'I regret to see that my book has turned out un fiasco solenne.' James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else, including two entire stories. Although only 24 when he signed his first publishing contract for the book, Joyce already knew its worth: to alter it in any way would 'retard the course of civilisation in Ireland'. Joyce's aim was to tell the truth — to create a work of art that would reflect life in Ireland at the turn of the last century and by rejecting euphemism, reveal to the Irish the unromantic reality the recognition of which would lead to the spiritual liberation of the country. Each of the fifteen stories offers a glimpse of the lives of ordinary Dubliners — a death, an encounter, an opportunity not taken, a memory rekindled — and collectively they paint a portrait of a nation.

In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, criminals take over after dark. Teen gang leader Alex narrates in fantastically inventive slang that echoes the violent intensity of youth rebelling against society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess’s introduction, “A Clockwork Orange Resucked.”

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving and wise. "If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins wrote to Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.

Desde los años noventa, la argentina Mariana Enriquez, autora de La hermana menor y de la novela Nuestra parte de noche, ha desarrollado un trabajo periodístico apabullante, en calidad y cantidad, que refleja todas sus apetencias, rechazos y obsesiones, una paleta personalísima en la que conviven Bruce Springsteen, Asia Argento, Sylvia Plath, Emily Brönte, la juventud durante los primeros años de la democracia de posdictadura en la Argentina, River Phoenix, Suede, el aborto, las drogas, Kurt Cobain, las ciencias ocultas, Nick Cave, Anne Rice, su gata: un mundo interior sembrado de intereses específicos y alimentado por afluentes inabarcables. Este libro reúne parte de esa obra publicada en medios de varios países pero, fundamentalmente, en el suyo. La mayoría de estos textos aparecieron en la prensa diaria y fueron producidos con urgencia, lo que habla del caudal de información que maneja la autora, necesario para construir estas piezas de acabado perfecto en poco tiempo. Ese caudal es un patrimonio construido a lo largo de años, una cueva del tesoro de la que ella saca, cada tanto, un ejemplar desconocido, un autor, un músico casi ignoto, y lo expone con la actitud de un fanático prudente, de un groupie sobrio, de un fan que jamás avergonzaría al objeto de su fanatismo. A veces se trata de piezas minúsculas, retratos a mano alzada de Adele o de Jeff Bridges, que en su condensación molecular son un destilado después de cuya lectura no hace falta una sola línea más para comprender la esencia de aquel a quien retrata; otras, de piezas más largas en las que le suelta la cuerda a una erudición despreocupada, jamás altiva, como si escribiera para un lector que sabe mucho más que ella; otras, de piezas en las que habla de su universo íntimo –su visión sobre los hijos, las mujeres, el amor, los amigos, la pareja– con un salvajismo tan auténtico que los textos parecen peces aún vivos, clavados en la página con un arpón. El otro lado es una amalgama sofisticada e inquietante de lo mejor de la obra de no ficción de una de las más destacadas escritoras contemporáneas. MARIANA ENRIQUEZ nació en 1973 en Buenos Aires. Es licenciada en Periodismo y Comunicación Social, subeditora del suplemento “Radar” del diario Página/12 y docente en la Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Ha publicado las novelas Bajar es lo peor (1995), Cómo desaparecer completamente (2004), Este es el mar (2017), Nuestra parte de noche (2019, Premio Herralde de Novela); la nouvelle Chicos que vuelven (2010); las colecciones de cuentos Los peligros de fumar en la cama (2009), Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego (2016, Premio Ciutat de Barcelona en la categoría de lengua castellana, traducida a 22 idiomas); el libro ilustrado Ese verano a oscuras (2019); y, los volúmenes de no ficción: Alguien camina sobre tu tumba. Mis viajes a cementerios (2013) y La hermana menor. Un retrato de Silvina Ocampo (2014).

Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters. Contains: "Big Red Son," "Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think," "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed," "Authority and American Usage," "The View from Mrs. Thompson's," "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," "Up, Simba," "Consider the Lobster," "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" and "Host."

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions. As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this U.K. bestseller is a major work by one of our finest writers.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed. Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

An award-winning international sensation―with a second-act dystopian twist― Time Shelter is a tour de force set in a world clamoring for the past before it forgets. “At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created,” begins Time Shelter ’s enigmatic narrator, who will go unnamed. “In the mid–seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting October 22, 4,004 years before Christ.” But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a “vagrant in time” who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century. In an apricot-colored building in Zurich, surrounded by curiously planted forget-me-nots, Gaustine has opened the first “clinic for the past,” an institution that offers an inspired treatment for Alzheimer’s each floor reproduces a past decade in minute detail, allowing patients to transport themselves back in time to unlock what is left of their fading memories. Serving as Gaustine’s assistant, the narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to nostalgic scents and even wisps of afternoon light. But as the charade becomes more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic to escape from the dead-end of their daily lives―a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Through sharply satirical, labyrinth-like vignettes reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka, the narrator recounts in breathtaking prose just how he became entrenched in a plot to stop time itself. “A trickster at heart, and often very funny” (Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker ), prolific Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov masterfully stalks the tragedies of the last century, including our own, in what becomes a haunting and eerily prescient novel teeming with ideas. Exquisitely translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter is a truly unforgettable classic from “one of Europe’s most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists” (Dave Eggers). 19 black-and-white drawings

Before the nightmare, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary life. But when splintering, blood-soaked images start haunting her thoughts, Yeong-hye decides to purge her mind and renounce eating meat. In a country where societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye's decision to embrace a more “plant-like” existence is a shocking act of subversion. And as her passive rebellion manifests in ever more extreme and frightening forms, scandal, abuse, and estrangement begin to send Yeong-hye spiraling deep into the spaces of her fantasy. In a complete metamorphosis of both mind and body, her now dangerous endeavor will take Yeong-hye—impossibly, ecstatically, tragically—far from her once-known self altogether.

A gargantuan, mind-altering tragi-comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America. Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human—and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.