And Other Stories Books

Description: ' She thought that it was precisely when things get uncomfortable or can't be shown that something interesting comes to light. That is the point of no return, the point that must be reached, the point you reach after crossing the border of what has already been said, what has already been seen. It's cold out there.' This hybrid novel-part research notes, part fictionalised diary, and part travelogue-uses the stories of polar exploration to make sense of the protagonist's own concerns as she comes of age as an artist, a daughter, and a sister to an autistic brother. Conceptual and emotionally compelling, it advances fearlessly into the frozen emotional lacunae of difficult family relationships. Deserving winner of multiple awards upon its Catalan and Spanish publication, Brother in Ice is a richly rewarding journey into the unknown.

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ISBN: 9781911508205

Description: This book is fearless and luminous and full of grace; it travels to the edge of death and finds life there. Its attention to the particulars of love - between the ones who will go and the ones they will leave - is something close to sublime.--Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams A nurse sleeps at the bedside of his dying patients; a wife deceives her husband by never telling him he has cancer; a bedridden man has to be hidden from his demented and amorous eighty-year-old wife. In her poignant and genre-busting debut, Susana Moreira Marques confronts us with our own mortality and inspires us to think about what is important. Accompanying a palliative care team, Moreira Marques travels to Tras-os-Montes, a forgotten corner of northern Portugal, a rural area abandoned by the young. Crossing great distances where eagles circle over the roads, she visits villages where rural ways of life are disappearing. She listens to families facing death and gives us their stories in their words as well as through her own meditations. Brilliantly blending the immediacy of oral history with the sensibility of philosophical reportage, Moreira Marques's book speaks about death in a fresh way. Susana Moreira Marques is a writer and journalist. She was born in Oporto in 1976 and now lives in Lisbon, where she writes for Publico and Jornal de Negocios. Between 2005 and 2010 Moreira Marques lived in London, working at the BBC World Service while also serving as a correspondent for Portuguese newspaper Publico. Her journalism has won several prizes, including the Premio AMI--Jornalismo Contra a Indiferenca and the 2012 UNESCO Human Rights and Integration Journalism Award (Portugal). Julia Sanches's translations have appeared in Suelta, The Washington Review, Asymptote, Two Lines, and Revista Machado, amongst others. She currently lives in New York City. And Other Stories Now and at the Hour of Our Death - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781908276629

Description: Published in Australia in 2009, Barley Patch was Murnane's first book in fourteen years, written after a period in which he had thought he would never write fiction again. The book begins with the question, 'Must I write?' What follows is both a chronicle of the images that have endured in the author's mind and an exploration of their nature. The clarity of the images is extraordinary, as is their range, from Mandrake the Magician to the bachelor uncle kicked in the 'stones' as a child, from a cousin's doll's house to the mysterious woman who lets her hair down, from the soldier beetle who winks messages from God to the racehorses that run forever in the author's mind. The narrator lays bare the acts of writing and imagining, finally giving us a glimpse of the mythical place where the characters of fiction dwell before they come into existence in books. With something of the spirit of Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, this is a cornerstone of Murnane's unclassifiable project, for which he is a deserving Nobel Prize candidate.'A genius.' Teju Cole.

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ISBN: 9781916751149

Description: Juan Pablo Villalobos's fifth novel adopts a gentle, fable-like tone, approaching the problem of racism from the perspective that any position as idiotic as xenophobia can only be fought with sheer absurdity. In an unnamed city, colonised by an unnamed world power, an immigrant named Gaston makes his living selling exotic vegetables to eateries around the city. He has a dog called Kitten, who's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and a good friend called Max, who's in a deep depression after being forced to close his restaurant. Meanwhile, Max's son, Pol, a scientist away on a scientific expedition into the Arctic, can offer little support. Gaston begins a quest, or rather three: he must search for someone to put his dog to sleep humanely; he must find a space in which to open a new restaurant with Max; and he must look into the truth behind the news being sent back by Pol: that human life may be the by-product of an ancient alien attempt at colonisation. and those aliens might intend to make a return visit. And Other Stories Invasion of the Spirit People - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781913505363

Description: Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her the nickname 'Boulder'. When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik and the couple decides to move there together, Samsa decides that she wants to have a child. She is already forty and can't bear to let the opportunity pass her by. Boulder is less enthused, but doesn't know how to say no - and so finds herself dragged along on a journey that feels as thankless as it is alien. With motherhood changing Samsa into a stranger, Boulder must decide where her priorities lie, and whether her yearning for freedom can truly trump her yearning for love. Once again, Eva Baltasar demonstrates her pre-eminence as a chronicler of queer voices navigating a hostile world - and in prose as brittle and beautiful as an ancient saga.

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ISBN: 9781913505387

Description: Shortlisted for the 2011 Guardian First Book Award and the 2012 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Tochtli lives in a palace. He loves hats, samurai, guillotines and dictionaries, and what he wants more than anything right now is a new pet for his private zoo: a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. But Tochtli is a child whose father is a drug baron on the verge of taking over a powerful cartel, and Tochtli is growing up in a luxury hideout that he shares with hit men, prostitutes, dealers, servants and the odd corrupt politician or two. Down the Rabbit Hole, a masterful and darkly comic first novel, is the chronicle of a delirious journey to grant a child's wish.

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ISBN: 9781913505578

Description: Elya is the lad with the vision, and Elya has the map. Zivand Kiva aren't so sure. The water may run out before they find the Village of Lakes. The food may run out before the flaky crescent pastries of Prune Town. They may never reach the Village of Girls (how disappointing); they may wellstumble into Russian Town, rumoured to be a dangerous place for Jews (it is). As three young boys set off from Mezritsh with a case of bristle brushes tosell in the great market town of Lublin, wearing shoes of uneven quality andpossessed of decidedly unequal enthusiasms, they quickly find that nothing, not Elya's jokes nor Kiva's prayers nor Ziv's sublime irritatingness, can preparethem for the future as it comes barrelling down to meet them. Absurd, riveting,alarming, hilarious, the dialogue devastatingly sharp and the pacingextraordinary, Lublin is a journey tonowhere that changes everything it touches.

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ISBN: 9781913505943

Description: A fairy tale run amok, The Taiga Syndrome follows an unnamed Ex-Detective as she searches for a couple that has fled to the far reaches of the Earth. A betrayed husband is convinced by a brief telegram that his second ex-wife wants him to track her down - that she wants to be found. He hires the Ex-Detective, who sets out with a translator into a snowy, hostile forest where strange things happen and translation serves to betray both sense and the senses. The stories of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood haunt the Ex-Detective's quest. As she enters a territory overrun with the primitive excesses of capitalism - accumulation and expulsion, corruption and cruelty -the lessons of her journey unfold: that sometimes leaving everything behind is the only thing left to do.

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ISBN: 9781911508687

Description: Originally published between 1985 and 2012, these stories offer an enthralling introduction to the work of one of contemporary fiction's greatest magicians, and a map of Gerald Murnane's evolution as a writer. Spare, transparent and profane, This career-spanning volume ranges from 'Finger Web', a fractal tale of the scars of war and the roots of misogyny, to 'Land Deal', which imagines Australia's colonisation and the ultimate vengeance of its indigenous people as a series of nested dreams, to 'The Interior of Gaaldine', a story which finds its anxious protagonist stranded beyond the limits of fiction itself, and which points the way toward Murnane's later works, from Barley Patch to Border Districts. With potent style and determined vision, Murnane creates sensitive portraits of intimate relationships - with parents, uncles and aunts, and particularly children - and probes each situation for anxiety and embarrassment, shame or delight. Murnane treats emotions and thoughts as he does minor objects: he shines light through them and makes them new, remaking the vessel of literature as he goes. And Other Stories Collected Short Fiction - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781911508649

Description: To Leave with the Reindeer is the account of a woman who has been trained for a life she cannot live. She readies herself for freedom, and questions its limits, by exploring how humans relate to animals. Rosenthal weaves an intricate pattern, combining the central narrative with many other voices - vets, farmers, breeders, trainers, a butcher - to produce a polyphonic composition full of fascinating and disconcerting insights. Wise, precise, generous, To Leave with the Reindeer takes a clear-eyed look at the dilemmas of domestication, both human and animal, and the price we might pay to break free.

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ISBN: 9781911508427

Description: Someone has written that all art aspires to the condition of music. My experience is that all art, including all music, aspires to the condition of horse-racing.' This collection of essays leads the reader into the searching and wildly fertile imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing, author of the classics Border Districts and Tamarisk Row, and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award. He writes of himself: as a boy making racehorses of his marbles, an obsession shared with Jack Kerouac; as a writer, working his first ten years in secret; as a reader, trying to understand the mystery of the right sentence by way of Virginia Woolf and Robert Frost; as a teacher, exploring the endless ways in which words can express the contours of our thoughts. From these vantage points Murnane sees the worlds of significance that lie within, or just beyond, the everyday details of Australian life. Carrying the reader with him across the valleys, plains and grasslands of his mind, this singular author creates an immersive landscape in which every word has its own space, shape and weight. And Other Stories Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781911508663

Description: A fifteen-year-old girl and her father, Johannes, take a cruise to Greece on the SS Proleterka. Jaeggy recounts the girl's youth in her distinctively strange, telescopic prose: the remarried mother, cold and unconcerned; the father who was allowed only rare visits with the child; the years spent stashed away with relatives or at boarding school. For the girl and her father, their time on the ship becomes their 'last and first chance to be together.' On board, she becomes the object of the sailors' affection, receiving a violent, carnal education. Mesmerised by the desire to be experienced, she crisply narrates her trysts as well as her near-total neglect of her father. Proleterka is a ferocious study of distance, diffidence and 'insomniac resentment.

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ISBN: 9781911508564

Description: Shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize Shortlisted for the Premio Valle-Inclan prize for its translation A recently divorced man trying to enjoy himself in one of the trendier districts of Buenos Aires finds himself at the centre a series of strange coincidences. These blips in causality are at first easily rationalised, but soon escalate from the merely implausible to the impossible to the cataclysmic. More, each accident of fate, piling one atop the other, drags a new, rambling tale in its wake, until the very ground beneath the man's feet seems likely to buckle beneath the weight of so many shaggy dogs. And yet, with master storyteller Cesar Aira holding their leashes, what better vacation from reality could any reader-or divorce-desire?. And Other Stories The Divorce - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781913505042

Description: A GUARDIAN BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR 2024AN OBSERVER BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR 2024A NEW STATESMAN BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR 2024 Mammoth's protagonist is a disenchanted young lesbian. She's inexperienced, irritated by life, eager to gestate, and determined to strip everything else down to essentials. She seduces men at random, swaps her urban habitat for an isolated farmhouse, befriends a shepherd, nurses lambs, battles stray cats, waits tables, cleans house, and dabbles in sex work - all in pursuit of life in the raw. This small bomb of a novel, not remotely pastoral, builds to a howling crescendo of social despair, leaving us at the mercy of Eva Baltasar's wild voice.

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ISBN: 9781916751002

Description: If death comes to a loved one, can we grieve alone? When all around is in ruins, can we confine our lives to one beautiful room constructed out of art, or love, or family ties? And when the words we know prove inadequate, can we turn to the language of birds? In an arty mansion in Milan's industrial zone, two men are shown one of the last remaining Futurist noise machines - an Intonarumore - and a painful old truth surfaces. A musician travels to three continents to see her siblings before returning to Johannesburg; her home is plundered every night around her as she composes a requiem. A man follows his male lover from London to Berlin's clubbing scene and on to a ruined castle in which the lover's family lives. He is looking for an antidote. The protagonists in SJ Naude's South African Literary Award-winning short story collection are listening out for answers that cannot be expressed. Offering fresh perspectives on gay, expat and artistic subcultures and tackling the pain of loss head on, Naude's stories go fearlessly and tenderly to the heart of our experiences of desire, love and death. And Other Stories The Alphabet Of Birds - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781908276445

Description: 'The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,are of imagination all compact.'- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the deaths of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, And Other Stories and Hay Festival have selected twelve contemporary international authors to each write an original and previously unpublished story as their tribute to these giants of world literature. In order to celebrate the international influence of both writers and offer us new and intriguing perspectives on them, six English-speaking authors have taken inspiration from Cervantes and his work, while six Spanish-language authors have written stories inspired by Shakespeare. The authors are Ben Okri, Deborah Levy, Kamila Shamsie, Yuri Herrera, Marcos Giralt Torrente, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Vicente Molina Foix, Soledad Puértolas, Hisham Matar, Nell Leyshon, Rhidian Brook and Valeria Luiselli. An introduction by Salman Rushdie explores the liberating legacy of Cervantes and Shakespeare for contemporary fiction. And Other Stories Lunatics, Lovers and Poets - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781908276780

Description: In the court of the King, everyone knows their place. But as the Artist wins hearts and egos with his ballads, uncomfortable truths emerge that shake the Kingdom to its core. Part surreal fable and part noir romance, this prize-winning novel from Yuri Herrera questions the price of keeping your integrity in a world ruled by patronage and power. And Other Stories Kingdom Cons - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781908276926

Description: A girl repeatedly chops her boyfriend in half but, while her 'other half' multiplies, she is still not satisfied. Love transforms a mother working down the chippie - into Elvis. Clary's father puts antlers on stuffed rabbits to make jackalopes, but when her mother walks out on them, Clary has to help her father if they are to survive. Beautiful, sharp and fearless, Costa Short Story Award winner Angela Readman's debut collection is aptly titled, for each story packs its share of explosive material. Exposing all kinds of prejudice - against age, status, disability - the stories also offer quirky new strategies for troubled lives. If Angela Carter is Readman's fairy godmother, then David Lynch is her wicked stepbrother. Don't say you weren't warned. And Other Stories Don't Try This at Home - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781908276520

Description: 1975. The cusp of Argentina's Dirty War. The magnate, Fausto Tamerlan, has been kidnapped by guerrillas, who as part of their ransom demands have stipulated the placement of a bust of Eva Peron in all ninety-two offices of Argentina's leading construction company, Tamerlan & Sons. Tamerlan's head of procurement, Ernesto Marrone, is the man tasked with the job, but he soon finds out that his is a mission for executives of a heroic disposition. His subsequent picaresque journey plunges him into a world of occupied factories, the slums of Buenos Aires and the utopian Evita City. Equipped with his trusty copy of Don Quixote: The Executive-Errant, Marrone is a modern knight who finds himself forced to penetrate the ultimate Argentinian mystery: Eva Peron - that maid of myth and legend whom we know as Evita. A stand-alone novel in its own right but also a prequel to his first novel, The Islands (And Other Stories, 2012), Carlos Gamerro's caustic and utterly original novel is a shattered window onto Argentina's recent past. And Other Stories The Adventure Of The Busts Of Eva Peron - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781908276506

Description: Finalist for the 2024 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize A lone white man lives beside the river on the edge of the Penobscot reservation in Maine. Charles spends his days doing odd jobs, looking after his depressive mother, and staring across the water to the house in which his half-Native daughter Elizabeth has grown up, unaware of his existence, her paternity hidden to protect her tribal status. Yet the cracks in the foundations of Elizabeth's life are beginning to show, and Charles can see Elizabeth is struggling, much like his own mother does. He firmly believes the truth will set them all free - but the price of it may be the destruction of them all. A deeply layered story of family and blood ties, full of quiet, beautiful, and dignified sentences, Fire Exit shows us kinship from all angles, and its capacity to break down, re-form, fade, or strengthen, while always remaining a part of us.' Utterly consuming . spellbinding and quietly devastating . a sober reckoning with what love can and cannot do, what healing is and is not possible in our families. The novel absolutely smoulders.' Tommy Orange.

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ISBN: 9781916751040