"Jorge Carrión collects bookshops: from Gotham Book Mart and the Strand Bookstore in New York City to City Lights Bookshop and Green Apple Books in San Francisco and all the bright spots in between (Prairie Lights, Tattered Cover, and countless others). In this thought-provoking, vivid, and entertaining essay, Carrión meditates on the importance of the bookshop as a cultural and intellectual space. Filled with anecdotes from the histories of some...
"In a crumbling apartment block in Luanda, Angola, impoverished families hoard memories to survive a corrupt regime. Odonato-nostalgic for the days of socialism-searches for his son whose life as a petty criminal he laments. As his hope drains away, Odonato's flesh becomes transparent and his body increasingly weightless. Transparent City confirms Ondjaki as one of Africa's major writers."-- Provided by publisher.
"It's winter in Montreal, 2002, when a graphic design student's gambling addiction starts to drag him under. In debt to the metal band that's commissioned him to draw their album cover and ensnared in lies to his friends and his cousin, he takes the first job that promises a paycheck: dishwasher at La Trattoria, a high-end restaurant, where he finds himself thrust, on his first night, into roiling world of characters. A magnificent, hyperrealist debut,...
"Islanders are never afraid, if they were, they wouldn't be able to live here. Born on the island that bears her name, Ingrid Barrøy's world is circumscribed by storm-scoured rocks and the moods of the sea by which her family lives and dies. But her father dreams of a bridge, and her mother longs for her own childhood island, and Norway faces its own sea change: the advent of a modern world and its attendant unpredictability and violence. Brilliantly...
"Picking up where Bookshops: A Reader's History left off, Against Amazon explores the impact of new technologies on bookshops and libraries. Collecting Carrion's essays on these vital cultural spaces, as well as interviews with the writers who love them, Against Amazon is equal parts a history of books and bookshops, a reader's autobiography, a travelogue, a love letter--and, urgently, a manifesto against the corrosive pressures of late capitalism."--...
"Known internationally for his novels, Mia Couto, winner of the Neustadt Prize for Literature, first became famous for his short stories. Sea Loves Me includes sixty-four of his best, thirty-six of which appear in English for the first time. Covering the entire arc of Couto's career, this collection displays the Mozambican author's inventiveness, sensitivity, and social range with greater richness than any previous collection, including early stories...
"No-one can be alone on an island . . . But Ingrid is alone on Barrøy, the island that bears her name, and the war of her childhood has been replaced by a new, more terrible present: Norway is under the Nazi boot. When the bodies from a bombed battleship begin to wash up on the shore, Ingrid can't know that one will be alive, and warm enough to erase a lifetime of loneliness - nor can she imagine what suffering she will endure in protecting her lover,...
When their friend dies by suicide in a vacant lot in Montreal's impoverished East End, three young women strike out into the world of the 2010s to define their identities, sexualities and political commitments. This novel-in-stories deftly weaves together a variety of perspectives to recount their lives as they experience restless wandering, deep friendship, emotional betrayal, solidarity in the face of conjugal violence, gender transition and anti-globalization...
"The long war is over, and Ingrid Barrøy, who we first met as a child herself in The Unseen, leaves the island that bears her name to search for the father of her daughter. Alexander, the Russian captive who survived the sinking of prisoner ship the Rigel and found himself in Ingrid's arms in White Shadow, attempted to cross the mountains to Sweden, and now Ingrid follows in his footsteps, carrying their child in her arms, the girl's dark eyes the...
"When millworkers in Roberval, a northern Quebec logging town, go on strike, the conflict rips the close-knit community apart, and despite the workers' solidarity, their individual struggles and demands further escalate tensions within the group. They remain united by the desire to escape poverty and exact revenge on their boss, but when Brian Ferland decrees a lockout and awakens in them a buried rage, they rally around the mysterious and magnetic...
"This sumptuously written thriller asks probing questions about how we live with each other and with our planet. The Cobra is a hard man in a brutal world. Expelled from El Salvador after a drug bust and working as a Guatemalan businessman's enforcer, he meets and comes to admire Polo, a human rights campaigner who defends the Mayan people. When the Cobra's boss orders him to murder Polo, a last-minute stab of conscience brings him into conflict with...
"A woman seeking justice in an imagined Detroit discovers resilience and resistance where she least expects they will be found. Looking for answers, and her missing granddaughters, Gloria moves into the house where her daughter was murdered. A stranger in a Fort Detroit neighborhood coping with the ongoing effects of racial and economic injustice, she finds herself surrounded by poverty, pollution, violence-as well as the resilience of the residents,...
"Love in late capitalism: Ivana Sajko takes us to the frontlines of a war waged between kitchen and bedroom. He, an unemployed Dante scholar, trying to change the world and write a novel. She, once a passable actress with a vaguely rewarding theater job, now a stay-at-home mom. He is delirious with dreams of grandeur; she is on edge, a detonator bomb with a dirty laundry trigger. The rent is late, the neighbor caviling, the government astoundingly...
"A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland's most beloved novelists. A man comes to awareness in a church in rural Iceland, not knowing why he's there or how he arrived. When a local woman offers to reunite him with her sister, he realizes he's lost not only his bearings, but his memory as well: he doesn't recall either sister, nor their mother, the woman buried beneath the stone. As their stories...
"Don Quixote meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit in this slapstick epic about destiny, family demons, and revenge. In 1911, in a hockey game in Quebec's Gasp̌ Peninsula, local tough guy Billy Joe Pictou fires the puck into Monti Bouge's mouth. When Monti collapses with his head across the goal line, Victor Bradley, erstwhile referee and local mailman, rules that the goal counts. Monti's ensuing revenge for this injustice sprawls over three generations,...
"Céline Wachowski, internationally renowned architect and accidental digital-culture icon, finally unveils her plans for the Webuy Complex, her first major public project commissioned by the city of Montreal, her hometown. But instead of the triumphant celebration she anticipates in at last bringing her reputation to bear in her own city, the project is immediately excoriated by critics, who accuse the her of callously destroying the social fabric...
"International Booker-nominated satirist GauZ' returns with a panoramic journey into the colonization of the African interior. In an attempt to avoid life as a factory worker, Dabilly, a young white man in late nineteenth-century France, seeks colonial adventure in Africa. Still mourning the recent deaths of his parents, he joins a beleaguered French general trying to set up trading routes on the Ivory coast which, in 1880, is still untouched by colonization....
"'Stoltenberg's elegant prose makes each scene . . . so engaging that it gives plot a bad name.'--John Self, The Guardian. For her entire life, Karin has fled from anything and anyone that tries to possess her. Her job demands nothing, she mostly socializes with men she meets online, and she's rarely in touch with Helene, her adult daughter. But when Helene's marriage is threatened, she turns, uncharacteristically, to her mother for commiseration...
