity for the first time.

Whether this is your first journey to the world of Portis or a long-awaited return to it, you’ll agree with critic Ron Rosenbaum—whose essay appears here alongside tributes by other writers—that Portis “will come to be regarded as the author of classics on the order of a twentieth-century Mark Twain, a writer who captures the soul of America.”

Welcome to Las Vegas. Hope you like it here. You aren’t leaving.

It’s a Las Vegas of outcasts, outsiders, obsessives, and oddballs—a place seen through the eyes of those who call it home in Extinction Studies.

In these stories, a young genius from a troubled home becomes obsessed with solving an infamous atomic-era murder. Twin brothers exploring subterranean tunnels beneath the Strip encounter a stranger who claims he can show them the future. A nonverbal boy devises a daring scheme to revive his punch-drunk prizefighter father’s fading glory. And in the title story, a teenager struggling in the aftermath of a traumatic event finds healing in B monster movies and a TV host who’s a cross between Dracula and Elvis.

Shane Joaquin Jimenez’s short stories deliver you far beyond the glitz and neon of the Strip. Across ten haunting tales, Jimenez takes a whirlwind tour of dark stage magic, macabre murder, moonlit desert graves, and the city’s unknown, unlucky underdogs fighting to the bitter end, no matter the odds.

Told with brutal honesty that is at turns uncanny and unsettling, nightmarish and psychedelic, exhilarating and moving, Extinction Studies uncovers the ineradicable hope at the heart of the strange neon city, shining out in the middle of nowhere.