In this dazzling debut, Polly Barton reflects on her experience of moving to the Japanese island of Sado at the age of twenty-one and on her journey to becoming a literary translator. Written in fifty semi-discrete entries, Fifty Sounds is a personal dictionary of the Japanese language that draws together a variety of cultural reflections – from conformity and being an outsider, to the gendering of Japanese society, and attitudes towards food and the cult of ‘deliciousness’ – alongside probing insights into the transformative powers of language-learning. Candid, humane, witty and wise, Fifty Sounds is remarkable work that takes a transparent look at language itself, lifting the lid on the quietly revolutionary act of learning, speaking, and living in another language.

At the age of eight Brian Lackey is found bleeding under the crawl space of his house, having endured something so traumatic that he cannot remember an entire five–hour period of time. During the following years he slowly recalls details from that night, but these fragments are not enough to explain what happened to him, and he begins to believe that he may have been the victim of an alien encounter. Neil McCormick is fully aware of the events from that summer of 1981. Wise beyond his years, curious about his developing sexuality, Neil found what he perceived to be love and guidance from his baseball coach. Now, ten years later, he is a teenage hustler, a terrorist of sorts, unaware of the dangerous path his life is taking. His recklessness is governed by idealized memories of his coach, memories that unexpectedly change when Brian comes to Neil for help and, ultimately, the truth.

'I work in an office. I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out, I put them back in again. That is it.' Twenty-three-year-old Frits - office worker, daydreamer, teller of inappropriate jokes - finds life absurd and inexplicable. He lives with his parents, who drive him mad. He has terrible, disturbing dreams of death and destruction. Sometimes he talks to a toy rabbit. This is the story of ten evenings in Frits's life at the end of December, as he drinks, smokes, sees friends, aimlessly wanders the gloomy city streets and tries to make sense of the minutes, hours and days that stretch before him. Darkly funny and mesmerising, The Evenings takes the tiny, quotidian triumphs and heartbreaks of our everyday lives and turns them into a work of brilliant wit and profound beauty.

In the late 1970s a new academic discipline was born: Translation Studies. We could not read literature in translation, it was argued, without asking ourselves if linguistic and cultural phenomena really were translatable and exploring in some depth the concept of equivalence. Professor Bassnett tackles the crucial problems of translation and offers a history of translation theory, beginning with the ancient Romans and encompassing key 20th-century structuralist work. She then explores specific problems of literary translation through a close, practical analysis of texts, and completes her book with extensive suggestions for further reading.

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. So she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies halt operations. The subways squeak to a halt. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost. Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers? A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.

She smelled like jasmine. No, not exactly. She smelled like the earth beneath a jasmine plant on a hot day. Most of us are poets, she said. It’s just a question of how it comes out. When a creative writing academic becomes infatuated with his colleague – the poet – it is not long before it begins to threaten his relationship with his partner, Michael. Michael is beautiful. Michael is safe. But the poet is everything he isn’t; she has everything he wants. While he writes about steel and sex, she dreams about the movements of swallows. While he tends to his budding career, she writes from her big, white house in the woods. As he slips between his old life and this new one, his fixation grows into something more powerful. The poet, his Kingfisher, is his sole focus. He is hypnotised. But when simultaneous illnesses threaten to destroy the precarious reality he clings to, he’s forced to question what he can and cannot take from someone. This is a novel about grief, power and desire – and the tangles in between that make up a life.

From National Book Award–winning Elisa Shua Dusapin, a subtle yet powerful portrayal of family, secrets, and silence set against the backdrop of a crumbling house in the French countryside—perfect for readers of Katie Kitamura and Elena Ferrante.“A bewitching meditation on tenderness and violence, intimacy and estrangement, The Old Fire will transport you to an ancient and wild place, immersing you in its temperatures and rainfalls, its grief and grace and sound and silence. You won’t be the same when you leave it.” —Tess Gunty, National Book Award–winning author of The Rabbit Hutch Through the window, I can see a light inside. Agathe leaves New York and returns to her home in the French countryside, after fifteen years away. She and her sister Véra have not seen each other in all those years, and they carry the weight of their own complicated lives. But now their father has died, and they must confront their childhood home on the outskirts of a country estate ravaged by a nearby fire before it is knocked down. They have nine days to empty it. As the pair clean and sift through a lifetime’s worth of belongings, old memories, and resentments surface. Tender and tense, haunting and evocative, The Old Fire is Elisa Shua Dusapin’s most personal and moving novel yet. An exploration of time and memory, of family and belonging, it is also a graceful and profound look at the unsaid and the unanswered, the secrets that remain, and whether you can ever really go home again. “A touching, mysterious novel, imbued with the beauty and strangeness of a fairy tale.” —Aysegül Savas, author of The Anthropologists “Dusapin has a rare and ferocious gift for pinning the quick, slippery, liveness of feeling to the Her talent is a thrill to behold.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

In the days of the British Empire, things were taken that probably shouldn't have been. So how come they're still in museums, galleries and some much stranger places? There are eight million objects in the British Museum alone. A number of them were stolen in wildly dodgy ways - a very big number. A chance encounter with one of them (a mechanical tiger/music box that mauls a soldier when you turn a handle) prompted journalist Marc Fennell to ask- 'What is that? And how the hell did it get here?' The answer was so gloriously weird that it sent Fennell on a globetrotting adventure, investigating the most audacious criminal enterprise in history - the British Empire. With wit, empathy and unflinching honesty, Stuff the British Stole reveals the true stories behind remarkable objects in the world's most celebrated museums. These artifacts tell the stories of power, resistance and survival that have shaped our modern world. Travelling from the pyramids of Egypt to the beaches where Captain Cook first landed, from Tuscan marble quarries to Kenyan torture chambers, Fennell uncovers the uncomfortable truths hidden behind the plaques. The human stories museums would rather we didn't talk about. Part travelogue, part true crime, part reckoning with history, this is a book about how the hell we got here.

Sebuah novel "rakaman dekad" yang menggambarkan jurang generasi antara dua keturunan. Aisyah telah dididik secara tradisional yang segala-galanya mesti akur dengan norma-norma masyarakat dan orang tua-tua. Dua orang anak perempuannya "terkorban" kerana tidak dapat melawan norma masyarakat ini. Apabila membina keluarganya sendiri, suasananya sudah berubah. Anak-anaknya menyanggah "kebenaran" yang dipelajarinya dulu, bersoal jawab mengenai sesuatu yang meragukan, membantah peraturan adat yang mereka anggap lapuk dan usang. Semua tindakan mereka tidak pernah terlintas di hatinya apalagi untuk dilakukan pada zamannya dulu. Pada mulanya, sangat sukar dia menerima perubahan ini. Akan tetapi, akhirnya dia terpaksa mengikut arus pemodenan itu. Dia berjaya membina keluarganya walaupun semua anaknya tidak ada disampingnya seperti yang diharap-harapkan. Semua persoalan ini diolah dengan satu gaya penceritaan yang lembut, indah dan menawan - satu gaya penulisnya yang unik, gaya Zurinah Hassan! ISBN13: 9789834925949

In The Possessed, Witold Gombrowicz, considered by many to be Poland's greatest modernist, draws together the familiar tropes of the Gothic novel to produce a darkly funny and playful subversion of the form. With dreams of escaping his small-town existence and the limitations of his status, a young tennis coach travels to the heart of the Polish countryside where he is to train Maja Ocholowska, a beautiful and promising player whose bourgeois family has fallen upon difficult circumstances. But no sooner has he arrived than his relationship with his pupil develops into one of twisted love and hate, and he becomes embroiled in the fantastic happenings taking place at the dilapidated castle nearby. Haunted kitchens, bewitched towels, conniving secretaries and famous clairvoyants all conspire to determine the fate of the young lovers and the mad prince residing in the castle. Translated directly into English for the first time by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The Possessed is a comic masterpiece that, despite being a literary pastiche, has all the hallmarks of Gombrowicz's typically provocative style.

Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson - or anyone else - has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced, and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well, that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy. And as she contemplates aspects of the troubled past which have brought her to her present state, so too will her drama become one of the few certifiably original fictions of our time.