The narrator, a scientist working on antibodies and suffering from emotional and mental illness, meets a Persian woman, the companion of a Swiss engineer, at an office in rural Austria. For the scientist, his endless talks with the strange Asian woman mean release from his condition, but for the Persian woman, as her own circumstances deteriorate, there is only one answer.
"Thomas Bernhard was one of the few major writers of the second half of this century."-Gabriel Josipovici, Independent
"With his death, European letters lost one of its most perceptive, uncompromising...

Nathan, a blind Jewish scribe, tells the story of the coming of the Messiah in the person of one Simon Stern from his birth on the Lower East Side, through his career as a millionaire dealer in real estate, to his building of a refuge for the Jewish remnant of World War II.
"A majestic work of fiction that should stand world literature's test of time, to be read and reread. A masterpiece." "Commonweal "
"This book ensnares one of the most extraordinarily daring ideas to inhabit an American novel in a number of years. For one thing, it is that risky devising, dreamed of only by the...

Spurned by his first love, Homi Seervai, the Parsi genius from Bombay, creates a machine that lets him scan his brain for memories of the time he spent with her. The machine malfunctions, propelling him instead into his collective unconscious where he encounters ancestors and relatives, both dead and alive. In this wildly inventive book available for the first time in the United States Homi, blessed with the memory of elephants, discovers the splendor of his heritage as well as hope for the future.
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It is 1963 in an unnamed town in North Dakota, and Anthony Thrasher is languishing for a second year in eighth grade. Prematurely sophisticated, young Anthony spends too much time reading Joyce, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas but not enough time studying the War of 1812 or obtuse triangles. A tutor is hired, and this "modern Hester Prynne" offers Anthony lessons that ultimately free him from eighth grade and situate her on the cusp of the American sexual revolution. Anthony's restless adolescent voice is perfectly suited to De Vries's blend of erudite wit and silliness-not to mention his fascination...

Jean Dutourd's "A Dog's Head" is a wonderful piece of magical realism, reminiscent of Voltaire, Borges and Kafka. With biting wit, Dutourd presents the story of Edmund Du Chaillu, a boy born, to his bourgeois parents's horror, with the head of a spaniel. Edmund must endure his school-mate's teasing as well as an urge to carry a newspaper in his mouth. This is the story of his life, trials, and joys as he searches for a normal life of worth and love.
"Dutourd is a fine craftsman, whose work has the classic virtues of brevity, lucidity, and concentration. He has written a sardonic...

Fragments is a story about how war can make everything explosive-even love-and how two friends try to put the pieces of their lives together again.

" Fragments] makes the usual semi-autobiographical account of the Vietnam War] . . . seem flimsy and discursive in comparison. . . . The shapeliness and sense of larger design is] so elegantly executed in Fragments."-Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"The plot is believable, the characters sharply drawn, the prose clean and distinctive. . . . Stand s] with Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, James...

"The Conquerors" describes the struggle between the Kuomintang and the Communists in the Cantonese revolution of the 1920s. It is both an exciting war story and a gallery of intellectual portraits: a ruthless Bolshevik revolutionary, a disillusioned master of propaganda, a powerful Chinese pacifist, and a young anarchist. Each of these "conquerors" will be crushed by the revolution they try to control.
In a new Foreword, Herbert R. Lottman discusses the political background of the book, and the extent to which Malraux invented the history he wrote about.
" "The Conquerors"] is a...

What was life like for the scientists working at Los Alamos? Thomas McMahon imagines this life through the wide eyes of young Tim MacLaurin, the thirteen-year-old son of an MIT physicist who, inspired by a young woman named Maryann, worked on the project. Filled with the sensuous excitement of scientific discovery and the outrageous behavior of people pushed beyond their limits, "Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry" is a beautifully written coming-of-age story that explores the mysterious connections between love and work, inspiration and history.

Moving from Massachusetts to Kansas in 1855 with his new wife and a group of German carpenters, Gordon McKay is dead set on making his fortune raising bees-undaunted by Missouri border ruffians, newly-minted Darwinism, or the unsettled politics of a country on the brink of civil war.

Aboard the Alecto, prolific romance author Valentine Beals ruminates on the ship's most seemingly incongruous couple: a graceful, ethereal, virginal dancer named Barberina Rookwood and her lover, Saul Henchman, a crippled, emasculated war hero and photographer. Fancifully, Beals imagines Henchman to be the reembodiment of one of the most mysterious Arthurian legends, the Fisher King--the maimed and impotent ruler of a barren country of whom Perceval failed to ask the right questions. A myth with many permutations--and a blurred borderland between them--the Fisher King legend dovetails...