Results by title

The Stoke Newington Edition

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe

Bucknell University Press, 2019

Robinson Crusoe, an adventure tale that fascinated such thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, and J. M. Coetzee, has been an international best-seller for three hundred years. An adventure tale involving cannibals, pirates, and shipwrecks, it embodies economic, social, political, and philosophical themes that continue to be relevant today. Moreover, the notion of isolation on a deserted island and a fascination with survival continue to be central to countless popular cinema and television programs. This edition of the novel with its introduction, line notes, and full bibliographical notes provides a uniquely scholarly presentation of the novel. There has been no other edition like it.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Ivan Bunin was the first Russian writer of the twentieth century to be award the Nobel Prize in literature. Like many other Russian writers, he emigrated after the Revolution and never returned to his homeland; The Life of Arseniev is the major work of his émigré period.

In ways similar to Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Bunin's novel powerfully evokes the atmosphere of Russia in the decades before the Revolution and illuminates those Russian literary and cultural traditions eradicated in the Soviet era. This first full English-language edition updates earlier translations, taking as its source the version Bunin revised in 1952, and including an introduction and annotations by Andrew Baruch Wachtel.

The Life of Arseniev

Youth

Ivan Bunin

Northwestern University Press, 1994

The Literary Guide and Companion to Southern England

Revised Edition

Robert M. Cooper

Ohio University Press, 1998

In a series of intriguing routes through the English countryside, Professor Robert Cooper notes those attractions that the casual tourist might unknowingly pass by, such as the house where Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities, or the windswept quay where John Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s woman walked. Maps and information about restaurants and accommodations give the traveler the opportunity of having pints of “half and half” where Jane Austen dined or visiting the pub where Blake’s scuffle led to his trial for treason.

This newly revised and updated edition of Robert Cooper’s acclaimed handbook combines the utility of current travel information with the appeal of literary history, biography, and anecdote in a leisurely and flavorful guide to the broad sweep of southern England outside of London. A rich and reliable guide to the landscape that fostered one of our most cherished cultures, The Literary Guide and Companion to Southern England is an indispensable resource for those who wish to experience literature firsthand.

The Little Lights of Town

Stories of resilience, belonging, and the quiet beauty of life on the edge of the wild.

In The Little Lights of Town, acclaimed poet and memoirist Jonathan Johnson turns to fiction, bringing to life the rugged landscapes and tightly knit communities of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Against the backdrop of Lake Superior’s cold, untamed shores, his characters navigate love, loss, and the relentless pull of home.

From those who choose to stay despite the ever-present shadow of isolation to those searching for connection in a land where nature looms larger than life, these stories illuminate the quiet urgencies of human existence. With prose as lyrical as it is unflinching, Johnson visualizes a place where the past lingers in the streets, and where even in the darkest winters, little lights continue to shine.

Jonathan Johnson

Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025

The Long Swim

Terese Svoboda

University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

A runaway circus lion haunts a small town where two lovers risk more than their respective marriages. A junket to Cuba and an ambassador’s dalliance with a niece hide dark secrets and political revolution. “I’ve always had a knife,” says the unstable stepson to his parents. Inventive, dark, and absurd, the stories in The Long Swim capture Terese Svoboda’s clear-eyed, wry angle on the world: a place of violence and uncertainty but also wild beauty, adventure, and love both lasting and ephemeral. Her characters strive for escape—through romance, travel, or more self-destructive pursuits—and collide with the constraints of family and home, their longing for freedom and autonomy often at odds with the desire for safety and harmony.

Cynical, irreverent, and formally daring, Svoboda’s stories in The Long Swim are a deft exploration of womanhood and humanity. Waves of provocation and wonder toss the reader and leave them wanting more.

A Novella and Two Short Stories

The Loss

Vladimir Makanin

Northwestern University Press, 1998

The novella and two short stories that make up this volume were written at three different periods in Makanin's life, yet they are united by their narrative and stylistic invention, their range of human emotion, and the profound humanity of their prose. Though banished and suppressed in the Brezhnev era, Makanin is now recognized as one of Russia's leading writers.

In his celebrated short story "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," two Russian soldiers take a Chechen prisoner during the war, and as events unfold, Makanin reveals the casual brutality of the war but also the secret truths of the character's lives. In the novella The Loss, Pekalov, a drunkard and dreamer obsessed with the idea of building a tunnel under the Ural River, disappears in a ditch while working and is made a saint by the people of his village. "Klyucharyov and Alimushkin" tells the story of what happens when one man becomes remarkably lucky while the other loses all his luck.

The Lost Lives of Lena Wu

Alvin Lu

University of Alabama Press, 2026

Centered around Lena Wu, a middle-aged Taiwanese immigrant and divorcee, the novel is a recursively structured interrogation of the contingencies between past and present; memory and self-understanding; and memoir and fiction.

Unfolding from the bygone era of 1950s Las Vegas through the turbulent decades that followed, this epic novel examines the universal search for identity and reward in a world where the good life always seems out of reach. The streets of early Las Vegas are a tough place for a boy to grow up. Pete Elkins is fatherless, living in a cramped apartment with his mother, a party-girl with a penchant for falling in love with the wrong kind of man; and his older sister, who has grown up too fast from trying to parent both her brother and their reckless mother. Pete is headed for serious trouble when he is befriended by Willy Bobbins, a casino owner with a murky past and even murkier business practices. But Willy is also deeply compassionate and wise, and he soon becomes a surrogate father for the lonely Pete. Gradually, Pete becomes involved with Willy’s troubled family and comes to know both the scope of his mentor’s power and the depth of his vulnerabilities.

The Lucky

(A Novel)

H. Lee Barnes

University of Nevada Press, 2003

A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic

The Mahabharata

R. K. Narayan

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Growing from an oral tradition of ballads based on historic events in India, the Mahabharata was passed down and extended through the centuries, becoming the longest poem ever written. R. K. Narayan provides a superb rendition in an abbreviated and elegant retelling of this great epic.

Lenny Makepeace uses magic and propaganda to lead Russia to a Marxist utopia.

The Makepeace Experiment

Abram Tertz

Northwestern University Press, 1989

Winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize

A grand tour of the edges of our lives, where glory and significance riot against the logic of living and the pall of tragedy.

The Making Sense of Things is a collection of twelve stories that pulse with memory, magic, and myth—all our favorite ways of trying to make sense of things.

Readers are treated to vivid and unforgettable characters. A fiercely independent woman puts the man who loves her to unconscionable tests, never guessing that arson, suicide, and canine obesity will yield a magical kind of happiness. A honeymooner in Venice, addled by fever and second thoughts, commits by dumb error a double murder. A brisk lawyer founders when a car wreck claims his son and ex-wife, then discovers that the desperation of grief is a kind of hope.

The Making Sense of Things

George Choundas

University of Alabama Press, 2018

Russia's Literature of the Absurd

The Man with the Black Coat

Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky

Northwestern University Press, 1997

The Master Of Monterey

This comic novel, by the author of The Blossom Festival, is set in Mexican California in 1842 and is based on a true story of mistaken conquest. When Commodore Jones and the crew of the National Intention land in Monterey believing themselves to be bringing freedom and democracy to the benighted Californios, they discover that history has preceded them, that cruelty, betrayal, greed, and lust are already well established there, and that far from existing outside of history, California is a battleground for several contending versions of the past. They also find that their own limitations and illusions are far more powerful than the message of hope that they intend to deliver.

Lawrence Coates

University of Nevada Press, 2003

The Maze Maker

“I address you across more than three thousand years, you who live at the conjunction of the Fish and the Water-carrier,” speaks Daedalus, an artisan, inventor, and designer born into an utterly alien family of heroes who value acts of war above all else, a world where his fellow Greeks seem driven only to destroy—an existence he feels compelled to escape.

In this fictional autobiography of the father of Icarus, “Apollo’s creature,” a brilliant but flawed man, writer and sculptor Michael Ayrton harnesses the tales of the past to mold a myth for our times. We learn of Daedalus’s increasingly ambitious artifacts and inventions; his fascination with Minoan culture, commerce, and religion, and his efforts to adapt to them; how he comes to design the maze of the horned Minotaur; and how, when he decides that he must flee yet again, he builds two sets of wax wings—wings that will be instruments of his descent into the underworld, a place of both purgatory and rebirth.

A compelling mix of history, fable, lore, and meditations on the enigma of art, The Maze Maker will ensnare classicists, artists, and all lovers of story in its convolutions of life and legend. “I never understood the pattern of my life,” writes Daedalus, “so that I have blundered through it in a maze.”

Michael Ayrton

University of Chicago Press, 2015

The Meaning of Daughter

Nader, Alexia

University of Iowa Press, 2026

After immigrating from Lebanon to Haiti as a young girl, Merjan comes of age in an insular, conservative community, where it seems as though her sole escape is marriage. Striking a bargain with a young art dealer, she marries and dreams of becoming a painter, only to discover her husband’s support tethered with expectations.

In the late 1970s, Merjan’s daughter Yvonne is a young woman on the cusp of a marriage of convenience. Though resentful of her mother, Yvonne dreams of establishing a Haitian art gallery in New York with the help of a well-connected older man—but her time there ends disastrously, creating a deep rift between her and her family.

In the present day, Yvonne’s daughter Eva is a student whose art draws inspiration from her grandmother Merjan’s largely undiscovered work. When Eva becomes unexpectedly pregnant, she moves back to her childhood home in Miami to sort out her ambivalent feelings, where she finds her family upended by feuds. An intimate family saga, The Meaning of Daughter explores questions about maternal ambivalence, ambition, artmaking, and how desire resists gendered expectations.

Acclaimed writer Jeffrey Lewis is known for his deft portrayals of relatable figures from all walks of life. In The Meritocracy Quartet, his four interlinking novels—Meritocracy: A Love Story, The Conference of the Birds, Theme Song for an Old Show, and Adam the King—have been brought together for the first time into a single volume. Set against the backdrop of the changing American landscape over four decades, The Meritocracy Quartet is a testament to the country’s evolving personality.

The quartet follows Louie, a Yale graduate from a modest background with a gift for forging connections in high and low places. Beginning in the 1960s, as he documents a going-away party for a fellow Yalie on his way to Vietnam, and continuing through his spiritual encounters with a 1970s group of city misfits, his turn to television writing in the 1980s, and a tragic love story between two of his close friends in the 1990s, Louie chronicles not only his own personal struggles—his silent love for his best friend’s girl, his delicate relationship with an at-times absent father—but also the attitudes, events, and people that marked his generation. From the Vietnam War to George W. Bush, from television trends to the divide between the haves and have-nots, The Meritocracy Quartet is a moving witness to everything America had to offer in the latter portion of the twentieth century.

The Meritocracy Quartet

Jeffrey Lewis

Haus Publishing, 2011

Fictions and Science Fictions from Indiana and Beyond

The Moon over Wapakoneta

Michael Martone

University of Alabama Press, 2018

Lyric fictions by a master fabulist of America’s Midwest

The Moon over Wapakoneta is vintage Michael Martone, the visionary oracle of the American Midwest with the gift for discovering the marvelous in the mundane. In these stories Martone shows us how traveling across time zones from Ohio to Indiana is a form of time travel; how a beer bottle can serve as a kind of telescope, how Amish might power their spaceships with windmills as they travel through space and time. These stories capture the paradox of feeling that one is in the heart of the country while at the same time in the middle of nowhere, of natives who find themselves strangers in their once familiar, but now strange, lands.

On display is a love of obsolete technologies, small-town whimsy, home movies of proms and birthday parties, steam engines and baseball games. If Italo Calvino lived in Indiana rather than Italy, these are the fictions he might have made.

A highly acclaimed anti-fascist novel, The Mortal Storm was Phyllis Bottome's dramatic warning against the warmongering, antisemitism, and misogyny of the Nazis. The story pits the developing political and feminist consciousness of Freya Roth against the Nazi machine that will destroy the fabric of her family and nation. In its combination of adventure and love story, political analysis and history, The Mortal Storm remains a powerful reminder of the greatest crisis of the twentieth century, as well as a riveting personal saga.

The Mortal Storm

Phyllis Bottome

Northwestern University Press, 1998

A tense sociopolitical novel exploring power, violence, and morality in 1970s India.

The Murderer’s Mother takes readers to the late 1970s in the Indian state of West Bengal, where the Communist Party–led Left Front has just been voted into power. It tells the story of Tapan, who has been installed as a gang leader by the most powerful man in the locality in order to kill “unwanted obstacles,” which he does, one after another. Tapan knows there is no other way he can earn a living, but at the same time, he is desperate to protect his family. He tries to stop petty crime and assaults on women, even as he protects his patron’s interests. Through the dissonance, he becomes both a feared and revered figure, but his patron’s game becomes clear: now the murderer, too, must be eliminated.

The Murderer’s Mother

Mahasweta Devi

Seagull Books, 2023

In a forest where every step is familiar, Sára searches for mushrooms—but what she unearths instead are the long-buried truths of her own life.

Nestled deep in the Bohemian Forest, Sára’s world is quiet and bound to the rhythms of nature. She has wandered the same wooded trails for seven years, filling her basket with mushrooms, her pockets with memories, and her thoughts with the past she cannot quite escape. The solitude suits her—until the death of her mother forces her to confront the tangled roots of family and the wounds that never fully healed. As Sára meticulously sorts through chanterelles and boletes, she also sorts through childhood recollections and the uneasy inheritance of trauma. The forest offers refuge, but it also holds secrets, and as the seasons shift, so does Sára’s understanding of herself and the complicated bonds that tether her to the world.

With melodic prose and an acute sensitivity to how landscapes shape lives, Viktorie Hanišová crafts a novel of quiet intensity and deep introspection. The Mushroom Gatherer is a haunting meditation on loss and the delicate balance between isolation and connection, perfect for readers drawn to atmospheric fiction.

The Mushroom Gatherer

Viktorie Hanišová

Seagull Books, 2025

In Flyshoals, Georgia, karma is writ small enough to witness. When Doreen Swilley discovers that her boss and lover of thirty years intends to fire her to placate his dying wife, she devises a plan to steal his business from him. Her plan just might work too, if she is not thwarted by a small town’s enmeshed histories and her family’s own dark secrets.

Set during the 2009 recession, The Nature of Remains rests at the intersection of class, gender, education and place. Through extended geological metaphor, readers witness the orogeny, crystallization, and weathering of the human soul. Doreen’s journey reveals the ways even a woman’s most precious connections—her children, her grandchildren, her lover—operate within larger social structures capable of challenging her sovereignty.

The Nature of Remains

Ginger Eager

New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2020

The New Existence

Michael Collins

University of Iowa Press, 2021

Chicagoan Helen Price, a dying woman, recounts her life while driving toward an oncology appointment. She attempts to take her own life, survives, then dies under tragic circumstances.

In death, Helen bequeaths the family home to her only son, gay playwright Norman Price. Father to an adopted Chinese child, and recently broken up with his partner, Norman’s life is in crisis. Helen also bequeaths a series of tapes to Nate Feldman, a Vietnam draft dodger ensconced in the far reaches of Canada, and the son of Helen’s former boss, Theodore Feldman. Nate’s return to America to claim the tapes occasions confronting a history of animus between father and son, but also the nature of the relationship between Helen Price and Theodore Feldman.

Told from moving cars, the journeys of Norman Price and Nate Feldman converge toward unexpected mysteries and revelations that uncover not so much lies as understandings of life that no longer hold under the scrutiny of the present.

Carmen Laforet’s first novel, Nada, written when she was just 23, won the Nadal Prize, establishing Laforet as one of the greatest writers of post-war Spanish literature. She went on to win the Menorca Prize in 1955 and the National Literature Prize in 1956 for the novel The New Woman. Although she gradually distanced herself from the literary world in the 1970s, she was rediscovered internationally at the beginning of this century and has been translated into more than 30 languages. 2021 marked the centenary of her birth. The only novel of Laforet’s not to be translated into English is La Mujer Nueva (The New Woman). This edition offers a translation by Claire Wadie and an introduction by the Laforet scholar, Caragh Wells. Ahead of its time, The New Woman tells the story of a woman who longs for freedom in a world in which she has been denied it. But she learns that true freedom also means responsibility. Paulina is young and passionate but vain. After leaving her husband in order to live with her married lover, Paulina experiences a profound religious conversion. She had always been critical of Catholicism but she begins to see a spiritual dimension to her own life and yearns for change. She must decide how to live authentically: stay with her lover, live alone, join a convent, or return to her husband? In making this decision, she comes to understand the full meaning of her humanity, her womanhood, and her place in society. The New Woman offers insight into a woman’s experience of the Spanish civil war and Catholicism’s abiding spiritual richness even at a time when the political situation in Spain rendered the Church unpopular in the eyes of many young women.

The New Woman

Carmen Laforet

Catholic University of America Press, 2025

First published in German in 1804, under the nom de plume “Bonaventura,” The Nightwatches of Bonaventura is a dark, twisted, and comic novel, one part Poe and one part Beckett. The narrator and antihero is not Bonaventura but a night watchman named Kreuzgang, a failed poet, actor, and puppeteer who claims to be the spawn of the devil himself. As a night watchman, Kreuzgang takes voyeuristic pleasure in spying on the follies of his fellow citizens, and every night he makes his rounds and stops to peer into a window or door, where he observes framed scenes of murder, despair, theft, romance, and other private activities. In his reactions, Kreuzgang is cynical and pessimistic, yet not without humor. For him, life is a grotesque, macabre, and base joke played by a mechanical and heartless force.

Since its publication, fans have speculated on the novel’s authorship, and it is now believed to be by theater director August Klingemann, who first staged Goethe’s Faust. Organized into sixteen separate nightwatches, the sordid scenes glimpsed through parted curtains, framed by door chinks, and lit by candles and shadows anticipate the cinematic. A cross between the gothic and the romantic, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura is brilliant in its perverse intensity, presenting an inventory of human despair and disgust through the eyes of a bitter, sardonic watcher who draws laughter from tragedy.

Translated by Gerald Gillespie, who supplies a fresh introduction, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura will be welcomed by a new generation of English-language fans eager to sample the night’s dark offerings.

The Nightwatches of Bonaventura

Bonaventura

University of Chicago Press, 2014

The Norman Maclean Reader

Norman Maclean

University of Chicago Press, 2008

In his eighty-seven years, Norman Maclean played many parts: fisherman, logger, firefighter, scholar, teacher. But it was a role he took up late in life, that of writer, that won him enduring fame and critical acclaim—as well as the devotion of readers worldwide. Though the 1976 collection A River Runs Through It and Other Stories was the only book Maclean published in his lifetime, it was an unexpected success, and the moving family tragedy of the title novella—based largely on Maclean’s memories of his childhood home in Montana—has proved to be one of the most enduring American stories ever written.

The Norman Maclean Reader is a wonderful addition to Maclean’s celebrated oeuvre. Bringing together previously unpublished materials with incidental writings and selections from his more famous works, the Reader will serve as the perfect introduction for readers new to Maclean, while offering longtime fans new insight into his life and career.

In this evocative collection, Maclean as both a writer and a man becomes evident. Perceptive, intimate essays deal with his career as a teacher and a literary scholar, as well as the wealth of family stories for which Maclean is famous. Complete with a generous selection of letters, as well as excerpts from a 1986 interview, The Norman Maclean Reader provides a fully fleshed-out portrait of this much admired author, showing us a writer fully aware of the nuances of his craft, and a man as at home in the academic environment of the University of Chicago as in the quiet mountains of his beloved Montana.

Various and moving, the works collected in The Norman Maclean Reader serve as both a summation and a celebration, giving readers a chance once again to hear one of American literature’s most distinctive voices.

The Observable Characteristics of Organisms

In Ryan MacDonald’s stories, most no more than a page in length, we are given glimpses of a father and daughter at the zoo; an isolated man lamenting the absence of TV in his life; two young men atop a fridge at a party, drinking wine. These are stories of marriage and family, of the oddities of the natural world, of college parties, of web-cams and media obsession.

As MacDonald says, “I think what I’m after in the stories as well as in the video work is finding an experiential moment, nothing really stable, something pleasantly unstable, or uncomfortable . . . purposefully pleasant uncomfortable instability with moments of tenderness and definitely humor. Certainly nothing concrete, unless it needs that. A certain fear of and respect for banality. I’m after a good time, which can often turn into a really bad time, but either way, one we’ll remember forever.”

Despite the range of circumstances they reveal, these stories are unified by a brightness of vision, deft observation, and consistently sharp, funny, and unbridled language.

Ryan MacDonald

University of Alabama Press, 2014

The Old Man

Yuri Trifonov

Northwestern University Press, 1999

The Old Man veers between a contemporary effort to buy a dacha and the memories of an incident in the Civil War. A questionable action in the past haunts the present and throws into relief the materialism that has come to replace revolutionary idealism; suggesting this idealism may have been tainted in the first place. While the setting and situation are very Soviet, the quandary Trifonov describes has universal significance.

Pascal Quignard delves into the uncanny bond between recognition and loss, outlining how our earliest experiences shape our longing for a paradise we can never reclaim.

What if paradise was not a place we lost, but one we never truly knew? In Paradisiacs, the fourth volume of the Last Kingdom series, Pascal Quignard meditates on the nature of paradise—not as an Eden to which we might return, but as a place of origin that lingers in myth. Through his signature blend of ancient texts, Paleolithic art, psychoanalysis, and personal reflection, Quignard explores our primal longing for recognition. He traces this yearning back to the erstwhile, a prenatal paradise from which we are expelled at birth, and examines how resemblance and recognition shape our identities.

At once poetic and philosophical, Paradisiacs invites readers into Quignard’s singular world, where language and history coalesce into a profound rumination on the origins of selfhood. With John Taylor’s masterly translation, this latest installment of Last Kingdom is a hypnotic and revelatory reading experience for those drawn to the intersections of philosophy and the ineffable.

The Paradisiacs

Last Kingdom IV

Pascal Quignard

Seagull Books, 2025

Marked by powerful and evocative prose, Ferenc Barnás’s novel tells the fascinating story of a young man’s journey through his strange obsessions towards possible recovery. The unnamed narrator is the parasite, feeding off others’ ailments, but he is also a host who attracts people with the most peculiar manias. He confesses, almost amiably, his decadent attraction as a young adolescent to illnesses and hospitals. The real descent into his private, hallucinatory hell begins after his first sexual encounter; he becomes a compulsive masturbator, and then a compulsive fornicator. But to his horror, he realizes that casual sex is not casual at all for him—each one-night stand results in insane jealousy: he imagines previous lovers hovering over him every time he makes love to a woman.

When he gets to know a woman referred to as L., he thinks his demons may have finally subsided. But when he hears of her past, the jealousy returns. He seeks relief through writing—by weaving an imagined tale of L.’s amorous adventures. What will he do with this strange manuscript, and can it bring him healing?

A breathtaking blend of Dostoevskian visions, episodes of madness, and intellectual fervor, all delivered in precise, lucid prose, The Parasite is a novel that one cannot escape.

The Parasite

Ferenc Barnás

Seagull Books, 2020

The Pet Thief is a dystopian fable of science, rebellion, humankind’s inhumanity, and the struggle for identity and survival in a post-human world.

The Pet Thief

Kassten Alonso

University of Alabama Press, 2013

When scientists, the government, and venture capitalists conspire to hybridize humans with animals—cats, specifically—for organ harvesting, drug testing, and military applications, the experiment is an irredeemable failure, producing human-like beings with uncanny abilities who are nonetheless fundamentally defective.

Oboy and his mentor/tormentor Freda are two wayward hybrids, “cat people,” who have escaped with others to the depths of a rundown European city being leveled for reconstruction. They are members of a street gang led by an ominous leader called Swan.

Oboy is unable to think or speak except in mimicry, but he is a physical savant, which serves Freda’s mission. Enraged at what has been done to her, Freda wants to “rescue” every pet she can. When Oboy returns with a human baby after his first solo outing, their world and the truths of their existence come unraveled.

The Pillow Museum

Claire Bateman

University of Alabama Press, 2025

A collection of 56 flash fictions, micro-essays, and contemporary fables about the burden on women and families.

The Pillow Museum is a collection of 56 flash fictions, micro-essays, and contemporary fables set in various simulacra of our world. Claire Bateman’s gorgeous prose captures the imagination with closely observed details of people and places that are startlingly familiar yet unreal, where nothing can be taken for granted, including narrative logic: "It was snowing the night they had the fight about the glass piano whose music provided all the light in the house."

In an authoritative voice that offers no apologies or justifications, The Pillow Museum evokes a closely observed slipstream strangeness that refuses to take any moment or detail for granted—a fruitful, delirious disruption.

Garrick's Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1744 - 1756

The Plays of David Garrick, Volume 3

Edited by Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann

Southern Illinois University Press, 1981

David Garrick’s accomplishments as an actor, manager, and theatrical innovator brought him great fame and fortune, and his ideas influenced not only his own age but succeeding ages as well. Yet as a playwright, a part of the elegant combination of talents that was David Garrick, he has never achieved the critical reputation he richly deserves, in main because of the unavailability of texts and the lack of proper assessment of the historic importance of his plays in the English theatre.

This first complete edition makes available to scholars and students all the plays of Garrick in well edited texts, with commentary and notes.

Contents: Macbeth. A Tragedy, 1744; Romeo and Juliet, 1748; The Fairies. An Opera, 1755; Catherine and Petruchio. A Comedy, 1756; Florizel and Perdita. A Dramatic Pastoral, 1756; The Tempest. An Opera, 1756; and King Lear. A Tragedy, 1756.

The Pleasure Marriage

In The Pleasure Marriage, Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the epic story of a romance that explores desire and the intolerance for interracial marriage in Moroccan society. Amir is a prosperous merchant based in Fez, where he has a wife and four children. On one of his annual business trips to Senegal, he enters into a “pleasure marriage”—a temporary union permitted by Islamic law—with the alluring Nabou. Overcome by her passion and sensuality, he falls in love, with repercussions for three generations scarred by racism, immigration, and deportation.

Nabou returns to Fez as Amir’s second wife, weathering the jealous cruelty of Lalla Fatma, his first partner. Isolated within her new home, Nabou gives birth to twin sons, one black and one white, who come of age on the opposite sides of racial, social, and political chasms and who chart vastly different courses. The Pleasure Marriage showcases Ben Jelloun’s mastery of metaphor and lyrical narrative as he continues to take us into the worlds of Moroccan culture through his exquisite language and literary genius.

Tahar Ben Jelloun; Translated from the French by Rita S. Nezami

Northwestern University Press, 2021

Set in a small town in Switzerland, The Pledge centers around the murder of a young girl and the detective who promises the victim’s mother he will find the perpetrator. After deciding the wrong man has been arrested for the crime, the detective lays a trap for the real killer—with all the patience of a master fisherman. But cruel turns of plot conspire to make him pay dearly for his pledge. Here Friedrich Dürrenmatt conveys his brilliant ear for dialogue and a devastating sense of timing and suspense. Joel Agee’s skilled translation effectively captures the various voices in the original, as well as its chilling conclusion.

One of Dürrenmatt’s most diabolically imagined and constructed novels, The Pledge was adapted for the screen in 2000 in a film directed by Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson.

The Pledge

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Estonian literature in its written form is little more than a century old. As Estonia was part of the Russian Empire, then of the Soviet Union, it is something of a miracle that the powerful presence of the Baltic Germans, the periods of Russification, and other more subtle forms of cultural pressure, have not eradicated Estonian as a serious literary language. One of the central figures to credit for this was Friedebert Tuglas. The nine stories, and the essay, featured here were written during the World War One, or in the first years of Estonian independence in the early 1920s. They reflect the troubled spirit of the times, but exhibit the influence of a wide selection of writers, ranging from O. Wilde and M. Gorky, to F. Nietzsche and Edgar Allan Poe. The subject matter of Tuglas' stories represented here ranges from a starving prisoner, via a luckless pharmacist's hallucinations from childhood, a wandering soldier who encounters weird spirits, to a young man sitting in a park, accosted by a devilish lunatic who wants to introduce a new brand of devil worship to the world.

The Poet and the Idiot

Friedebert Tuglas

Central European University Press, 2007

Chronicle of Emotions, Notebook 1

The Principles of Life on Black Friday

Alexander Kluge

Seagull Books, 2023

A highly readable and lighthearted, yet intellectual-stimulating exploration of the modern human condition.

This volume concerns itself with the question of time, from the description of a brief fragment passing by in a matter of minutes to stories of the unexpected stock-market crash of 1929, a once-in-a-century event that Europeans call ‘Black Friday’ because Wall Street’s collapse reached the Old World one day later. Through this exploration of time, Kluge ponders some fundamental questions not altered by the passing of time: What can I trust? How can I protect myself? What should I be afraid of? Our age today has achieved a new kind of obscurity. We’ve encountered a pandemic. We’ve witnessed the Capitol riots. We see before us inflation, war, and a burning planet. We gaze at the world with suspense. What we need in our lives is orientation—just like ships that navigate the high seas. We might just find that in Kluge’s vignettes and stories.

Three Tales of the Caucasus

The Prose of the Mountains

Aleksandre Qazbegi

Central European University Press, 2015

The Prose of the Mountains contains three tales of the Caucasus by Aleksandre Qazbegi, one of the most prescient and gifted chroniclers of the Georgian encounter with colonial modernity. His stories offer an invaluable counterpoint to the predominantly Russian narratives that have hitherto shaped scholarly accounts of the nineteenth-century Caucasus. “Memoirs of a Shepherd” poignantly chronicles the young author’s decision to pass seven years of his life as a shepherd with Georgian mountaineers. “Eliso” (the name of a Chechen girl) offers one of the most searing accounts on record of the forced migration of this people from their homeland to Ottoman lands. Set in the sixteenth century, “Khevis Beri Gocha” (the name of a Georgian village chief) classically chronicles a tragic misunderstanding between a severe father and his loving son.

The Puppet

By Ibrahim al-Koni

University of Texas Press, 2010

The Puppet, a mythic tale of greed and political corruption, traces the rise, flourishing, and demise of a Saharan oasis community. Aghulli, a noble if obtuse man who has been chosen leader of the oasis, hankers after the traditional nomadic pastoralist life of the Tuareg. He sees commerce (understood as including trade in gold, marriage, agriculture, and even recreation) as the prime culprit in the loss of the nomadic ethos. Thus he is devastated to learn that his supporters are hoarding gold.

The novel's title notwithstanding, the author has stressed repeatedly that he is not a political author. He says that The Puppet portrays a good man who has been asked to lead a corrupt society. The subplot about star-crossed young lovers introduces a Sufi theme of the possibility of transforming carnal into mystical love. The Puppet, though, is first and foremost a gripping, expertly crafted tale of bloody betrayal and revenge inspired by gold lust and an ancient love affair.

The first volume of Paul Scott's classic account of the last days of British rule in India

No set of novels so richly recreates the last days of India under British rule—"two nations locked in an imperial embrace"—as Paul Scott's historical tour de force, The Raj Quartet. The Jewel in the Crown opens in 1942 as the British fear both Japanese invasion and Indian demands for independence. On the night after the Indian Congress Party votes to support Ghandi, riots break out and an ambitious police sergeant arrests a young Indian for the alleged rape of the woman they both love.

The Raj Quartet, Volume 1

The Jewel in the Crown

Paul Scott

University of Chicago Press, 1976

The powerful, moving second volume of Paul Scott's classic account of the last days of British rule in India

In The Day of the Scorpion, Scott draws us deeper in to his epic of India at the close of World War II. With force and subtlety, he recreates both private ambition and perversity, and the politics of an entire subcontinent at a turning point in history.

As the scorpion, encircled by a ring of fire, will sting itself to death, so does the British raj hasten its own destruction when threatened by the flames of Indian independence. Brutal repression and imprisonment of India's leaders cannot still the cry for home rule. And in the midst of chaos, the English Laytons withdraw from a world they no longer know to seek solace in denial, drink, and madness.

The Raj Quartet, Volume 2

The Day of the Scorpion

Paul Scott

University of Chicago Press, 1998

The powerful third volume of Paul Scott's classic account of the final days of British rule in India

India, 1943: In a regimental hill station, the ladies of Pankot struggle to preserve the genteel façade of British society amid the debris of a vanishing empire and World War II. A retired missionary, Barbara Batchelor, bears witness to the connections between many human dramas; the love between Daphne Manner and Hari Kumar; the desperate grief an old teacher feels for an India she cannot rescue; and the cruelty of Captain Ronald Merrick, Susan Layton's future husband.

The Raj Quartet, Volume 3

The Towers of Silence

Paul Scott

University of Chicago Press, 1998

The powerful, dramatic final volume of Paul Scott's classic account of the last days of British rule in India.

After exploiting India's divisions for years, the British depart in such haste that no one is prepared for the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1947. The twilight of the raj turns bloody. Against the backdrop of the violent partition of India and Pakistan, A Division of the Spoils illuminates one last bittersweet romance, revealing the divided loyalties of the British as they flee, retreat from, or cling to India.

The Raj Quartet, Volume 4

A Division of Spoils

Paul Scott

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Followed by "Two Stages" and Additional Notes

The Red Scarf

Yves Bonnefoy

Seagull Books, 2021

An intensely personal and profoundly moving review of Bonnefoy’s childhood memories.

In December 2015, six months before his death at the age of 93, Yves Bonnefoy concluded what was to be his last major text in prose, L’écharpe rouge, translated here as The Red Scarf. In this unique book, described by the poet as "an anamnesis"—a formal act of commemoration—Bonnefoy undertakes, at the end of his life, a profoundly moving exegesis of some fragments written in 1964. These fragments lead him back to an unspoken, lifelong anxiety: “My most troubling memory, when I was between ten and twelve years old, concerns my father, and my anxiety about his silence.” Bonnefoy offers an anatomy of his father’s silence, and of the melancholy that seemed to take hold some years into his marriage to the poet’s mother.

At the heart of this book is the ballad of Elie and Hélène, the poet’s parents. It is the story of their lives together in the Auvergne, and later in Tours, seen through the eyes of their son—the solitary boy’s intense but inchoate experience, reviewed through memories of the now elderly man. What makes The Red Scarf indispensable is the intensely personal nature of the material, casting its slant light, a setting sun, on all that has gone before.

Now in paperback, The Red Sofa is a quiet French novella exploring love, memory, and the perspective that travel gives us on both.

In The Red Sofa, we meet Anne, a young woman setting off on the Trans-Siberian Railway in order to find her former lover, Gyl, who left twenty years before. As the train moves across post-Soviet Russia and its devastated landscapes, Anne reflects on her past with Gyl and their patriotic struggles, as well as on the neighbor she has just left behind, Clémence Barrot.

Rocked by the train’s movements Anne is moved by her memory of Clémence, who is old and whose memory is failing, but who has not lost her taste for life and adventure. Ensconced on her red sofa at home, Clémence loves to tell Anne her life story, mourning lost loved ones and celebrating the lives of brave, rebellious women who went before her. Eventually, Anne’s train trip returns her home having not found Gyl, but having found something much more meaningful—herself.

The Red Sofa

Michel Lesbre

Seagull Books, 2017

The Registry of Forgotten Objects

In this haunting debut collection, best-selling author Miles Harvey probes the mysterious relationship between human longings and the secret lives of inanimate objects. In one story, an artist discovers an uncanny ability to transform modern sculptures into priceless ancient treasures. In another, a teenager experiences visions of other people’s pasts while vandalizing their abandoned houses. In a third, a grieving couple returns again and again to the beach where their son disappeared, pulling plastic bottles, fishing nets, buoys, and other bits of beach trash from the surf “as if those random bits of wreckage were the untranslated hieroglyphs of some secret language that might help them understand their loss.” Harvey—whose work Dave Eggers called “ludicrously unputdownable”—delivers a constellation of stories that explore the gravitational pull of material things: how they drift into and out of our hands, how they assume new meanings, and the ways they serve as conduits between the present and past, the everyday and incomprehensible. Most of all, he explores how these objects have the power to reveal strange and moving facets of the human condition.

Miles Harvey

The Ohio State University Press, 2024

The Relic tells the story of an orphaned young man, Teodorico Raposo, who is brought to Lisbon from a provincial town in Portugal to live with his aunt, a rigid, stern—and oftentimes—forbidding Catholic. Her devout circle of acquaintances is made up almost entirely of priests, many of whom are more concerned with appearances than spirituality, and seeking her and their approval, Teodorico is driven to attend Mass, say rosaries, and frequent churches, all the while awakening to sensuality, women, and the material life in conflict with “Auntie’s” devotions, which are—inwardly—devoid of the charity preached by Christ. When Teodorico obtains a degree from the University of Coimbra, Auntie sends him to the Holy Land to search for a relic to cure her ills. He meets up with a learned German author and, after a sojourn to Egypt, the two make their way to the land trod by Jesus. It is there that Teodorico has the dream that takes up nearly one third of the novel: he witnesses the travails that lead to the Passion and Crucifixion, as well as the aftermath of Christ’s death. Faced now with his mission, Teodorico embarks on a search. He soon comes upon an item, a “true” relic authenticated by his German friend, the sanctity of which will send Auntie to the heights of spiritual bliss, so much so that she will make him her heir. But when Teodorico returns to Lisbon with it, deception awaits her as the result of a simple mistake that had been made, and disinheritance awaits him as a result of Auntie’s anger and vindictiveness.

The Relic

Jose Maria Eca de Queiros

Catholic University of America Press, 2023

The Reprisal

In the bitterly cold winter of 1943, the Italian countryside is torn apart by violence as partisans wage a guerilla war against the occupying German army and their local fascist allies. In the midst of this conflict, a ragtag group of fascist supporters captures a woman in the late stages of pregnancy. Suspecting her of being in league with the partisans, they hastily put her on “trial” by improvising a war tribunal one night in the choir stalls of the abandoned monastery that serves as their hide-out. This sham court convicts the woman and sentences her to die—but not until her child has been born. When a young seminarian visits the monastery and tries to dissuade the fascist band from executing their sentence, the absurd tragedy of the woman’s fate is cast in stark relief. The child’s birth approaches, an unnerving anticipation unfolds, and tension mounts ominously among the characters and within their individual psyches.

Laudomia Bonanni

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Based on a number of incidents that took place in Abruzzo during the war, Laudomia Bonanni’s compact and tragic novel explores the overwhelming conflicts between ideology and community, justice and vengeance. The story is embedded in the cruel reality of Italian fascism, but its themes of revenge, sacrifice, and violence emerge as universal, delivered in prose that is at once lyrical and brutal.

In her native Italy, Bonanni, a writer of journalism and critical prose as well as fiction, is hailed as one of the strongest proponents of post-war realism, and this is the first of her novels to be made available to Anglophone readers. Translators Susan Stewart and Sara Teardo render Bonanni’s singular style—both sparse and emotive, frank and poetic—into readable, evocative English.

A mysterious illness is afflicting the residents of Millsville, Wisconsin—but that might be the least of their problems. Investigating the situation is Arthur Reilly, the county restaurant inspector who recently relocated from New York City following an unseemly scandal. When he gets sidetracked and falsely suggests a link between the outbreak and a local Albanian-run diner, the town descends into panic, chaos, and finger pointing. As the situation spirals out of control, county commissioner Janet Vosberg seizes the moment to position herself for higher office and newspaper editor Adam Bender aims to settle a long-simmering score. And what’s with the hot dog pushcart that recently appeared by the side of Highway 9?

This antic, raunchy send-up of small-town life gets deep into the minds and hearts of its characters and their entanglements. Alex Pickett exposes the fault lines in Midwestern Nice and reveals how corruption can take hold in even the most unlikely of places.

The Restaurant Inspector

Alex Pickett

University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

The Resurrectionists

Collins, Michael

University of Iowa Press, 2021

Haunted by the deaths of his parents and uncle, Frank Cassidy journeys north to dispute a cousin's claim to the family farm, where he meets a stranger who might resolve mysteries about Frank's past.