A woman discovers that her bathroom has been remodeled into a prison cell—where she is an unlikely inmate—in this surreal novel of exile, grief, memory, and migration. In Salerno, Italy, Dilara spends her days caring for her aging father and her hypochondriac husband. Since leaving her native Istanbul, she’s been unable to find a job—adrift, she becomes increasingly fixated on domestic improvement, specifically on the renovation of a second bathroom. When the work is completed, she enters and finds herself not in a bathroom but in a prison cell, and a Turkish one at that. As she tries and fails to conceal the unfortunate discovery from her husband, she confronts the prison’s other inhabitants—the buffoonish guards who refuse to believe her conundrum; the other women who begin filling the cells beyond hers—and the strange things that drift through the smell of the Bosporus, her mother’s voice, calls to prayer . . . Has she gone mad? Is she the victim of a terrible prank? Is it a portal, a dream, a simulation? As she burrows deeper into her cell, her life beyond it begins to fall apart—her husband disappears, her father’s grip on reality loosens, political dictatorship threatens to destroy everything worth keeping. In his slender, disquieting first novel, Kenan Orhan tells a story of modern migration like no other. The Renovation is a tragic comedy of displacement, a story that remodels its own form to the dazzling inevitable end.

Lady Wainwright presides over the gothic gloom at Belting, in mourning for her two sons lost in the Second World War. Long afterwards a stranger arrives at Belting, claiming to be the missing David Wainwright – who was not killed after all, but held captive for years in a Russian prison camp. With Lady Wainwright’s health fading, her inheritance is at stake, and the family is torn apart by doubts over its mysterious long-lost son. Belting is shadowed by suspicion and intrigue – and then the first body is found. This atmospheric novel of family secrets, first published in 1964, is by a winner of the CWA Diamond Dagger.

In an unnamed African nation, the people are subject to a state of perpetual warfare and to an Orwellian abuse of language that strips from language its meaning and renders life senseless. And in a bare room lit only by moonlight, a young man hides, waiting for the mysterious crocodile-men to come and help him escape from the violent tyranny of the state. While he waits, he tells his story. This is Kossi Efoui’s catastrophic and carnivalesque dreamscape, the dark setting of The Shadow of Things to Come. Here, men and women are taken in the night, spirited away from their families and sent to plantation penal colonies to be worked to the edge of madness. When they return, they are empty shells, their lost time referred to as the “Time of Annexation.” But though his parents were taken, our protagonist survived, first in the care of a quirky benefactress named Mama Maize, then under the wing of the state itself, as a student at one of its elite schools. When he meets a bookseller named Axis Kemal, however, he has found a surrogate father, an eccentric and wise man who can bring him out of the meaningless confusion and tell him the truth about the society he lives in. Through his characters, Efoui speaks out against atrocity and the abuse of power, but more, he writes against political rhetoric and the destruction of meaning by government. This novel is a love letter to language and, in Chris Turner’s dazzling translation, it becomes a stunning introduction for English-language readers to an exciting new talent.

In a country called Town, a doctor named Su is found dead in an abandoned car. There is only one place the police intend to look for her suspected killer: the Saha Estates. Controlled by a secretive organization of ministers, Town is the safest, richest nation in the world. But it is a society clearly divided into the haves and have-nots, and those who have the very least—who aren’t even considered citizens—live on the Saha Estates. Residents of Saha must squat in moldy units without plumbing or electricity and can only find work doing harsh labor. For many, the apartment complex is a bleak haven for escaping even bleaker pasts—as it was for Jin-kyung and her brother, Do-Kyung, who showed up one day sopping wet and shivering. No one is shocked when a lowlife like Do-Kyung becomes the main suspect in Su’s—a citizen’s—murder. But then Do-Kyung disappears. Isolated in a barren Saha unit, Jin-Kyung makes a choice: she will finally confront a system hellbent on erasing her brother’s existence. To find him, she must rely on her tightlipped neighbors, from the mysterious janitor known as “Old Man,” to Granny Konnim, the community gardener and reluctant midwife, to Woomi, an unwitting test subject at the local clinic. On her quest for the truth, Jin-kyung will uncover a reality far darker than she could have imagined.

The first English translation of celebrated Swiss-German novelist Sibylle Berg, Grime is a manifesto for fury, escape, and individual revolt…

Vanja, a government worker, leaves her home city of Essre for the austere, wintry colony of Amatka on a research assignment. It takes some adjusting: people act differently in Amatka, and citizens are monitored for signs of subversion. Intending to stay just a short while, Vanja finds herself falling in love with her housemate, Nina, and decides to stick around. But when she stumbles on evidence of a growing threat to the colony and a cover-up by its administration, she begins an investigation that puts her at tremendous risk. In Karin Tidbeck's dystopic imagining, language has the power to shape reality. Unless objects, buildings, and the surrounding landscape are repeatedly named, and named properly, everything will fall apart. Trapped in the repressive colony, Vanja dreams of using language to break free, but her individualism may well threaten the very fabric of reality. Amatka is a beguiling and wholly original novel about freedom, love, and artistic creation by an idiosyncratic new voice.

'Strangely enough, I mistook it for a gentleman at first. Fortunately I had my spectacles with me so I could see it was really a nose.' With this pair of absurd, comic stories Gogol indulges his imagination and delights readers. Contains 'The Nose' and 'The Carriage'.

The artefact is a circular ribbon of matter six hundred million miles long and ninety million miles in radius. Pierson's puppeteers, the aliens who discovered it, are understandably wary of encountering the builders of such an immense structure and have assembled a team of two humans, a mad puppeteer and a kzin, a huge cat-like alien, to explore it. But a crash landing on the vast edifice forces the crew on a desperate and dangerous trek across the Ringworld.

"Who Goes There?" is the novella that formed the basis of John Carpenter's film The Thing. Campbell's classic story tells of an Antarctic research base that discovers and thaws the ancient, frozen body of a crash-landed alien—with terrifying results! This Wildside Press edition is the only ebook version of this classic story authorized by the Campbell estate.

To build the future, we need new ways of supporting software teams. This book will give you a secret weapon: the psychology that creates resilience for developers, sustainable practices for software teams, and innovation for organizations. You'll learn from rigorous empirical evidence gathered from top engineering organizations and thousands of developers around the world, revealing powerful principles software teams can use to guard against failure and drive cultures of collaboration and problem-solving. Making incredible software doesn't have to be a death march - this book presents a humane alternative for software teams looking to use the transformative power of behavioral science to understand what drives technology businesses forward. The Psychology of Software Teams provides a model for developers and leaders who want to bring the human back to tech and take a science-based approach to unlocking the "black box" of software engineering. This book is for the developers and builders of the future. Bringing science and heart together, The Psychology of Software Teams will teach you how to untangle your thinking from pervasive myths about software work and harness the superpowers of psychology to create more joyful, innovative, and thriving environments for software.

Cooking is terrible, and food is often a massive pain in the ass. Eating is sometimes ok, sometimes a giant drag, and somehow still a thing that you have to do multiple times a day, which seems enormously unfair. This book isn’t going to teach you how to cook, or turn you into the kind of person who hosts effortless dinner parties, or make you more attractive and popular and interesting. At best, it’s going to make it slightly more likely that you manage to eat something in the ten minutes between walking in the door and falling into the sweet embrace of the internet. I’m not joking—a lot of this can be done, start to finish, in ten to fifteen minutes. I resent thirty-minute meals because it feels like about twenty-eight minutes too long to spend on feeding myself. If you’re excited to get home from work and spend an hour cooking dinner, this isn’t the book for you. If you really value authenticity, this isn’t the book for you. If you literally only eat three foods and you’re happy like that, this isn’t the book for you. If you, like me, are tired and depressed and just need to get some food into your face once in a while, this is definitely the book for you. You should buy it. Maybe it’ll help.

One evening in downtown Seoul, Jeong-su is smoking a cigarette outside when he sees something a huge black orb appears out of nowhere and sucks his neighbour inside. The orb soon begins consuming other people and no one knows how to stop it. Impervious to bullets and tanks, the orb splits and multiplies, chasing the hapless residents of Seoul out into the country and sparking a global crisis with widespread violence and looting. Jeong-su must rely upon his wits as he makes the arduous journey in search of his elderly parents. But the strangest phases of this ever-expanding disaster are yet to come and Jeong-su will be forced to question everything he has taken for granted. Dryly funny, propulsive and absurd, The Black Orb is terrifyingly prescient about the fragility of human civilisation.

MTV has discovered the authors of tomorrow. Read them today in Pieces. This unique short-story collection is more than a good read—it's an exciting glimpse into the future of fiction. The winners of MTV's "Write Stuff" competition share their voices and visions in tales that are endearingly raw, undeniably bold, and engagingly inventive. In Next Time, a housewife encounters a gunman—an experience that changes her life, and her mind, in surprising ways...Pinball is an edgy tale of a young mail clerk's hidden sex life...After her broken engagement, a cook in New York goes to work for a chic SoHo couple in Roam...Mother captures the tragedy of a woman's illness, as witnessed through her daughter's eyes...In Day of the Dead, a humorously doomed relationship begins when a twentysomething's boyfriend returns from an Outward Bound trip and moves in with her...Two old high school friends reunite—and compare their very different lives—in Black Cowboy. Along with other stories and an introduction by Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower), Pieces is filled with the excitement of discovery—as a host of newcomers present their works to a wide and eager audience. Scoring / William Clifford -- Polaroid / Matthew Loren Cohen -- Day of the dead / Aury Wallington -- The white carousel horse / Dennis G. Dillingham, Jr. -- First snow / Davy Rothbart -- The carnival / Clementyne Howard -- Petty theft / Martin Wilson -- Next time / Michelle Rick -- Black cowboy / Carmen Elena Mitchell -- Pinball / Jason Rekulak -- Roam / Kathleen Bedwell Hughes -- Mother / Alsha D. Gayle -- Respiration / Chandra Steele -- A fortune / Joy Monica T. Sakaguchi -- Forbidden fate / Sujata DeChoudhury