A Woman's Story is Annie Ernaux's "deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality” (Kirkus Reviews). Upon her mother's death from Alzheimers, Ernaux embarks o…
Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico. His debilitating malaise is drinking, an activity that has overshadowed his life. On the most fateful day of the consul's lif…
Easily one of the 20th century's most visionary writers, J. G. Ballard lived far ahead of his time. Called his "prophetic masterpiece" by many, The Atrocity Exhibition practically lies outside of any …
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (TLS). That time is the period between the two World Wars, an…
"Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and…
At the age of seventy, after a gap of twenty years, Jorge Luis Borges returned to writing short stories. In Brodie's Report, he also returned to the style of his earlier work with its brutal realism, …
Set on the coast of England against the vivid background of the sea, The Waves introduces six characters—three men and three women—who are grappling with the death of a beloved friend, Percival. Inste…
The grandson of Prince Genji lives outside of space and time and wanders the grounds of an old monastery in Kyoto. The monastery, too, is timeless: a place of prayer and deliverance, with barely a tra…
The Turn of the Screw is an 1898 horror novella by Henry James that first appeared in serial format in Collier's Weekly magazine (January 27 - April 16, 1898). In October 1898 it appeared in The Two M…
Jean Genet's seminal Our Lady Of The Flowers (1943) is generally considered to be his finest fictional work. The first draft was written while Genet was incarcerated in a French prison; when the manus…
The 2020 Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück's thirteenth book is among her most haunting. Here as in the Wild Iris there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and anci…
When a class war erupts inside a luxurious apartment block, modern elevators become violent battlegrounds and cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on "enemy" floors. In this visionary ta…
