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The Birdman, narrator of Our Circus Presents, lives in a one-room apartment on the fifth floor of a squalid tenement block in northern Romania...

"Reading such a world means stepping inside it, letting it infect you, bruise, scrape, poison and obsess you." Jonathan Bolton, CONTEXT

One of the acknowledged masterpieces of Mexican literature, Fernando del Paso's News from the Empire is a powerful and encyclopedic novel of the tragic lives of Maximilian and his wife, Carlota, the short-lived Emperor and Empress of Mexico. Simultaneously intimate and panoramic, the narrative flows from Carlota's fevered memories of her husband's ill-fated empire to the multiple and conflicting accounts of a broad cast of characters who bore witness to the events that first placed the hapless couple on their puppet thrones, and then as swiftly removed them. Stretching from the troubled final years of Maximilian's life to the early days of the twentieth century, News from the Empire depicts a world of both political and narrative turbulence, and is as much a history of the advent of modernity as a eulogy for the corrupt royal houses of Europe. This startling and fevered work of "historiography" is a tour de force.

It is a book of quiet, close-knit prose studded with unforgettable scenes, set forth here in precise, analytical descriptions, there in intense, lyrical flights of near- poetry. It is uniquely Rilke and touches the reader with the same sudden revelations and uncanny awareness as do his poems.

Fiction Now reports on the current states of the novel in France, taking a series of soundings within the compass of innovative French writing since 2001. Chapters focus closely upon Jean Echenoz, Marie Redonnet, Christian Gailly, Lydie Salvayre, Gerard Gavarry, Helene Lenoir, Patrick Lapeyre, and Christine Montalbetti. Each of the authors invoked exemplified in his or her work a different set of strategies, concerns, and approaches: one of them transposes the Book of Judith to the Parisian suburbs; another imagines the most taciturn of cowboys in the American West; still another goes well beyond death, into the afterlife of a concert pianist. Despite their diversity of theme and technique, these writers share a will to make French fiction new, and demonstrate compellingly that the novel as it is practiced in France today is an extremely vigorous, deeply enthralling, and richly plural cultural form.

This Naoki Prize-winning work is a personal yet precise account of the lives of working women in the Edo period (1600-1868). In the latter half of the Edo period, the warrior caste was finding itself pushed out of the top echelons of society by the rising merchant class, and repeated famines swept the countryside. Against this backdrop, a small number of women vigorously built themselves independent lives with unusual careers--working as designers of ornamental hairpins, or even scribes--in the male-dominated society of the day. The stories in The Budding Tree recount the conditions in which these women lived.

"An original and entertaining study of, chiefly, Ulysses . . . This is a most stimulating book." Anthony Burgess

On the night of a father's death, two women remember. Esther, the wife denied, and Sara, her corrupted daughter, look back at the father's overwhelming cruelty and ahead to their freedom from him. Esther is paralyzed by her complicity in her daughter's suffering. Sara has been traumatized into an escapist dream world. Finally liberated from his terrible physical and emotional abuse, they must decide whether they will accept new possibilities or conform to old values. The darkness, no matter how black, is not complete: "I don't hate being a woman," Sara tells herself. "I don't." Beautifully written and remarkably powerful,

Translation of: Le grand incendie de Londres.

Many of Cuba's intellectuals embraced the Castro regime, but Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who criticized it, was condemned as a traitor and forced into exile. From this bitter experience, which included his hospitalization for mental collapse, came the vivid sketches of Cuban life that made up the acclaimed "View of Dawn from the Tropics". In exile he revised this work into "Three Trapped Tigers", a savage comedy that catapulted him into the first rank of Latin American novelist.

Vian's final and most serious novel begins with an elegant psychiatrist arriving in a remote town, where he helps deliver the triplets of a woman whose husband is locked up in a bedroom because she abhors him for causing the pain and discomfort of her pregnancy. A mix of disturbing incidents and verbal wit, "Heartsnatcher is as funny and strange as the best of Raymond Queneau and Eugene lonesco.

A seeing-eye dog leads a blind man into a frozen river, a southern Baptist loses his memory and finds true love in Bel Air, an obese dot.com executive has "anorgasmic" latex sex with her CEO, and a homeless man in New York creates an intellectual universe based on Post-it notes stuck to the inside of his cardboard box shelter--Douglas Glover's stories are wildly inventive, deadpan comedies of our universal human catastrophe. They are sly, demanding and wise--stories about language, desire and love (in a very dark place). The humor veers from the wry and sardonic to the salacious, mordant and playful. And always there are moments of such stark emotional intimacy that the reader slides, almost without noticing, from laughter to lament.

Together these two novels comprise the most fascinating, obsessive, and erotic works of contemporary Frech fiction. Like the works of Georges Bataille, and those of the Marquis de Sade before him, Klossowski's fiction explores the connections between the mind and the body through a lens of sexuality. Both of these novels feature Octave, an elderly cleric; his striking young wife Roberte; and their nephew, Antoine in a series of sexual situations. But Klossowski's books are about theology as well, and this merging of the sexual with the religious makes this book one of the most painstakingly baroque and intellectual novels of our time.

Fire the Bastards! is a scorching attack on the book-review media using the critical reception of William Gaddis's 1955 novel The Recognitions as a case study. Although this monumental novel is now generally regarded as one of the few indisputable milestones of contemporary American fiction, its original reviews were overwhelmingly negative. Combining meticulous research with savage indignation, Green exposes the inaccuracies, prejudices, and outright incompetence of Gaddis's reviewers to argue that the review media is ill-equipped to deal with masterpieces of innovative fiction, much preferring safe, predictable books that reassure (rather than question) conventional literary expectations. Despite his careful scholarship, Green is not a dispassionate commentator but an impassioned satirist, working in a rogue tradition that looks back to Swift's ferocious pamphlets. Originally published as a three-part series in his own magazine called newspaper - which Gilbert Sorrentino has described as "one of the authentic minor splendors of New York literary life in the late fifties and early sixties" - this is the first time Fire the Bastards! has appeared in book form. Gaddis scholar Steven Moore has written an introduction filling in the background to this unique work and comparing the book-reviewing media of today with that of the fifties.

The concluding installment of translator Woods's stupendous four-volume edition of "the German Joyce's" Collected Early Fiction, 1949-1964. Schmidt (1914-79) was a modernist master whose deeply unconventional fiction employs distorted grammar, punctuation, and typography in an all-out effort to render as accurately as possible, and in unedited and uncensored form, the fragmented nature of consciousness. Thus, The Stony Heart(1954) wittily conflates the adventures of historical researcher Walter Eggers as he pursues his scholarly quarry in a rural setting where he makes amazing discoveries about the local landscape ("Drunkards exist among sheep. . .") and short work of his hostess's wavering fidelity to her philandering husband. This novel's intermittent paeans to German literary culture and rude burlesques of Nazism are given more complex, if less immediately engaging form, in (the ingeniously retitled) B/Moondocks (1960), whose narrator Karl Richter's amatory pursuit of his troubled mistress stimulates him to invent a picaresque tale of the colonization of the moon. Both Richter's manipulation of his helpless Hertha and the aggressive sexuality of his mysterious "Auntee Hecta" subtly suggest the lurking presences of domination and sadism in what seems a tamed and reformed culture. Runaway puns and abstruse literary references further ruffle and complicate the surface of a fascinating work whose meanings are well worth digging for. And here's hoping translator Woods is at work on the rest of Schmidt's demanding rewarding oeuvre. (Kirkus Reviews)

"No other study of the American novel has such fascinating and on the whole right things to say."--Washington Post

Dalkey Archive Press first introduced readers to this "best-kept secret" of British literature with the hardback Collected Writings of Olive Moore in 1992. Spleen, the best of the author's three novels, tells the disturbing story of a woman who goes into self-imposed exile to an island off the coast of Italy after giving birth to a deformed child. Filled with self-reproach and guilt about her son and her life (having yearned to give birth to something "new and rare", she blames herself for her son's deformity), Ruth broods on what it means to be a woman ("nature's oven for nature's bun") and the inequalities between the sexes. Filled with the colors and beauty of the Italian countryside and in a style similar to Virginia Woolf's, Spleen challenges the assumption that women can't help but be tender and maternal, that their heads are only "ever-enlarging hearts".

In this spellbinding, utterly unconventional fiction, an aging author who is identified only as Reader contemplates the writing of a novel. As he does, other matters insistently crowd his mind - literary and cultural anecdotes, endless quotations attributed and not, scholarly curiosities - the residue of a lifetime's reading which is apparently all he has to show for his decades on earth. Out of these unlikely yet incontestably fascinating materials - including innumerable details about the madness and calamity in many artists' and writers' lives, the eternal critical affronts, the startling bigotry, the countless suicides - David Markson has created a novel of extraordinary intellectual suggestiveness. But while shoring up Reader's ruins with such fragments, Markson has also managed to electrify his novel with an almost unbearable emotional impact. Where Reader ultimately leads us is shattering.

Like Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, Annihilation is about a day in the life of a town - in this case, a Polish-Jewish town shortly before World War II. The reader participates in the life of the town instant by instant - from the moment when the local courtesan pours the contents of her chamber pot out her open window up to the moment when the city policemen return to night duty. For the narrator, every object, every person and event belongs to the world he strives to save from impending annihilation: the landscape of beer drops left on a counter, the dance of the Hasidim before the Town Hall, the taste of mint drops in an attorney's mouth. As the minutes on the Town Hall's clock measure the day's passing, and as this day's passing brings the town one day closer to its historical annihilation, a Book of the Day writes itself, preserving the town in memory against the ravages of time and history. Already a success in Poland and in translation in France, Germany, and Italy, Piotr Szewc's novel has been compared to the novels of Proust and to the paintings of Chagall.

In The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, Michael Stephens presents the most devastating vision of the Irish-American family since the nightmarish portrayals of Eugene O'Neill and James T. Farrell. Returning to their Brooklyn neighborhood for the wake and funeral of their father (Customs Inspector Leland Coole, aka Jackie Ducks, Little Lee, Crazy Jack, but remembered by his children as the "old bastard"), the sixteen Coole children talk and reminisce about their father and family; all adults now, their lives have been painful failures involving drugs, alcoholism, violence, petty crime, incest, and despair. Like any truly emotionally crippled children of a dysfunctional family, the Cooles rant with bitterness about their pasts but likewise romanticize their family, coupling an ability to analyze their plight with an utter inability to do anything about it. The novel is also the story of the decline of urban America and the story of third-generation immigrants who are both cut off from their roots and yet unassimilated into the illusory American melting pot. Stephens writes of all this with a passion and love of his materials. And he writes bravely because this is a book that will be attacked by those who believe in the mythical American family invoked by "family-values" politicians and wealthy evangelists. If Stephens has a message at all, it is that families are diseases made fatal by a cynical American society.