Que se passe-t-il quand les fantasmes qu'on a dans la tête se répandent dans la vie - et vice versa ? Ces "contes de la folie ordinaire" pour une fin de siècle conjuguent plusieurs sortes d'addiction : l'amour, la vengeance, la drogue. On y voit des handicapés monter une organisation terroriste, un auteur de romans sentimentaux s'abandonner à son penchant pour la pornographie, et un couple d'accidentés de la vie fusionner dans l'amour absolu. Avec ces trois romances "chimiques", Irvine Welsh s'aventure dans une zone dangereuse, où la réalité ne fait que confirmer nos pires cauchemars.

''The best book ever written by man or woman . . . Deserves to sell more copies than the Bible" —Rebel Inc THE BESTSELLING NOVEL THAT INSPIRED DANNY BOYLE’S CULT FILM Described by The Sunday Times as "the voice of punk, grown up, grown wiser and grown eloquent," Trainspotting follows the lives of a group of Scottish junkies. Its bleak depiction of drug addiction is vivid and brutal, and has lost none of its power to shock. Choose the book that outraged the critics. Choose the literary phenomenon that defined a generation. Choose Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh.

From Marcial Gala, the author of the award-winning The Black Cathedral, Call Me Cassandra is a darkly magical tale of a haunted young dreamer, born in the wrong body and time, who believes himself to be a doomed prophetess from ancient Greek mythologyTen-year-old Rauli lives in a world that is often hostile. His older brother is violent; his philandering father doesn’t understand him; his intelligence and sensitivity do not endear him to the other children at school. He loves to read, especially Greek myths, but in Cuba in the 1970s, novels and gods can be dangerous. Despite the signs that warn Rauli to repress and fear what he is, he knows three things to be true: First, that he was born in the wrong body. Second, that he will die, aged eighteen, as a soldier in the Cuban intervention in Angola. And third, that he is the reincarnation of the Trojan princess Cassandra.Moving between Rauli’s childhood and adolescence, between the Angolan battlefield, the Cuban city of Cienfuegos, and the shores of ancient Troy, Marcial Gala’s Call Me Cassandra tells of the search for identity amid the collapse of Cuba’s utopian dreams. Burdened with knowledge of tragedies yet to come, Rauli nonetheless strives to know himself. Lyrical and gritty, heartbreaking and luminous, Rauli’s is the story of the inexorable pull of destiny.

From one of Japan's greatest modern writers comes an exquisitely disturbing novel of sexual combat and concealed passion, a work that distills beauty, longing, and loathing into an intoxicating poisoned cocktail. An aging, embittered novelist sets out to avenge himself on the women who have betrayed him. He finds the perfect instrument in Yuichi, a young man whose beauty makes him irresistible to women but who is just discovering his attraction to other men. As Yuichi's mentor presses him into a loveless marriage and a series of equally loveless philanderings, his protégé enters the gay underworld of postwar Japan. In that hidden society of parks and tearooms, prostitutes and aristocratic blackmailers, Yuichi is as defenseless as any of the women he preys on. Mordantly observed, intellectually provocative, and filled with icy eroticism, Forbidden Colors is a masterpiece.

A diabolical collection of stories featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, goblins, and the macabre, by “one of Latin America’s most exciting authors” (Silvia Moreno-Garcia) On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed—all those birds were once women. Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women—these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists. Lyrical and hypnotic, heart-stopping and deeply moving, Enriquez’s stories never fail to enthrall, entertain, and leave us shaken. Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People showcases Enriquez’s unique blend of the literary and the horrific, and underscores why Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, calls her “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”

Thirty years in the making, William Gass's second novel first appeared on the literary scene in 1995, at which time it was promptly hailed as an indisputable masterpiece. The story of a middle aged professor who, upon completion of his massive historical study, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany, finds himself writing a novel about his own life instead of the introduction to his magnum opus. The Tunnel meditates on history, hatred, unhappiness, and, above all, language.

Dog Days considers why we tell stories the way we do, and how we might tell them otherwise. Combining memoir and essay, cultural criticism and literary experiment, it begins with a personal trauma - the account of how Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays of 2009 - but looks outwards as much as inwards for answers. Skilful and controlled, but also searching and febrile, this is a book that unsettles time and narrative, art and imagination, embodying in form the trauma that it describes. Taking in writers and artists from Vivian Gornick to Robert Burton, David Lynch to Sylvia Plath, LaBarge picks apart the structures of narrative forms to ask how it might be possible to tell the 'Good Story', and its aftermath, on its own terms.

New Year’s Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run. The explosive first long work by “the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances. A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.

Death is an inevitable fact of life. Throughout the centuries, humanity has sought to understand this sobering thought through art and ritual. The theme of memento mori informs medieval Danse Macabre, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Renaissance paintings of dissected corpses and “anatomical Eves,” Gothic literature, funeral effigies, Halloween, and paintings of the Last Judgment. Deceased ancestors are celebrated in the Mexican Day of the Dead, while the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead to secure their afterlife. A volume of unprecedented breadth and sinister beauty, Death: A Graveside Companion examines a staggering range of cultural attitudes toward death. The book is organized into themed chapters: The Art of Dying, Examining the Dead, Memorializing the Dead, The Personification of Death, Symbolizing Death, Death as Amusement, and The Dead After Life. Each chapter begins with thought-provoking articles by curators, academics, and journalists followed by gallery spreads presenting a breathtaking variety of death-related imagery and artifacts. From skulls to the dance of death, statuettes to ex libris, memento mori to memorabilia, the majority of the images are of artifacts in the astonishing collection of Richard Harris and range from 2000 BCE to the present day, running the gamut of both high and popular culture. Table of Contents 1. The Art of Dying 2. Examining the Dead 3. Memorializing the Dead 4. The Personification of Death 5. Symbolizing Death 6. Death as Amusement 7. The Dead After Life Essays: Death in Ancient and Present-Day Mexico, Eva Aridjis,The Power of Hair as Human Relic in Mourning Jewelry - Karen Bachmann, Medusa and the Power of the Severed Head, Laetitia Barbier, Anatomical Expressionism, Eleanor Crook, Poe and the Pathological Sublime, Mark Dery, Eros and Thanatos, Lisa Downing, Death-Themed Amusements, Joanna Ebenstein, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, Bruce Goldfarb, Theatre, Death and the Grand Guignol, Mel Gordon, Holy Spiritualism, Elizabeth Harper, Playing dead – A Gruesome Form of Amusement, Mervyn Heard, The Anatomy of Holy Transformation, Liselotte Hermes da Fonseca, Collecting Death, Evan Michelson, Art and Afterlife: Ethel le Rossignol and Georgiana Houghton, Mark Pilkington, The Dance of Death, Kevin Pyle, Art, Science and the Changing Conventions of Anatomical Representation, Michael Sappol, Spiritualism and Photography, Shannon Taggart, Playing with Dead Faces, John Troyer, Anatomy Embellished in the Cabinet of Frederik Ruysch, Bert van de Roemer