A young girl clings fiercely to the damaged love of her mother—a taciturn farmworker cast out by her family and scorned by her village after giving birth out of wedlock—in this devastating and lyrically rendered novel from a French-Italian maverick.Marie lives with her mother, Genie, in a ramshackle house by a willow-lined river in rural France, among farms, vineyards, and wheatfields. Her grandparents’ house is nearby, beyond a hill of white sand overrun by foxes, but she and her mother are not welcome there. Every morning, Genie walks to the neighboring farms and houses to do what work there is to be done—pruning vines, husking corn, feeding livestock, making sausages and preserves. When farmers and villagers greet the woman, she says nothing, and keeps walking.Once, she was lighthearted, a lovely girl from one of the best families in the valley; but now they all call her “Crazy Genie.” While her mother works, Marie waits at the edge of the fields, or in the corners of dark kitchens, yearning for her mother to turn from her work and notice her; longing for the moment when they will be back in their lonely house by the river.  “I wanted to love her every minute of my life, so that she would want me,” Marie thinks. “I followed her everywhere. She would ‘Get out of my hair.’ But me, I wanted to love her, to always be near her.”Crazy Genie, told in Marie’s ingenuous, straightforward voice—first as a child and later as hopeful, emotionally wounded young woman—is the second novel by the French author Inès Cagnati, who grew up in poverty in rural France in the 1940s, the child of Italian immigrant agricultural workers. Rich in observation, color and detail, and devastating in its portrayal of a child’s unconditional love and of society’s callous prejudices, Crazy Genie won the Prix des Deux Magots in 1977. Her first novel, Free Day, won the Prix Roger Nimier in 1973. Together these books cement Cagnati’s astonishing power as a writer to convey the experience of people literature has overlooked, awakening compassion and giving a voice to the voiceless.

A “linguist-traveler” arrives by plane to Ravicka, a city of yellow air in which an undefined crisis is causing the inhabitants to flee. Although fluent in the native language, she quickly finds herself on the outside of every experience. Things happen to her, events transpire, but it is as if the city itself, the performance of life there, eludes her. Setting out to uncover the source of the city’s erosion, she is beset by this other crisis—an ontological crisis—as she struggles to retain a sense of what is happening. Event Factory is the first in a series of novels (also available are the second, The Ravickians; the third, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge; and the fourth, Houses of Ravicka) that Renee Gladman is writing about the invented city-state of Ravicka, a foreign “other” place fraught with the crises of American urban experience, not least the fundamental problem of how to move through the world at all.

Masharakat Chantek: Enigma Penyisihan OKU membicarakan perihal kehidupan komuniti Orang Kurang Upaya (OKU) dengan mengumpulkan sekelumit kecil beban penyisihan sosial yang sentiasa dilalui sepanjang perjalanan kehidupan. OKU sudah lama dijadikan objek inspirasi (inspirational porn) ketika mereka bertarung sendirian dengan ‘tangan’ dan ‘kaki’ terikat untuk meneruskan kelangsungan hidup. Naskhah ini membawakan persoalan demi persoalan, daripada sang penulis yang juga merupakan seorang OKU. Mengapakah OKU dicitrakan dalam perihal ‘tidak cantik’? Adakah kekurangupayaan telah menghilangkan sifat cantik seorang manusia? Sudahkah yang ‘cantik’ dapat menghindari segala kekurangan? Selalunya OKU dianggap sebagai sumber inspirasi hanya karena mereka sedang berjuang untuk bertahan hidup meski dengan kekurangupayaan. Namun, pandangan ini mengabaikan realiti kelemahan sosial yang mereka alami tatkala masyarakat pula seringkali gagal mendukung mereka. Masyarakat mendabik bahawa mereka sangat menyantuni OKU. Mereka sudah menyediakan imaginasi ‘istimewa’, ‘khas’, ‘penuh inspirasi’. OKU yang tidak berupaya hanyalah mereka yang malas berusaha. ‘Masyarakat cantik’ hanya menanggapi OKU dalam imej-imej kekurangupayaan dan mengabaikan ketidakupayaan sosial yang dialami oleh mereka. Kehadiran buku ini sedang menzahirkan fikiran-fikiran yang melangkaui zamannya. Penulis sedang merebut kembali wacana kekurangupayaan dan ketidakupayaan yang selama ini menjadi milik hegemoni ‘masyarakat cantik’. Naratif semasa mengenai OKU sedang diperdebatkan kembali dalam laras-laras popular dengan disertai perspektif mendalam penelitian akademik. Buku kecil ini menggarap segala permasalahan selingkar OKU dengan bersahaja. Semua persoalan-persoalan rumit ini akan cuba ditelanjangi secara jelas dan tanpa disembunyikan lagi. Hal demikian kerana ada beberapa sisi yang masih tersembunyi daripada pemahaman khalayak awam mengenainya. Kehadiran buku kecil ini cuba memberikan suatu pemetaan baharu kepada kefahaman sedia ada berkaitan OKU. Analisisnya masih boleh diperdebatkan secara ilmiah. Semoga para pembaca yang budiman berhenti sejenak dan merenung sedalam-dalamnya setiap pandangan yang dilontarkan oleh penulis.

A man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and finally he gets stuck at the end of a forest road. Soon it gets dark and starts to snow, but instead of going back to find help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest. Inevitably, the man gets lost, and as he grows cold and tired, he encounters a glowing being amid the obscurity. Strange, haunting and dreamlike, A Shining is the latest work of fiction by Jon Fosse, 'the Beckett of the twenty-first century' (Le Monde).

Sinister forces draw together a cast of desperate characters in this eerie and absorbing novel from Yoko Ogawa. An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Years later, the writer’s stepson reflects upon his stepmother and the strange stories she used to tell him. Meanwhile, a surgeon’s lover vows to kill him if he does not leave his wife. Before she can follow-through on her crime of passion, though, the surgeon will cross paths with another remarkable woman, a cabaret singer whose heart beats delicately outside of her body. But when the surgeon promises to repair her condition, he sparks the jealousy of another man who would like to preserve the heart in a custom tailored bag. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders—their fates converge in a darkly beautiful web that they are each powerless to escape. Macabre, fiendishly clever, and with a touch of the supernatural, Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge creates a haunting tapestry of death—and the afterlife of the living.

A man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and finally he gets stuck at the end of a forest road. Soon it gets dark and starts to snow, but instead of going back to find help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest. Inevitably, the man gets lost, and as he grows cold and tired, he encounters a glowing being amid the obscurity. Strange, haunting and dreamlike, A Shining is the latest work of fiction by Jon Fosse, 'the Beckett of the twenty-first century' (Le Monde).

Sinister forces draw together a cast of desperate characters in this eerie and absorbing novel from Yoko Ogawa. An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Years later, the writer’s stepson reflects upon his stepmother and the strange stories she used to tell him. Meanwhile, a surgeon’s lover vows to kill him if he does not leave his wife. Before she can follow-through on her crime of passion, though, the surgeon will cross paths with another remarkable woman, a cabaret singer whose heart beats delicately outside of her body. But when the surgeon promises to repair her condition, he sparks the jealousy of another man who would like to preserve the heart in a custom tailored bag. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders—their fates converge in a darkly beautiful web that they are each powerless to escape. Macabre, fiendishly clever, and with a touch of the supernatural, Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge creates a haunting tapestry of death—and the afterlife of the living.

Nobody in Eric’s family talks about why photos of his Uncle Mikey are on every table, in every room. Years of silence, together with a relentless Buddhist upbringing, has Eric convinced he is Mikey’s reincarnation. But when a summer in the mountain temples of Lion Rock Hill results in a crisis of faith, Eric is confused by his feelings of betrayal. His growing understanding of his place in Hong Kong society and the circumstances surrounding his uncle’s disappearance compels him to question all that he has come to believe is true. And just like his uncle before him, Eric finds himself forced to choose between his family and himself.SUNSET AT LION ROCK is a letter from a nephew to his uncle who died before he was born. It serves as a window into parts of a Eurasian child’s life which his family can never know, documenting his attempt to navigate racial confusion, religious trauma, the meaning of friendship, and the struggle for self-discovery in a shifting culture on the eve of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China (PRO).“A notably rewarding read from an obvious talent.”—Xu Xi 許素細, author of That Man in Our LivesLove and loss share the same root in Sunset at Lion Rock. The narrator’s passionate, searching voice takes us through the tug-of-war of a biracial and multicultural Hong Kong native, as he navigates the pain of understanding family decisions alongside his home city’s complex history, as well as finding resolution, acceptance, and peace.---Flora Qian, New York City, USA, author of South of the Yangtze, winner of the Proverse Prize 2022Wong Foreman's Hong Kong is complexly nuanced, is existentially problematic, is much more real and multi-prismed than the English language can manage to imagine and construct. A flawed place, an ingenious place, a borrowed place, a tragic place, a magic place—an all too human, all too spirited—emporium of the past gasping through the present.— Jason S Polley, Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Hong Kong Baptist University; Jason S Polley, Wing Kin Vinton Poon, and Lian-Hee Wee (eds). Cultural Conflict in Hong Angles on a Coherent Imaginary. Palgrave, 2018.

At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars's Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch—except that it's a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his starstruck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book), who foresees a companionship in crime that will also be an unprecedented scientific collaboration, Moravagine travels from Moscow to San Antonio to deepest Amazonia, engaged in schemes and scams as, among other things, terrorist, speculator, gold prospector, and pilot. He also enjoys a busy sideline in rape and murder. At last, the two friends return to Europe—just in time for World War I, when "the whole world was doing a Moravagine." This new edition of Cendrars's underground classic is the first in English to include the author's afterword, "How I Wrote Moravagine."