Trainspotting is the novel that first launched Irvine Welsh's spectacular career—an authentic, unrelenting, and strangely exhilarating episodic group portrait of blasted lives. It accomplished for ...

As always, Alice Munro surprises us. While the nine stories in this new collection could not be written by anyone else, they are subtly different. The title story, for example, ranges from small-to...

Since Glass and God, which was her first full-length collection published in Britain and which was nominated for the 1998 Forward Prize, Anne Carson has published a book a year to extraordinary cri...

Elizabeth Costello is a 2003 novel by South African-born Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee. In this novel, Elizabeth Costello, a celebrated aging Australian writer, travels around the world and gives...

The Children of Men begins in England in 2021, in a world where all human males have become sterile and no child will be born again. The final generation has turned twenty-five, and civilization is...

. In his final two books, Hector Viel Temperley sought to create a complete world, a surreal realm of profound spirituality that would be attained through intensely physical experience. In "Crawl,"...

Unless, first published by Fourth Estate, an imprint of Harper Collins in 2002, is the final novel by Canadian writer Carol Shields. Semi-autobiographical, it was the capstone to Shields's writing ...

American Tabloid is a 1995 novel by James Ellroy. The novel chronicles three rogue American law enforcement officers from November 22, 1958 through November 22, 1963. Each becomes involved in a web...

Jaime Gil de Biedma y Alba (Nov. 13, 1929-Jan. 8, 1990) was a Spanish post-Civil War poet. He was born in Nava de la Asunción[1] on November 13, 1929. He stopped writing poetry some ten years be...

The Progress of Love is a book of short stories by Alice Munro, published by McClelland and Stewart in 1986. It won the 1986 Governor General's Award for English Fiction, her third win of that award.

A collection spanning the range of the writer's career includes his first published poem, his celebrated verses on violence in Africa, his mature work from "The Star-Apple Kingdom," and his late ma...

This entirely new edition brings together all of Philip Larkin’s poems. In addition to those that appear in Collected Poems (1988) and Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005), some unpublished pieces from...

A complete collection of short fiction by the creator of Philip Marlowe includes stories such as "Blackmailers Don't Shoot," "The Pencil," and "English Summer."

Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet...

Winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation's Citation for Fiction. An eleven-year-old heroine tells her unforgett...

Sing, Unburied, Sing is a 2017 novel by Jesmyn Ward. It is about a family's dynamics in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. The novel received overwhelmingly positive reviews, and was ...

Nazneen finds herself married off to a man twice her age and moved to London, where she meets a younger man involved in radical politics and begins to wonder if she has a say in her own destiny.

Der Blindensturz (1985) (translated as The Parable of the Blind) is the title of short novel in ten chapters by German writer Gert Hofmann. Inspired by Parabel der Blinden (1568), a painting by Ne...

Kitchen （キッチン）is a novel written by Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto (吉本ばなな）in 1988 and translated into English in 1993 by Megan Backus. Although one may notice a certain Western influence in Yosh...

Cigarettes is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State. Though nothing is as simple as it...

Waterland is a 1983 novel by British author Graham Swift. It won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. (Swift won this prize in 1996 with his novel Last Orders). It i...

The History of the Siege of Lisbon (Portuguese: História do Cerco de Lisboa) is a novel by Portuguese author José Saramago, first published in 1989. It tells the story of a proofreader and the sto...

A writer, fearful of losing his abilities and hence his connection with the world, takes an afternoon walk and has several encounters that reaffirm his confidence

Couples, Passersby (German: Paare, Passanten) is a 1981 short story collection by the German writer Botho Strauß. It consists of narrative vignettes and aphoristic sequences divided into six sectio...

Costas Haritos, a CID chief in central Athens, is uncomfortably married, aggressive and pessimistic, and only manages to relax when he is at home reading his English dictionaries. A veteran of the ...

Hempel's now-classic collection of short fiction is peopled by complex characters who have discovered that their safety nets are not dependable and who must now learn to balance on the threads of w...

A captivating first novel of love and madness, Hallucinating Foucault tells of a devoted reader's quest to find and liberate Paul Michel, enfant terrible of French Letters, who is schizophrenic and...

Hella S. Haasse, one of Holland's most popular contemporary authors, was born in the Dutch East Indies in 1918. The influence of her early years in this region, where she left behind unforgettable ...

The Piper family is steeped in secrets, lies, and unspoken truths. At the eye of the storm is one secret that threatens to shake their lives -- even destroy them. Set on stormy Cape Breton Island o...

Whales begin sinking ships. Toxic, eyeless crabs poison Long Island's water supply. The North Sea shelf collapses, killing thousands in Europe. Around the world, countries are beginning to feel the...

Pereira Maintains (Italian: Sostiene Pereira) is a 1994 novel by the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi. It is also known as Pereira Declares and Declares Pereira. Its story follows Pereira, a journal...

Hailed as "original and unsettling, an Animal Farm for the new century" (The Wall Street Journal), this first novel lingers long after the last page has been turned. Described as a "fascinating psy...

Contact is a 1985 science fiction novel by American scientist Carl Sagan. It deals with the theme of contact between humanity and a more technologically advanced, extraterrestrial life form. It ran...

In the late 1940s the Civil War is over, and Franco is still very much in charge. Prullas, a once-popular playwright, leaves his wife by the seaside while he pursues a crowded life in the stifling ...

Extinction is the last of Thomas Bernhard’s novels. It was originally published in German in 1986.

A tale inspired by the complex relationship between famous hysteria patient Blanche Wittman and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Marie Curie follows the scientist's ongoing efforts to understand the n...

Disillusioned and loveless, a chain-smoking art history professor, who spends her spare time singing in nightclubs and tending to her young daughter, finds herself pursued by an erratic, would-be l...

Obabakoak is a 1988 short story collection by the Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga. The title can be translated as "Individuals and things of Obaba". The book won the National Novel Prize.

A novel by the author of "A New History of Torments", "The Fiction of Reality" and "Figures of Enchantment". It features the character Urim who wanders the world, and yet in finding the end of his ...

The Busconductor Hines is the first published novel of the Scottish writer James Kelman, published in 1984. This novel is the first to be published by Kelman, but it was written after A Chancer.

Black Box is a novel by Israeli writer Amos Oz, first published in 1986. The book is written in the form of letters, which the various characters write to each other. The correspondence ultimately...

When Julia Lambert, an art professor, settles into her idyllic Maine house for the summer, she plans to spend the time tending her fragile relationships with her father, a repressive neurosurgeon, ...

Flora Fontages is a famous Parisian actress who has been in exile from her native Canada for twenty years. When word comes that her long-estranged daughter, Maud, has disappeared in Quebec City, sh...

Dramatizes the conflict in modern China between reformers and party hardliners

A novel of Korea dealing with a rebellion against the Japanese occupation early this century. Through the eyes of nobles and peasants is seen the conflict between nationalists who want to fight and...

Get Shorty is a 1990 novel by American novelist Elmore Leonard. In 1995, the novel was adapted into a film of the same title, and in 2017 it was adapted into a television series of the same title.

Shame is Salman Rushdie's third novel, published in 1983. This book was written out of a desire to approach the problem of "artificial" (other-made) country divisions, their residents' complicity, ...

The poignant story of an elderly, impoverished violin maker, a master craftsman who refuses to trim his values for the modern age, as seen through the eyes of his young protégé. A best-seller in Bu...

A Gate at the Stairs is a novel by American fiction writer Lorrie Moore. It was published by Random House in 2009. The novel won Amazon.com's "best of the month" designation and was a finalist for ...