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Marcoré, first published in Rio de Janeiro in 1957, won the coveted prize for fiction awarded by the Brazilian Academy of Letters and has been praised by leading critics and writers in Brazil. The novel has maintained favor with the Brazilian public and has also been published and received with enthusiasm in Portugal.

Adopting the intimist, introspective approach characteristic of such writers as Machado de Assis and Graciliano Ramos, Pereira tells a moving, bittersweet tale of personal problems and family relationships. The central character of Marcoré is the narrator, a modest, introverted individual who, aware of his own human condition, tends to view life with pessimism tempered with compassion.

As the narrator reflects on his life and relationships in a small town in the state of São Paulo, an unobtrusive document of Brazilian family life unfolds. The novel contains several highly dramatic scenes as well as many tender and entertaining ones and introduces a set of very human, very credible characters, including a most irascible mother-in-law and a wife who makes a strange vow.

The reactions, thoughts, and hidden motivations of the characters are revealed in precise and economical language—evidence of the author's powers of observation and knowledge of human nature.

Rachel de Queiroz has described Marcoré as "a beautiful and tormented book." It has become a modern Brazilian classic.

Sally Benson’s charming slice-of-life story is back in print for a new generation of readers.

Originally published as World War II raged overseas, Meet Me in St. Louis is Sally Benson’s semi-autobiographical account of the intergenerational Smith family during the twelve months leading up to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. With warmth and tenderness, Benson chronicles the Smiths’ lives as they navigate sibling rivalries, first loves, financial hardship, jealousy, and heartaches in a poignant ode to the bonds of family.

Benson's novel is infused with wit as she details the lighthearted, pleasant existence of the Smith family’s five children—one rife with chaste crushes, victimless pranks, and other childhood escapades. Yet, the novel’s episodic, squeaky-clean veneer belies a dark comedic brilliance that transcends the ages and speaks, even today, to the universal experience of growing up.

Long out of print, this new edition of Benson’s timeless work includes a foreword by bestselling author Benjamin Dreyer, who comments both on the book's origins and its afterlife in popular culture as the source material for Judy Garland’s beloved musical of the same name. An effervescent midcentury novel waiting to be rediscovered, Meet Me in St. Louis is ready to meet its new generation of readers.

These are the recollections of Alexandre—of his life, his death-in-life, and his ultimate death, as they are played out against the mobile tapestry of the valley where he was born. The valley itself, in the backlands of the state of Bahia, Brazil, alternates at different stages in Alexandre’s consciousness between reality and symbol. It swings from a harsh regional specificity to become the panorama of all human life, its endless, eroding wind the devouring hostility of all environments and its pain the pain of every human being in the face of his own brutality and that of others.

Throughout the novel Alexandre’s mind ranges from sharp awareness, through hallucination, to oblivion (“a man dies while alive,” says Jeronimo, his mentor), and back again as he experiences the violent, obtuse phenomena of life in the valley—his universe and ours. This latter-day Lazarus leaves the resisting hills and black sky once only, hounded by the valley dwellers who believe he has murdered his wife, her father, and her brother. Yet despite his awareness of the horror of the valley and his intuition of something beyond it, it is precisely his contact with the gentler existence to which he escapes that forces Alexandre to recognize his nature for what it is. Turning his back on a greater and more varied range of feeling and experience, he chooses the narrow ferocity of the valley, to which he returns to die the final death for which the earlier deaths have prepared him.

A postapocalyptic noir that asks if love and political ideals can survive civilizational collapse

A meditative, postapocalyptic noir, Mevlido’s Dreams is an urgent communiqué from a far-future reality of irreversible environmental damage and civilizational collapse. Mevlido is a double agent working for the police and living in the last habitable city on the planet, a sprawling abyssal ruin marked by war and ruled by criminals. Suspended in the bardo between his loyalty to the surveillance state and to the anarchists, communists, and other rebels he monitors, Mevlido clings to life and hope—barely—in the city’s vast slums, haunted by the memory of the wife he failed to save during the last war and dreaming of a mysterious mission he is told he must accomplish. At the same time, an enigmatic organization existing elsewhere—the Organs—observes Mevlido’s actions and debates its responsibility to him and to humanity as a whole. 

Asking what it means to love and care for others at the end of the world, this dense, brilliantly detailed postcollapse reality imagined by Antoine Volodine is one that grows ever more relevant amidst intensifying climate and political catastrophes. A key work in Volodine’s post-exotic fictional universe, Mevlido’s Dreams envisions a world changed beyond recognition and ruled under irrational authoritarianism in which dreams nest within dreams and the boundaries between life and death are fluid and uncertain.

A remarkable young woman flees India to chase the dream of self-reinvention in America

The orphaned girls of St. Ursula’s convent are destined to be nuns or servants, but seventeen-year-old Savi dreams of escape. She is chosen to work as a governess for the wealthy Nandiyar family at their country estate in Tamil Nadu, where she falls for a lively and carefree apprentice sculptor. After the violent and horrific events of a single night, they are forced to flee, leaving their homeland forever in the rearview.

Decades later, Savi has become known to all as “Missy” and runs a successful driving school in Chicago. She is a pillar of the South Asian community and the mother of two brilliant, stubborn young women, Mansi and Shilpa. But when Varun, a charming doctor with mysterious connections to her past, enters their lives, a chain of events is set off that puts Missy’s carefully constructed world in jeopardy. Can Missy outrun her secrets? And, if she is forced to face them, what will become of those she loves?
 

Available for the first time in English, Hungarian writer Edina Szvoren's short story collection gives voice to lives shaped by repression, cruelty, and silence.

Moments from the Life of a Hedgehog and Other Stories introduces English-language readers to the unsettling, exacting fiction of Hungarian author Edina Szvoren. Disturbing yet deliberately modest, these stories evoke a claustrophobic world of compromise and quiet desperation: fractured families warped by history and habit, boarding schools and workplaces ruled by cruelty, and domestic interiors heavy with unspoken dread. Set in the final decades of Hungarian socialism and its immediate aftermath, Szvoren’s sharply observed miniatures are animated by ever-shifting perspectives—outsiders, misfits, refusers—struggling to make sense of lives largely beyond their control. Grotesque without excess, absurd without relief, Szvoren’s narrative voices overlap and collide in ways that recall Franz Kafka and István Örkény. Yet her work remains firmly grounded in the body: queasy, intimate, and insistently physical, with a feminist and existential charge. Among polyester ornaments and unbearable family encounters, these stories offer a powerful, understated testimony to the unheard—and the nearly unhearable.

Set in the High Atlas in pre-modern Morocco, Moon and Henna Tree chronicles the rise and fall of a local potentate, Hmmu. Not content with the territory left to him upon his father’s death, Hmmu, under the influence of his scheming advisor, Ibn al-Zara, begins a campaign to acquire those lands that adjoin his, either through marriage or physical force.

Ahmed Toufiq’s subtle investigation of the abuse of power and its effects on those who suffer under its tyranny also provides a unique look at Amazigh (Berber) culture. While most of Toufiq’s contemporaries focus on modern urban Morocco, he provides a fascinating, and accurate, account of the customs and traditions of a large, yet often ignored, segment of the population. Moon and Henna Tree (in the original Arabic) won the Moroccan Book Prize in 1989.

As Charlie McCarthy is to Edgar Bergen, so is Martin T. Dooley to newspaper humorist Finley Peter Dunne. Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War, originally published in 1898, collects brief, humorous pieces Dunne wrote for the Chicago Evening Post and the Chicago Journal. In an Irish-American dialect as thick as the foam on a pint of stout, Mr. Dooley and his friends discuss the military "sthrateejy" for American action in Cuba, "iliction" day shenanigans, Queen Victoria's jubilee, the "new woman," and the strange American sport of football, in which a player puts "a pair iv matthresses on his legs, a pillow behind, [and] a mask over his nose" and tries to kill his fellow men. Through his tall tales and speculations, Mr. Dooley reveals the pleasure and pain of being Irish in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century.

Clothed in the charming hyperbole and mislocution of the unflappable Mr. Dooley, Dunne's incisive social criticism flies unerringly to the target, exposing prejudice, hypocrisy, insensitivity, and plain old-fashioned humbug.

An updated translation of Colette’s revolutionary 1922 autobiographical collection that contains six previously untranslated chapters.

This book is a much-needed new translation of Colette’s classic La Maison de Claudine. A careful re-reading of the text was long overdue, given Colette’s evolution into one of the most admired French novelists in the modern world, the inadequacy of earlier translations, which omitted six significant chapters, and changes in contemporary attitudes on motherhood and sexual orientation. The controversial topic at the center of the novel, her passion for her mother Sido, animates her writing as a whole. As the BBC notes, “The Most Beloved French writer of all time. . . . An icon in her native France, Colette's scandalous life and works still captivate readers 150 years on from her birth, writes John Self.”

Long unpublished and presumed lost, Myself, Four Times reveals Maria Lazar as a bold, psychologically acute feminist writer whose work deserves a central place in twentieth-century European literature.

Myself, Four Times is a rediscovered novel of friendship, desire, and self-invention by Maria Lazar (1895–1948), one of the most incisive and unjustly neglected voices of interwar Austrian literature. Written in Vienna in the late 1920s but never published in Lazar’s lifetime, the novel appears now for the first time, drawn from her literary estate.

The book follows four women—friends since their school days—whose lives unfold in strikingly different directions, yet remain inseparably bound from adolescence into adulthood. Set against the backdrop of the not-so-golden 1920s, it traces shared youth and first love alongside the darker currents of friendship: self-deception, betrayal, jealousy, and emotional manipulation. At the same time, Lazar charts women’s struggles for independence, identity, and fulfillment in a society poised between liberation and collapse.

With psychological acuity and social sharpness, Myself, Four Times captures both the exhilaration and the cost of female solidarity. Its long suppression mirrors Lazar’s own fate: a celebrated writer forced into exile by Nazism, silenced after she died in 1948, and only recently reclaimed as a major figure of twentieth-century European literature.