Literature

"Bridey Sullivan, a young American woman who has fled a peculiar and traumatic upbringing in Washington State, takes up with a queer British couple, the poet Milo Rollack, and Eton drop-out Jasper Lethe. Slipping in and out of homelessness, addiction, and under-the-table jobs, they create their own kind of family as they struggle to survive"--Amazon.com.

From the reign of the Tsars in the early 19th century to the collapse of the Soviet Union and beyond, the short story has long occupied a central place in Russian culture. Included are pieces from many of the acknowledged masters of Russian literature - including Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn - alongside tales by long-suppressed figures such as the subversive Kryzhanowsky and the surrealist Shalamov. Whether written in reaction to the cruelty of the bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy of communism or the torture of the prison camps, they offer a wonderfully wide-ranging and exciting representation of one of the most vital and enduring forms of Russian literature.

From the author of international bestseller Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

''Cho's complex, humane, and by its end utterly transfixing novel shows that it is in community that we find resilience.' i newspaper

'Like Bong Joon-ho's Academy Award-winning film Parasite and the popular Netflix series Squid Games, Saha points to the increasing inequality and lack of social mobility in South Korea. ... With global inequality on the rise, Saha's theme of human dignity quashed by the interests of mega-corporations resonates widely.' Daily Telegraph

'[A]n affecting portrait of people doing their best to survive in a world that would rather pretend they didn't exist.' New York Times

In a country called 'Town', Su is found dead in an abandoned car. The suspected killer is presumed to come from the Saha Estates.

Town is a privatised country, controlled by a secretive organisation known as the Seven Premiers. It is a society clearly divided into the haves and have-nots and those who have the very least live on the Saha Estates. Among their number is Jin-Kyung, a young woman whose brother, Dok-yung, was in a relationship with Su and quickly becomes the police's prime suspect. When Dok-yung disappears, Jin Ky-ung is determined to get to the bottom of things. On her quest to find the truth, though, she will uncover a reality far darker and crimes far greater than she could ever have imagined.

At once a dystopian mystery and devastating critique of how we live now, Saha lifts the lid on corruption, exploitation and government oppression, while, with deep humanity and compassion, showing us the lives of those who, through no fault of their own, suffer at the hand of brutal forces far beyond their control.

Praise for Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

480 BC. Arimnestos of Plataea has already lived through several lifetimes' worth of adventure, from being a rich man's slave in Ephesus to winning glory at the battle of Marathon against the might of the Persian Empire. But the gods - and the Persians - aren't finished with him yet. As an experienced sea captain - his enemies might say pirate - he has a part to play in the final epic confrontation of the Long War between the Greeks and Persians, the Battle of Salamis. It is a battle where many debts of blood will be repaid, ancient grudges settled, fame won and treachery exposed, where the Greeks must finally bury their differences and fight as one - for against them Xerxes, the Great King, has assembled the greatest fleet the world has ever known, his sworn purpose to brutally extinguish the flame of freedom and make every Greek his slave.

When her bohemian life in Paris falls flat at the beginning of the First World War, Sally Lunton returns to the care of her guardian in Little Crampton to find a husband. With some encouragement from the local busybody, she makes a play for Mr Bingley, the bank manager, although she has a rival in Mrs Dalton, a widow with a young daughter to raise. These two ladies form a quiet alliance, recognising that the prize isn't really worth fighting over but respecting the other's pursuit of financial security.

Sally aims to win but is distracted by her unsettling emotions for a soldier tortured by his experience at the Front. This entertaining novel is full of acute and humorous observations of male and female attitudes to love and marriage. Sally is a spirited heroine, who is determined to settle into a comfortable life now that she is in her early thirties.

But in securing her future, Sally must also face her past.

The new novel from the international bestselling author of the Wool trilogy. The old world is buried. A new one has been forged atop the shifting dunes. Here in this land of howling wind and infernal sand, four siblings find themselves scattered and lost. Palmer has never been the same since his father walked out twelve years ago. His elder sister, Vic, is trying to run away from the past; his younger brothers, Connor and Rob, are risking their lives to embrace it. His mother, left with nothing but anger, is just trying to forget. Palmer wants to prove his worth, not only to his family, but to himself. And in the barren, dune-covered landscape of his home, there is only one way to earn respect: sand-diving. Plunging deep below the desert floor in search of relics and scraps of the old world. He is about to embark on the most dangerous dive of his young life, aiming to become the first to discover the rumoured city below. Deep within the sand lies the key to bringing his family together - and tearing their world apart.

This volume contains a selection of tales recounted to me by Sarakatsan men and women. I also supply a number of popular traditions, legends and mysteries. The Greek edition should offer material to linguists, while I hope that, more generally, the tales have something to offer students of folklore. Unfortunately the literary merit of the tales is somewhat limited, since there are no truly gifted Sarakatsan storytellers as far as I have been able to discover. Their main problem is that they fail to employ the art of leisurely storytelling, and if you ask them to repeat a phrase you are almost certain not to hear the same thing twice, but instead a variation, while the narrator's patience with his or her listeners tends to wear thin within a very short space of time. On only a very few occasions was I able to follow the course that I prefer in my work, i.e. to listen to the tale as narrated by the storyteller for his and his audience's enjoyment rather than just churning it out for my sake, and then to get them to repeat it to me slowly so that I can write it down, and then for me to read it back to them so as to double-check the transcription. As a rule, I had to confine myself to the last two stages of this process. [...]

A haunting novel that probes the enigmas of time and memory, by Nobel Prize–winning author Patrick Modiano “Polizzotti’s crisp and evocative translation keeps the reader hooked.”—Publishers Weekly In his acclaimed semi-autobiographical novella Suspended Sentences, Patrick Modiano recounted a dramatic season in his childhood, of the home he shared with sinister surrogate parents, the mysterious events that took place there, and an infamous heist that was never solved. In Scene of the Crime, Modiano conjures the aftermath of those years. A decade has passed, and Jean Bosmans, now in his early twenties, becomes aware of a set of disturbing coincidences involving an elusive woman, his childhood home, and a host of disquieting characters who seem inordinately interested in his past, for reasons he can’t fathom. As he journeys into the echoes of memory, past and present become increasingly intertwined, forming a web spanning half a century. With the taut suspense of a detective novel, this book slowly peels away layers of time and forgetfulness to reveal the haunting, threatening, ultimately tragic legacies of what we think we know about our lives.

Written after the First World War when he was living in Sicily, Sea and Sardinia records Lawrence's journey to Sardinia and back in January 1921. It reveals his delighted response to a new landscape and people and his uncanny ability to transmute the spirit of place into literary art. Like his other travel writings the book is also a shrewd inquiry into the political and social values of an era which saw the rise of communism and fascism.

Angelos Sikelianos (1884–1951) is generally recognized as the most important Greek poet between Cavafy and Seferis. This selection of his poetry, first published by Princeton University Press almost thirty years ago, still remains the only collection in English in volume form; both the English and Greek texts of this present edition have been amended. Included in here are works from the full range of the poet's career and in his several voices — those of the lyricist, the narrator, the seer. The volume also offers samples of the poet’s varied forms, from sonnets to longer narrative and reflective poems, each rendered in a metrical equivalent. An introduction outlines the principal stages of the poet’s development as thinker and craftsman in relation to the particular translations included. For Sikelianos everything in the natural and visible world, when rightly perceived, is an expression of a supernatural and invisible order of reality. The task of the prophet, sage and poet is to reconcile the one world with the other, to heal the dichotomy between them through an act of creative mediation. With this in mind, Sikelianos uses myth not as a rhetorical device but as a mode for revealing the eternal divinities that inhabit the physical world. In his late poems, myth becomes the agency for uniting his subjective and narrative voices into a sublime tragic vision.