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Winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize

Natural Wonders is a novel in the form of a series of lectures about the earth and its prehistory. In it, a grieving widow assembles an idiosyncratic history of the earth’s history based on her understanding and impressions of her deceased husband’s papers.

In Natural Wonders, Jenny is given the task of assembling a memorial edition of her recently deceased husband Jonathan’s lecture series about the physical history of the earth. With little knowledge of his work or of Jonathan himself, Jenny constructs from his fragmentary and disorganized notes her own version of our planet’s past.
 
Presented as a series of lectures, Jenny’s earth history is an amalgam of stories from science and about scientists—a Serbian mathematician and his theory of the ice ages, a Swiss doctor camped on a glacier, the mysterious materia pinguis thought to have drifted down from stars to form fossils. Into these stories she interweaves scenes from their marriage as well as material she finds on Jonathan’s shelves. In her history, an explanation of continental drift becomes enmeshed with a schoolboy’s erotic encounter with an older woman. Icebergs in an Andean lake launch a woman’s jealous affair with a third-rate actor, and H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau is dramatically recounted in new form.
 
Natural Wonders mixes mythology, popular fiction, and a misfired romance with the story of the earth hurtling around the sun. From intimately human to geologic to cosmic, it explores change, love, and loss.

A young man from Monterey and his younger brother go on their first deer hunt with their minister father and his friends. The setting is 1950s northern California, in country where, from the right height, one can see Mt. Shasta in one direction, Mt. Lassen in the other. It is a region of small, insular towns, and although it is a familiar hunting ground for the Reverend and his buddies, not everyone there welcomes black hunters. Father and son both shoulder their pride, and a racial confrontation seems inevitable.

Among the lessons young Satch learns is the sometime advantage of wit and spine. During their days in the wilderness, the brothers are initiated to the right practice of the hunt and camp and to the ribald talk, needling banter, camp tales, and occasional aggravation of sundry friends. Hunting has a primal nature, but as Satch sees, so may the variable interactions of men.

"We live in a fantastic reality," Mikhail Kuraev writes. "Life itself, the turns of history, people’s fates are unlikely, amazing and fantastic." This is the strange reality, the fantastic world of Russia before glasnost, that comes to life in Kuraev’s remarkable short stories and novellas. Celebrated as one of the true innovators to emerge in recent years, Kuraev mines the rich literary tradition and the deep and not so distant past of his native Russia to produce tales that are both deeply moving and stylistically intriguing.
Though steeped in history, his stories pluck from obscurity the little people history ignores—and, in the Soviet Union of Stalin, often crushed. In the complex "Captain Dikshtein," a fictional account of an incident in the 1921 Kronstad, Kuraev evokes life within Soviet military culture and draws a vivid, difficult portrait of one particular life amid the ships and artillery. In "Night Patrol," a lowly member of the Soviet secret police narrates his evening rounds, interspersing the nightly arrests with reflections on his long career in the KGB. In "Petya on His Way to the Heavenly Kingdom," set in a construction site for a hydroelectric dam near Murmansk, a soldier’s murder of the village simpleton resonates through a small community committed to an enormous and enormously dubious technological project. Ranging over a broad landscape of historical foibles, Kuraev’s sympathetic wit and satiric brilliance have invited comparison to Gogol, but are finally unique. In this book, English-reading audiences will discover a new and challenging voice in a tradition that has given the world some of its greatest stories.

The first Russian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, Ivan Bunin is often considered the last of the great Russian masters. Already renowned in Russia before the revolution, he fled the country in 1920 and lived the remainder of his life in France, where he continued to write for thirty years. Bunin made his name as a short-story writer with such masterpieces as "The Gentleman from San Francisco," the title piece in one of his collections and one of the stories in this volume. His last book of stories, Dark Avenues, was published in the 1940s. Among his longer works were a fictional autobiography, The Life of Arseniev (1930), and its sequel, Youth (1939), which were later collected into one volume, and two memoirs, The Accursed Days (1926), and Memories and Portraits (1950). He also wrote books on Tolstoy and Chekhov, both of whom he knew personally. Bunin, in fact, serves as a link-both personal and literary-between Tolstoy, whom he met as a young man, Chekhov, a close friend, and Vladimir Nabokov, who was influenced by Bunin early in his career and who moved in the same émigré literary circles in the twenties and thirties.

Bunin achieved his greatest mastery in the short story, and much of his finest work appears in this volume-the largest collection of his prose works ever published in English. In Robert Bowie's fine translation, with extensive annotations and a lengthy critical afterword, this work affords readers of English their first opportunity for a sustained encounter with a Russian classic, and one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

The invulnerable Nikola Suhaj lives a Robin Hood-like existence as he and his band rob travelers and rich Jewish merchants. Nikola seems invulnerable until a new police captain and a generous reward tempt his bandit cohorts into betraying him.

Ivan Olbracht's reputation as one of Czechoslovakia's most important authors stems from his works dealing with Ruthenia and the tensions between the two major ethnic groups of the region: the Ruthenians and the Jews. Weaving myth with realism, Nikola the Outlaw is considered Olbracht's masterpiece.

Winner of the Mexico National Novel Prize, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, and IMPACT Prize

Joaquín Buitrago, a photographer in the Castaneda Insane Asylum, believes a patient is a prostitute he knew years earlier. His obsession in confirming Matilde's identity leads him to explore the clinics records, and her tragic history. Joaquín and Matilda begin to tell each other fragmented stories about a past they almost shared, and a future in which they do not believe. Set in 1920s Mexico, this novel is at once an overview of one of the most turbulent times in Mexican history, a love story, and a meditation on the ways in which medical and popular language define insanity. No One Will See Me Cry is a lyrical and startling visitation with the so-called losers of an era as they try to plumb the meaning of their lives. 

A young poet is killed by her lover, a politician, in the eastern Indian state of Bihar. Soon afterward, across India in Bombay, an idealistic journalist is hired by a movie director to write a Bollywood screenplay about the murdered poet. Research for the script takes the writer, Binod, back to Bihar, where he and his cousin Rabinder were raised. While the high-minded Binod struggles to turn the poet’s murder into a steamy tale about small towns, desire, and intrigue, Rabinder sits in a Bihari jail cell, having been arrested for distributing pornography through a cybercafé. Rabinder dreams of a career in Bollywood filmmaking, and, unlike his cousin, he is not burdened by ethical scruples. Nobody Does the Right Thing is the story of these two cousins and the ways that their lives unexpectedly intertwine. Set in the rural villages of Bihar and the metropolises of Bombay and Delhi, the novel is packed with telling details and anecdotes about life in contemporary India. At the same time, it is a fictional investigation into how narratives circulate and vie for supremacy through gossip, cinema, popular fiction, sensational journalism, and the global media.

Thrust into the bizarre labyrinth of DC society, John MacManus struggles to rescue a bankrupt nonprofit while starting a family. Wackiness ensues.

Three unconnected people travel north, each passing in isolation over one of the most troubled and controversial dividing lines in the world: the Mexico‒US border. But in a melee of language and blood, their stories and the stories of those they meet—of a young serial killer, a waitress and graphic novelist and her lover (and former professor), and an outsider artist in a mental institution—gradually begin to coalesce. Daring in both its protagonists and its structure, Edmundo Paz Soldán’s Norte is a fast-paced, vivid, and operatic blending of distinct voices. Together, they lay bare the darkness of the line over which these souls—like so many others—have passed.

A prominent member of a new generation of Latin American writers, Paz Soldán stands in defiant opposition to the magical realism of the past century, instead grounding his work in political, economic, and historical realities. Norte is no exception; it is a tale of displacement and the very human costs of immigration. Shocking with its violence even as it thrills with its language, confounding rather than cowering under the cliché of the murderous, drug-dealing immigrant, Norte is a disquieting, imperative work—an undeniable reflection of our fragmented modern world.

Josef Erdman arrives in Maribor, Slovenia, on the eve of World War II. Though he claims to be a salesman, it soon becomes apparent that Josef has no purpose in the town--and that a newcomer can expect nothing but distrust from the townspeople. Against this backdrop he witnesses the fiery shimmer of the aurora borealis and imagines the town set aflame--an omen of the coming war.

First published in 1948, Nothing but the Night marked the auspicious beginning of John Williams' career as a novelist—a career that would go on to include the classics Stoner and the National Book Award winning Augustus. In the person of Arthur Maxley, Williams investigates the terror and the waywardness of a man who has suffered an early traumatic experience. As a child, Maxley witnessed a scene of such violence and of such a nature tat the evocation of Greek tragedy is inescapable. now, years later, we move through a single significant day in the grown Arthur Maxley's life, the day when he is to meet his father, who has been absent for many years. With rare economy and clarity, the story moves at an ever-increasing pace to its unforgettable end.

It is 1943. A German submarine commander and an American pilot are stranded on a rubber life raft, floating alone in the middle of the ocean, with nothing between them but a bottle of whiskey, some cigarettes, a few chocolate bars, and a pack of chewing gum. Both sit, hoping to be rescued, but there is no hope in sight. The stage is thus set for this hypnotic existentialist parable, a rediscovered classic in the literature of World War II.

In a terse, almost clinically exact style, Nothing in Sight distills the brutal essence of what it is to die alone. Much more than a story of war, this short novel presents the memories, dreams, and hallucinations of two soldiers as they drift toward death. With nothing in sight on the horizon, Jens Rehn directs our view inward, into the minds of both men as they question the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the possibility of enduring human relationships. As the drama unfolds, each man recalls fragments of his past through the delirium of thirst and pain. The American soldier, his arm severed, dies first of gangrene. The German dies in agony a week later. Their life raft sinks into the vastness of the ocean.

Reissued two years ago in Germany, Nothing in Sight was hailed by critics there as a singular achievement. The work is presented here in a crystalline English translation for the first time, given new life for generations of readers to come.

A Dostoevskian psychological novel of ideas, Novel with Cocaine explores the interaction between psychology, philosophy, and ideology in its frank portrayal of an adolescent's cocaine addiction. The story relates the formative experiences of Vadim at school and with women before he turns to drug abuse and the philosophical reflections to which it gives rise. Although Ageyev makes little explicit reference to the Revolution, the novel's obsession with addictive forms of thinking finds resonance in the historical background, in which "our inborn feelings of humanity and justice" provoke "the cruelties and satanic transgressions committed in its name.