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The first of Heimrad Backer s books to appear in English, transcript is an experimental Austrian writer s literary confrontation with the Holocaust.

Drawing together a wide range of focused critical commentary andobservation by internationally renowned scholars and writers, thiscollection of essays offers a major reassessment of Aidan Higgins sbody of work almost fifty years after the appearance of his first book, Felo De Se.

A dazzling literary card game: an investigation into how and why we fall into or out of love--with a person or a book.

In his debut collection, Damion Searls gives us five extraordinary tales of the life of the mind in America today. ¿56 Water Street¿ and ¿Goldenchain¿ follow writers whose projects only lead them deeper into the labyrinth of modern relationships and friendships. The nasty office satire ¿The Cubicles¿ and the atmospheric ¿A Guide to San Franciscö take place in the sun and fog of West Coast dreams. In the final story, ¿Dialogue Between the Two Chief World Systems,¿ a Hungarian beauty creates a scholarly conundrum with surprising parallels to the book as a whole.Set amidst Ethiopian healing scrolls and sponges of the Adriatic and the guy who invented flashing the temperature on bank clocks, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going plays in the intersection of knowledge and life in contemporary America. Searls¿s flights of fancy and painterly eye for detail introduce a range of intelligent characters feeling their way toward complex moral and personal truths.

Though best known as the author of a series of brilliant novels, here Higgins turns his writerly gifts to work for the radio.

This year Rikki Ducornet is being presented with a lifetime achievement award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her beloved work as a novelist and essayist, but perhaps most of all for her work as a writer of short stories. In the tradition of Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, and Angela Carter, Ducornet creates modernday fables filled with characters as complex and surprising as any in American short fiction. This landmark collection of new stories is generously illustrated by T. Motley, whose gritty, fantastical cartooning explores the same post-magical realism that has been the subject of Ducornet's distinguished career.

"A captivating short work almost beyond description." The New Yorker

"In "The Confidence-Man," writes John Bryant in his Introduction, "Melville found a way to render our tragic sense of self and society through the comic strategies of the confidence game. He puts the reader in the game to play its parts and to contemplate the inconsistencies of its knaves and fools." Set on a Mississippi steamer on April Fool's Day and populated by a series of shape-shifting con men, "The Confidence-Man is a challenging metaphysical and ethical exploration of antebellum American society. Set from the first American edition of 1857, this Modern Library paperback includes an Appendix with Bryant's innovative "fluid text" analysis of early manuscript fragments from Melville's novel.

The unmarried, unemployed narrator of A Fool's Paradise confronts the temptations of conventional success. Her life is founded on unsustainable contradictions. This precise and intensely personal novel describes the narrator's growing sense that freedom becomes, itself, a kind of routine, and shows her burgeoning desire to break out of it.

The hiring of a new secretary shouldn't be a big deal--just a slight a change in the office environment. But for the protagonist of this novel, it is a declaration of war, a call to arms: "The new secretary has only been here two days," she says, "and I'm already talking about evil, a word I shouldn't even be using--arming myself for battle and choosing my weapons." Her quiet life of sacrifice and service has been rudely disrupted by the new hire, and she is not--despite the advice of her doctor, her neighbors, and her daughter--about to leave it at that. Instead, sabotage, alcohol, and kindness become the arsenal in a conflict fought across copy rooms and office parties. But the humor is undercut by a sadness, a sense of defeat that makes this slim novel resonate with the injustice of our increasingly impersonal, corporate world.

Sixty-one vignettes on the sole subject of masturbation record the imaginative varieties of this activity in prose that is playful, intimate, quirky and humane. Illustrated throughout with watercolors by Francesco Clemente that offer an intriguing counterpoint to Mathews's fictions.

As in his novel The Polish Complex, Konwicki's A Minor Apocalypse stars a narrator and character named Konwicki, who has been asked to set himself on fire that evening in front of the Communist Party headquarters in Warsaw in an act of protest. He accepts the commission, but without any clear idea of whether he will actually go through with the self-immolation. He spends the rest of the day wandering the streets of Warsaw, being tortured by the secret police and falling in love. Both himself and Everyman, the character-author experiences the effects of ideologies and bureaucracies gone insane with, as always in history, the individual struggling for survival rather than offering himself up on the pyre of the greater good. Brilliantly translated by Richard Lourie, A Minor Apocalypse is one of the most important novels to emerge from Poland in the last twenty five years.

The long-awaited final work and magnum opus of one of the United Statess greatest authors, critics, and tastemakers, In Partial Disgrace is a sprawling self-contained trilogy chronicling the troubled history of a small Central European nation bearing certain similarities to Hungary-and whose rise and fall might be said to parallel the strange contortions taken by Western political and literary thought over the course of the twentieth century. More than twenty years in the making, and containing a cast of characters, breadth of insight, and degree of stylistic legerdemain to rival such staggering achievements as William H. Gass's The Tunnel, Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra, Robert Coover's The Public Burning, or Peter Nadas's Parallel Lives, In Partial Disgrace may be the last great work to issue from the generation that changed American letters in the '60s and '70s.

On the eve of a coup d'etat, the wife of a diplomat newly returned to Turkey from the United States finds that the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fuat, is in fact a childhood friend. Having married more for status than love, and quizzically unmoored from the reality of day-to-day existence in the capital, she begins to nurse an impossible love for her husband's superior, and in the process of telling us of her Bovary-like, novelistic infatuation, she confesses innumerable details of her life: her tomboyish school years, her independence and ambitions as a young woman, her surprise at her own willingness to set aside her aspirations to enter the comfortable world represented by her husband. Set against the backdrop of the great cultural changes occurring in Turkey during the 1960s, "Music by My Bedside" is a compelling and often playful journey through one woman's off-kilter view of herself, the world, and the conventions by which she is constrained.

In honor of the 80th birthday of one of the grandmasters of American experimental fiction, editor St phane Vanderhaeghe has gathered critical essays and appreciations by William Gass, John Barth, Bradford Morrow, Shelley Jackson, Kathryn Hume, Brian Evenson, Kate Bernheimer, Rick Moody, and many more along with prose and poetry by Coover himself.

Arguably Gordon Lish's masterpiece, Peru begins with its narrator announcing, "e;There is nothing which I will not tell you if I can think of it."e; Gradually, the story of a dark childhood secret-real or imagined-unfolds: in 1940, six-year-old Gordon murdered his harelipped rival, Steven Adinoff, in a Long Island sandbox . . . (unless he didn't). Peru's narrator weaves together strands of disconnected, mesmerizing trivia, resurrecting memories of the mundane suburban childhood that spawned a killing: the sense of tedium on an endless summer day; the squishy sounds of a hoe digging into flesh. Ambiguous, complex, inventive, and subversively comic, Peru is a compendium of unnerving observations about memory, violence, obsession, and the potential horror behind the facade of an ordinary life.

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 and prose. Theo's method opens onto two seemingly contradictory interior landscapes: one, a rage of identification with a college classmate who has written and signed the legal document justifying the use of torture by the US; the other, a love for the singer best known for her interpretations of the composer who wrote that vital song. Theo commits himself to the idea that only through his method will he be able to save himself. Is he mad, or has history itself lost its way?

Poetic, comic, obsessed with minutiae, My Beautiful Bus is a welcome dose of serious frivolity at the expense of the contemporary novel. Based on an actual bus trip across France taken by Oulipo-member Jacques Jouet in the late '80s, his fictional reconstruction of the experience twenty years later focuses not so much on the scenery as on the possibilities offered an author by the eponymous vehicle and its occupants. With detours through everything from Puss in Boots to Pascal's maxims, we are introduced to each eccentric passenger as they climb aboard (one, for example, claims to have a corpse in his luggage), every character bringing us one step further into Jouet's imaginative universe: their conversations, preoccupations, reactions, and possibilities taking their places as elements of a fiction in the narrator's mind. In the final pages it becomes clear that the book itself is a sort of bus, boarded impulsively and with no fixed destination in mind, and that it has carried its readers to places they could not have imagined.

Mathilde Lewly-a female painter at the dawn of the twentieth century-has achieved notoriety among the Parisian avant-garde. She and her husband, also a talented young artist, pursue their separate visions side by side in a Clichy atelier, galvanized by the artistic ferment that surrounds them. But the couple are threatened by the shadow of Mathilde's little sister, Eugenie: since the two girls' sudden departure from their native England, Eugenie has been determined to vault the eight years separating her from Mathilde. Now, devoured by envy and haunted by a past she never actually experienced, the "e;little one"e; hurls herself into the artistic and personal life of her elder sister. It is the birth of a fierce rivalry, an emotional tug-of-war, played out against the bohemian riot of the last century's wildest years. But will the First World War's sudden and brutal eruption allow Mathilde to escape this intimate conflict and achieve her destiny?

In this comic novel of political intrigue, Adam Gorozpe, a respected businessman in Mexico, has a life so perfect that he might as well be his namesake in the Garden of Eden-but there are snakes in this Eden too. For one thing, Adam's wife Priscila has fallen in love with the brash director of national security-also named Adam-who uses violence against token victims to hide the fact that he's letting drug runners, murderers, and kidnappers go free. Another unlikely snake is the little Boy-God who's started preaching in the street wearing a white tunic and stick-on wings, inspiring Adam's brother-in-law to give up his job writing soap operas to follow this junior deity and implore Adam to do the same. Even Elle, Adam's mistress, thinks the boy is important to their salvation-especially now that it seems the other Adam has put out a contract on Adam Gorozpe. To save his relationship, his marriage, his life, and the soul of his country, perhaps Adam will indeed have to call upon the wrath of the angels to expel all these snakes from his Mexican Eden.

A woman falls into a coma. Perhaps she's going to die. Becoming the sleeper's shadow, the woman's daughter will accompany her mother through six weeks of agony, bearing witness to the prolonged death imposed upon her by the monstrous machine of modern medicine. During this final voyage through the fog, the narrator attempts to recover the vivacious woman she knew before this illness: the mad lover, the romantic spouse, the musician who sacrificed her dreams to the reality of life with her husband. By assembling her memories of the dying woman, gluing together scraps of recollections like puzzle pieces, Marie Chaix reconstructs the portrait of a woman who she deeply loved-a blurred silhouette forever fixed in that "e;museum of dust"e; where each life ends.

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 "e;acoustical decorator"e; by the name of Burgmuller-a poetical gentleman, the lover of three women, able to communicate with birds, and at least as philosophically minded as his author: "e;Everything has suddenly become so transparent that one can't see through anything anymore."e; This enormously comic-and equally melancholic-tale is perhaps Jonke's masterwork.

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 impossible: return his grown son-a lonely man approaching middle age-to his birth parents. In prose that is both minimal and subtly off kilter, acclaimed Israeli novelist Dror Burstein introduces us to an Israel that is as peculiar, and poignant, as Donald Barthelme's America: ranging from an apocalyptic future to the petty annoyances of daily life, from shifting continents to tiny heartbreaks.

Begun in 1929 under the title "e;New Prose"e; and drastically revised after Vladimir Mayakovsky's sudden death, A Hunt for Optimism (1931) circles obsessively around a single scene of interrogation in which a writer is subjected to a show trial for his unorthodoxy. Using multiple perspectives, fragments, and aphorisms, and bearing the vulnerability of both the Russian Jewry and the anti-Bolshevik intelligentsia-who had unwittingly become the "e;enemies of the people"e;Hunt satirizes Soviet censorship and the ineptitude of Soviet leaders with acerbic panache. Despite criticism at the time that it lacked unity and was too "e;variegated"e; to be called a purely "e;Shklovskian book,"e; Hunt is stylistically unpredictable, experimentally bold, and unapologetically ironic-making it one of the finest books in Shklovsky's body of work.

Featuring the work of some of the greatest poets of the twentieth century as well as their contemporary counterparts, this anthology is unique in bringing together a broad selection of Switzerland 's greatest authors in all of the country 's major languages. Featuring Blaise Cendrars, Hugo Ball, Jacques Chessex, Hans Arp, Gerhard Meier, Philippe Jaccottet, Adelheid Duvanel, Arno Camenisch, Giorgio and Giovanni Orelli, Urs Allemann, Claire Genoux, and Robert Walser, among many others including some whose work has never before been available in English translation this overview of Swiss poetry stands as the ideal introduction to an undervalued and idiosyncratic force in international literature, standing at the foundations of many of the most influential literary movements, be they traditional or experimental.

Complex and hauntingly beautiful, Lygia Fagundes Telles¿s most acclaimed novel is a journey into the inner lives of three young women, each revealing her secrets and loves, each awaiting a destiny tied to the colorful and violent world of modern Brazil. Sensual and wealthy Lorena dreams of a tryst with a married man. Unhappy Lia burns with a frantic desire to free her imprisoned fiancé. Glamorous Ana Clara, unable to escape her past, falls toward a tragedy of drugs and obsession. Intimate and unforgettable, The Girl in the Photograph creates an extraordinary picture of the wonder and the darkness that come to possess a woman¿s mind, and stands as one of the greatest novels to come out of Brazil in the late twentieth century.

A collision between contemporary poetics and the Renaissance lyric, between aestheticism and political engagement, The Master of Insomnia is a collection of Slovenian poet Boris A. Novak's verse from the last fifteen years, including numerous poems never before available in English. In these sensitive translations, Novak stands revealed as both innovator and observer; as critic Ales Debeljak has written: "e;The poet's power in bearing witness to Sarajevo and Dalmatia, to his childhood room and his retired father, to the indifferent passage of time and the desperate pain of loss, confirms the melancholy clairvoyance of Walter Benjamin, who stated that what is essential hides in the marginal, negligent, and hardly observed details. Whoever strives to see the "e;big picture"e; will inevitably overlook the essential . . . [Novak's] wide-open eyes must watch over both the beauty of this life and the horror of its destruction."e;