Verba Mundi

"For ten years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a one-time client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files - directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century - but leads to his former life are few. Could he really be that person in a photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attache?...

"Life is an unclassified masterpiece, a sprawling compendium as encyclopedic as Dante's Commedia and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and, in its break with tradition, as inspiring as Joyce's Ulysses. Structured around a single moment in time - 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 - Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, and extraordinary rich...

"The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary follows Morel, a Frenchman who survives the Holocaust - a survival he credits to imagining elephants roaming the wilderness. Once free, he travels to French Equatorial Africa with the aim of saving his beloved elephants from being hunted and killed for meat and ivory. Realizing his more conventional tactics are not eliciting a response, however, he turns militant, and the story takes a dark turn. This novel examines...

A collection featuring novellas by prominent Israeli writers. They range from Aharon Appelfeld's In the Isles of St. George, which is on a wandering blackmarketeer, to David Grossman's Yani on the Mountain, on the social cost of Israel's militarization.