Literary Realism

When its librarian keeper mysteriously dies, two former classmates must race to locate a rare book from their college years that can foretell your future if you confess a secret from your past—but someone is intent on protecting what’s hidden inside. It can write the story of your future...

The epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. The beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan's gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation's troubled past: the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism....

A woman meets her next-door neighbor and loans her a spatula, then starts suffering horrific gaps in her memory. A man, feeling jilted by an unrequited love, becomes obsessed with sorting through his neighbors' garbage in the belief that it will teach him how to better relate to people. A landlord decides to raise the rent, and his tenants hatch a plan to kill him at a team-building retreat. In 10 captivating, unnerving stories, Flowers of Mold presents a range of ordinary individuals who have found themselves left behind by an increasingly urbanized and fragmented world.

Singer's famous and never-before-recorded novel about a passionate, forbidden love affair between Jew and Gentile in 17th century Poland.

John Updike reads six stories he has selected from the hundred-odd he has published. "A&P", recounting a moral crisis on the checkout counter, is his most anthologized story. "Pigeon Feathers," the longest story included, tells of a fourteen-year-old boy's fear of death and the answer he finds...

En Macondo transcurre la historia de un entierro imposible. Ha muerto un personaje extraño, un antiguo médico odiado por el pueblo, y un viejo coronel retirado, para cumplir una promesa, se ha empeñado en enterrarle ante la oposición de todo el pueblo y sus autoridades. Como en una tragedia griega -el libro lleva como lema una cita de Antígona que recuerda la prohibición de enterrar el cuerpo del Polinices-, el viejo coronel, su hija y su nieto van a cumplir la ominosa tarea.

Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize An extraordinary, “playful, moving, and wholly remarkable” (The Guardian) coming-of-age novel filled with myth and magic from one of England's greatest living writers. An introspective young boy, Joseph Coppock is trying to make sense of the world...

A profound portrait of contemporary Pakistan from the award-winning author of The Return of Faraz Ali In seven searing, atmospheric stories, Aamina Ahmad finds a world of pathos in the narrowest circumstances, from the fugitive intimacies of villages where nothing escapes notice to the crevices...

A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont), leaving all the comforts of home behind—a rollicking, lyrical novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of North Woods and one of America’s greatest living writers Miles Krzelewski...

Only very special people are chosen by children's author Laura White to join 'The Society', an elite group of writers in the small town of Rabbit Back. Now a 10th member has been selected: Ella, literature teacher and possessor of beautifully curving lips. But soon Ella discovers that the Society is not what it seems. What is its mysterious ritual, 'The Game'? What explains the strange disappearance that occurs at Laura's winter party, in a whirlwind of snow? Why are the words inside books starting to rearrange themselves?

C'era una volta il favoloso mondo di Lossiniere, un paese dove non suonano i telefoni e si viaggia in carrozza. Napoli, invece, è un inferno vero di traffico e spazzatura. Uno scrittore, appena arrivato da Roma, scopre che l'evento a cui doveva partecipare è stato annullato all'ultimo minuto. Il viaggio, in apparenza inutile, gli fa conoscere una enigmatica maestra e lo porta all'incontro fortuito con un manoscritto ambientato nel paese di Lossiniere, "Il libro di Clara e Riki", e con il mistero della sua autrice: una bambina di otto anni.

In this lush, magical, queer, and feminist take on Hamlet in modern-day New York City, a neuro-atypical philosopher, along with his best friend Horatio and artist ex-fiancé Lia, are caught up in the otherworldly events surrounding the death of his father. Meet Ben Dane: brilliant, devastating...

Iris, desperate to escape her unhappy marriage to her beautiful but controlling wife Claude, flees New York City for the remote Catskill Mountains. When she was a child, Iris and her father found solace in the beauty and wilderness of the forest, and now Iris needs time and space to clear her head and come to terms with the mistakes which have led her here. But what Iris doesn't expect in this journey of survival and self-discovery is to find herself - quite literally.

Though published second after Altmann's Tongue, The Din of Celestial Birds (1997) consists of the best of Evenson's early stories. They take place in a country (perhaps several countries) that seems at once everywhere and nowhere, haunted by birds, ghosts, poverty, tyranny, and the permeability of the line between the living and the dead. These stories offer a heady mix of absurdity and bleakness on the one hand and exuberant magic realism on the other.

Acclaimed author of 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas Marie-Helene Bertino's Parakeet is a darkly funny and warm-hearted novel about a young woman whose dead grandmother (in the form of a parakeet) warns her not to marry and sends her out to find an estranged loved one. The week of her wedding, The...

The lost literary origin story of #1 bestseller Lev Grossman - including a new foreword about how and why he wrote his first novel: "It is the intense, concentrated, boiled-down essence of the unhappiest years of my life." Twenty-something Hollis Kessler languishes in a hopelessly...

"[Jean Ann] Douglass’ narration, intimate and bemused and every so often curling up with wryness at the end of a sentence, is a perfect match for Shun-lien Bynum’s delicate delights." -- Slate A Buzz Book of Fall at Publishers Lunch * A WIRED Ultimate Summer Reading pick National Book Award...

Battling a wolf to save a little girl’s life makes Argus Brock a local hero. But what the small town of Redstone doesn’t know is that the tough teenager is a secretly a werewolf, which means the wolf Argus bit during the fight is now a werewolf, too. But unlike Argus and his wolf pack siblings, this wolf man is far from tame.

Un viejo coronel retirado va al puerto todos los viernes a esperar la llegada de la carta oficial que responda a la justa reclamación de sus derechos por los servicios prestados a la patria. Pero la patria permanece muda.

In these marvelously inventive stories, Samantha Hunt imagines numerous ways in which human lives might be altered by the otherworldly: an FBI agent falls in love with a robot built for a suicide mission; a young woman unintentionally cheats on her husband when she is transformed into a deer; two strangers become lovers and find themselves responsible for the resurrection of a dog; a woman tries to start her life anew after the loss of a child but riddles that new life with lies.