Current and Forthcoming Titles

Imagine a universe where every joke you’ve ever heard is solid, real, and occasionally dangerous—and all happening, one after the other, to the same small group of people. Detailing a series of filthy and ludicrous episodes in the life of a single family, saddled with a super-eccentric, sexually ...September 2009 [More]

In this delightful collection of essays—by turns wry and reflective, wistful and witty— contemporary Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk turns his attention to the villages and small towns of Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Albania, and of course his native Poland. Stasiuk travels to places no tourist wou...September 2009 [More]

Ishmael Reed’s career as one of our great playwrights has long been eclipsed by his other work. Here published for the first time, Reed’s plays follow the ancient tradition of using the theater as a forum in which the official versions of our history can be critiqued. Dealing with subjects that m...September 2009 [More]

Like the surfaces of a jagged crystal, each story in this collection shows an entirely different facet when viewed from a different angle. Playing games with the basic units of both life and fiction—the solid certainties of the self, the world around us, and the words we use to describe these thi...October 2009 [More]

One morning late in May, between three and six a.m., a group of lonely men and women wait to be brought together, like the elements in an equation. Ernst Spengler is about to throw himself out his window. Mylia, terminally ill and in enormous pain, goes out to visit a church. Hinnerk Obst, who’s ...November 2009 [More]

Setting out to tell the story of a mysterious cowboy—a stranger in town with a terrible secret—Christine Montalbetti is continually sidetracked by the details that occur to her along the way, her CinemaScope camera focusing not on the gunslinger’s grim and determined eyes, but on the insects craw...October 2009 [More]

To most of us, “subversion” means political subversion, but The Subversive Scribe is about collaboration not with an enemy, but with texts and between writers. Though Suzanne Jill Levine is the translator of some of the most inventive Latin American authors of the twentieth century—including Juli...October 2009 [More]

A young girl’s father is constantly forcing her to kiss him, and her aunt predicts that she will grow up to be a whore. With Albania’s communist regime crumbling around them, sex, dictatorship, and death are inescapable subjects for the girl and her family—though the protagonist of The Country Wh...November 2009 [More]

A European man arrives in Shanghai, ostensibly on vacation, yet a small task given him by his Parisian girlfriend Marie starts a series of complications. There is a mysterious Chinese man and a manila envelope full of cash. Later, he meets a woman at an art gallery and they agree to travel togeth...November 2009 [More]

The son of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of Britain’s Fascists in the 1930s, and himself the inheritor of a noble title, Nicholas Mosley nonetheless fought bravely for Britain during World War II, and became a tireless anti-Apartheid campaigner thereafter, finding little sense in living the “hypocrit...November 2009 [More]

Every day, the Birdman performs the same ritual: he climbs out onto his window ledge to see if he can manage to kill himself—and never does. The Birdman is a member of a loose-knit group of failed suicides, each pursuing absurd ways to end their lives: one saving up lost-dog reward money to buy e...November 2009 [More]

When Samuel Beckett and the Dutch painter Bram Van Velde met in Paris in the 1930s, both were living in abject poverty, and neither could have anticipated that—on the other side of World War II and the brutal occupation of France by the Nazis—they would each go on to be luminaries in their respec...December 2009 [More]

An astonishing and fantastical autobiographical novel—reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Laurence Sterne—The System of Vienna details Jonke’s travels through Vienna by streetcar, reporting the bizarre and frustrating encounters he experiences as he progresses—and meanwhile moving not just from trol...December 2009 [More]

Painter and art historian Nick Wadley—who has curated exhibitions on Kurt Schwitters, Franciszka Themerson, Gaberbocchus Press, and Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi—here turns his attentive and whimsical eye to one of life’s most essential relationships. With deceptive simplicity, and more than a little ch...December 2009 [More]

The great Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon began his life’s work with this extraordinary novel, a story of World War II as seen through the unglamorous, uncourageous, unhistorical eyes of the man on the street. Frustrated with the dainty, straightforward, neatly chronological narratives that domina...January 2010 [More]

Edwin Mortens is almost blind, but has good hearing; his wife Erna is hard of hearing, but has excellent eyes. Paralyzed from the waist down, Edwin sits locked in his bathroom all day, every day, trying to liberate his mind from his body. The experiment is going relatively well: nearly all his bo...January 2010 [More]

Historically, English-language readers have been great fans of European literature, and names like Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann are so familiar we hardly think of them as foreign at all. What those writers brought to English-language literature was a wide variety of new ideas, s...January 2010 [More]

Though best known as the author of a series of brilliant novels, here Higgins turns his writerly gifts to work for the radio. This collection includes ten plays broadcast in England and Ireland between 1973 and 1990, which have had a significant influence both on Higgins’s later fiction and on th...January 2010 [More]

Drawing together a wide range of focused critical commentary and observation by internationally renowned scholars and writers, this collection of essays offers a major reassessment of Aidan Higgins’s body of work almost fifty years after the appearance of his first book, Felo De Se. Authors like ...January 2010 [More]

Aidan Higgins’s greatest novel has long been unavailable, and is here reissued in a new and revised edition. Balcony of Europe tells the story of a complacent young Jewish wife from San Francisco and a middle-aged Irish painter who meet in a village on the coast of Spain, beginning an affair duri...January 2010 [More]

In Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal, the narrator accepts a job writing a laudatory authorized biography of a fast-food magnate, whose egotism borders on megalomania. She thus enters a world of call girls, celebrities, investment portfolios, and bitter rivalries, where the desire t...February 2010 [More]

transcript is a disturbing document. Using the techniques of concrete and visual poetry, Heimrad Bäcker presents quotations from the Holocaust’s planners, perpetrators, and victims. The book offers a startling collection of documents that confront us with details from the bureaucratic world of th...February 2010 [More]

Awash in small-town gossip, petty jealousy, and intrigues, Manuel Puig’s Heartbreak Tango is a comedic assault on the fault lines between the disappointments of the everyday world, and the impossible promises of commercials, pop songs, and movies. This melancholy and hilarious tango concerns the ...February 2010 [More]