The New Yorker "Brilliant. Like a literary exercise for the mind, but strangely fun to decode."--Elle "The most talked-about writer to come out of Chile since Bolaño," (The New York Times Book Review), Alejandro Zambra is celebrated around the world for his strikingly original, slyly funny, daringly unconventional fiction. Now, at the height of his powers, Zambra returns with his most audaciously brilliant book yet. Written in the form of a standardized...

Nearing the end of his life, Enzo, a dog with a philosopher's soul, tries to bring together the family, pulled apart by a three year custody battle between daughter Zoe's maternal grandparents and her father Denny, a race car driver.

Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon—Private eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era

In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre that is at once exciting and accessible, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there.

It's been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex- girlfriend....

"In a city far in the future, retired lecturer Wiggins moves from window to window in a museum, intricately describing each scene. Whales gliding above a shipwreck and a lost cup and saucer. An animatronic forest twenty stories tall. A line of mosquitos in uniforms and reglia, honored as heroes of the last great war. Bit by bit, Wiggins unspools the secrets of his world - the conflict that brought it to the brink, and the great thinker, Michaux, who...

One day while looking up a word in the New Oxford American Dictionary, Burrows was stopped in his tracks by an example sentence that seemed like a tiny piece of fiction which had wandered out of another book and settled down in the dictionary. Now he has created a collection of very short stories-- some barely one page long-- composed entirely of example sentences from various dictionaries. Genre-bending and wildly inventive, they create a giddy celebration...

Haunting and evocative, brutal and surreal, these twelve connected tales evoke the life of the Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927), whose short story "In the Grove" served as an inspiration for Akira Kurosawa's famous film Rashōmon, and whose narrative use of multiple perspectives and different versions of a single event influenced generations of storytellers. Writing out of his own obsession with Akutagawa, David Peace delves into the...

"Following the secrets and passions of young women, these stories and their narrators cross genres and rules to arrive at unforeseen lives. A subway rider remembers enacting the gods with her estranged twin, a concert usher discovers her tango-dancing boyfriend's lover, and a literacy worker confesses the gambles she and others have lost through the bluesy singers she admires. Told through semi-experimental play with nonlinear plots, plural narrators,...

"'I just don't believe that man is made of flesh and blood.' -- Jack Johnson, World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Pain was Joe Grim's self-expression, his livelihood and reason for being. In 1908-09 the Italian-American boxer toured Australia, losing fights but amazing crowds with his showmanship and extraordinary physical resilience. On the east coast Grim played a supporting role in the Jack Johnson-Tommy Burns Fight of the Century; on the west coast...

"A day in the life of the Delivery Boy, a recently arrived political refugee who must peddle his way to 5-star customer ratings-and, perhaps, freedom."-- "Countries go wrong, sometimes, and sometimes the luckier citizens of those countries have a chance to escape and seek refuge in another country--a country that might itself be in the process of going wrong. In the bustling indifference of an unnamed city, one such citizen finds himself trapped...