People who are afraid of life and of clear reasoning should not read The Contract. However, those who are looking for satisfactory answers to the most delicate questions that life poses should certainly read this book. Our history is full of tragic events and strange ideas in politics, science, religion, art and in every other sector of human existence. The consequence of that fact is that people have become completely insensitive – they can hardly be surprised, let alone shocked, by...
Theo Fales is a one-time historian turned book editor who specializes in ghostwriting the memoirs of leading American policy-makers. For over twenty-five years, Theo has been helping retired generals and CIA directors justify their decisions in the first-person. One day, however, hearing a song at a colleague's memorial service, Theo has a vision: he senses, in the music, a completely different way to live. He becomes obsessed by a need to align musical time with the metre of his own life...
One of the loveliest riddles of Austrian literature is finally available in English translation: Gert Jonke's 1982 novel, Awakening to the Great Sleep War, is an expedition through a world in constant nervous motion, where reality is rapidly fraying—flags refuse to stick to their poles, lids sidle off of their pots, tram tracks shake their stops away like fleas, and books abandon libraries in droves. Our cicerone on this journey through the possible (and impossible) is an «acoustical...
When Quentin's lover announces that she's leaving him for his brother and moving to America, he replies spontaneously that he too is leaving the country: but going where? To Tahas, he improvises: «a city whose very name sounded exotic.» Following through on this impulse, Quentin soon finds a job exactly where he claimed to be going . . . and with his departure from familiar Europe, finds himself aimless in a desert country equal parts dull and dreamlike, enclosed in «the Ring» to which...
There is no doubt that Desmond Hogan is one of most remarkable literary talents to have come out of Ireland in the past half-century, and perhaps the best introduction to his work is through his magnificent short stories, widely anthologized and praised throughout the world. Focusing as always on the downtrodden and the eccentric, the misplaced and the dispossessed, Hogan's stories merge past with present, landscape with mindscape—distinctly Irish and burdened by history, while...
Following a crippling depression and institutionalization, the writer «Desmond» wanders from his native Dublin around an increasingly unrecognizable Europe, and as far as the southern United States, assembling a patchwork of small stories, conversations, love affairs, memories, regrets, and confrontations: «the labyrinth of stories of people whose lives you touch . . . so that your mind becomes like a polychromatic Irish pub.» Whether a series of tragic postcards, a cubist novel, or a memoir...
One of the unheralded masterpieces of twentieth-century American fiction, Light While There Is Light is acclaimed poet Keith Waldrop's autobiographical novel about the myriad ghosts left behind by his family. Born to a deeply religious mother, the narrator and his siblings are led across the US as she searches for the «right» religious sect—a trip that ends with her speaking in tongues, and finally her total isolation. But no synopsis can do justice to the beauty of Keith Waldrop's...
Emil, the unwanted child of two young parents, is adopted by Yoel and Leah, a childless couple. Yet, as the years pass, it becomes clear that Emil doesn't bear much resemblance to the parents who've loved and raised him. Is his name the only thing his real parents have left him? Kin traces the movements of Emil and his four parents as they walk through the same city, nearby but apart, searching for each other in the faces of passersby; until Yoel, now old, becomes determined to do the...
Maximilian Sacheverell Hollingsworth is a counterfeiter, sculptor, filmmaker, sound artist, mystic, and terminal recluse, and over the course of fifty years, making use of a vast stockpile of illegitimate currency, he funds a great range of secret, large-scale art projects throughout London—from explorations of the far reaches of the imagination to more civic-minded schemes of an equally radical nature. At once a strikingly original satire of the ways in which art and currency conspire to favor...
Nea, a Chinese Cambodian teenager, has survived the Khmer Rouge only to land in poverty in Texas. Her small family struggles to get by when a miracle occurs. Wealthy and mysterious, Auntie and Uncle write to say they are alive and well, running a Chinese restaurant in Nebraska. As Nea helps pack Hefty bags with meager belongings for a journey into the American Midwest, little does she know their miracle has a dark side. Soon family secrets, small town resentments, lies born of wartime and a...
The final novel from the New York <i>Times</i> bestselling author of <i>Are You Somebody?</i> Like many a modern, well-travelled woman, Rosie has lived a fascinating life, full of adventure and the pleasure of many lovers in her younger years. Now, facing the challenges of middle-age, she finds that the things that defined her most–work, love, independence–begin to fail her. She comes home to Ireland to care for her elderly Aunt Min, trapped by circumstances in sleepy...
<P>Brion Gysin (1916–;1986) was a visual artist, historian, novelist, and an experimental poet credited with the discovery of the &#8216;cut-up' technique – a collage of texts, not pictures – which his longtime collaborator William S. Burroughs put to more extensive use. He is also considered one of the early innovators of sound poetry, which he defines as &#8216;getting poetry back off the page and into performance.' Back in No Time gathers...