Literary Realism

Deep in gambling debt, the celebrated Brazilian writer Beatriz Yagoda is last seen holding a suitcase and a cigar and climbing into an almond tree. She abruptly vanishes. In snowy Pittsburgh, her American translator, Emma, hears the news and, against the wishes of her boyfriend and Beatriz's two grown children, flies immediately to Brazil. There, in the sticky, sugary heat of Rio, Emma and her author's children conspire to solve the mystery of Yagoda's curious disappearance and staunch the colorful demands of her various outstanding affairs.

A parallel universe. South Texas. Narcotics are legal, and there’s a new contraband on the market: ancient Olmec artifacts, shrunken indigenous heads, and filtered animals - species of animals brought back from extinction to clothe, feed, and generally amuse the very wealthy. Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long enough to know to keep quiet. But his simple life starts to get complicated when the swashbuckling investigative journalist Paco Herbert invites him to come to an illegal underground dinner serving filtered animals.

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?

This fierce and beautiful story charts the histories of two women: Rae, young, unmarried, and far from home, awaits the birth of her first child. Lila, a fortune-teller with no interest in the future, lost her own daughter more than a quarter of a century earlier in New York. When these two women meet in Southern California, it's earthquake weather - the time when unexpected things happen.

Ren Ishida is nearly finished with graduate school when he receives news of his sister Keiko's sudden death. She was viciously stabbed one rainy night on her way home, and there are no leads. Ren heads to Akakawa to conclude his sister's affairs, still failing to understand why she chose to abandon the family and Tokyo for this desolate town years ago. Haunted in his dreams by a young girl who is desperately trying to tell him something, Ren struggles to find solace in the void his sister has left behind.

Emer is just a woman living in New York City who takes the subway, buys ice cream from the bodega on the corner, has writerly aspirations, and lives with her boyfriend, Con. But is this life she lives the only path she’s on?

On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight-year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see.

On the brink of the Nazi occupation of Paris, a German-Jewish bookbinder stumbles across a manuscript called Crossings. It has three narratives, each as unlikely as the next. And the narratives can be listened to one of two ways: either straight through or according to an alternate chapter sequence. The first story in Crossings is a never-before-seen ghost story by the poet Charles Baudelaire, penned for an illiterate girl.

Un viejo periodista decide festejar sus noventa años a lo grande, dándose un regalo que le hará sentir que todavía está vivo: una jovencita. En el prostíbulo de un pintoresco pueblo, ve a la jovencita de espaldas, completamente desnuda, y su vida cambia radicalmente. Ahora que la conoce se encuentra a punto de morir, pero no por viejo, sino de amor.

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.

J. Sutter is a bonafide junketeer - a freelance writer, travelling from city to city, hungry for free meals and the discarded sales receipts of others to claim on his expense account. Travelling into the backwoods of West Virginia to write a piece on the unveiling of the new John Henry postage stamp and the ensuing John Henry Days festival, J. continues his nearly record-setting, three-month junket binge.

Este libro excepcional reúne la novela corta que le otorga su título y otros seis relatos más, de los que todos menos uno pertenecen a la etapa de plena madurez del autor. Fueron los años en los que Macondo le abrió las puertas del realismo mágico: la frase se hace más larga y caudalosa, la realidad se expresa mediante fórmulas mágicas y legendarias, los milagros se insertan en la vida cotidiana.

With over 10 million copies sold, bestselling author Robert James Waller returns with the haunting, evocative story of a small town, a beautiful and mysterious woman, and the man forever changed by both.

It all starts on the morning the letter D disappears from language. First, it vanishes from Dhikilo’s parents’ conversation at breakfast, then from the road signs outside and from her school dinners. Soon the local dentist and the neighbor’s dalmatian are missing, and even the Donkey Derby has been called off. Though she doesn’t know why, Dhikilo is summoned to the home of her old history teacher Professor Dodderfield and his faithful Labrador, Nelly Robinson. And this is where our story begins.

Every night, as Faye puts her daughters to bed, she thinks of her own mother, Jeanie, who died when Faye was eight. The pain of that loss has never left her, and that’s why she wants her own girls to know how very much they are loved by her — and always will be, whatever happens. Then one day, Faye gets her heart’s desire when she’s whisked back into the past and is reunited not just with her mother but with her own younger self.

Combine an offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose, and the result is the remarkable story Dance Dance Dance: high-class call girls billed to MasterCard, a psychic 13-year-old dropout has a passion for talking heads, and meet a hunky matinee idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. Don’t forget the one-armed beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk and one very bemused narrator caught in the web of advanced capitalist mayhem.

In the 1950s, tensions remain high in the border town of La Frontera. Penny loafers and sneakers clash with boots and huaraches. Bowling shirts and leather jackets compete with guayaberas. Convertibles fend with motorcycles. Yet amidst the discord, young love blooms at first sight between Fulgencio Ramirez, the son of impoverished immigrants, and Carolina Mendelssohn, the local pharmacist’s daughter. But as they’ll soon find out, their bonds will be undone by a force more powerful than they could have known.

On a languid midsummer's day in the countryside, old Adam Godley, a renowned theoretical mathematician, is dying. His family gathers at his bedside: his son, young Adam, struggling to maintain his marriage to a radiantly beautiful actress; his 19-year-old daughter, Petra, filled with voices and visions as she waits for the inevitable; their mother, Ursula, whose relations with the Godley children are strained at best; and Petra's "young man" - very likely more interested in the father than the daughter - who has arrived for a superbly ill-timed visit.

When Theo Potiris performed his stand-up comedy act on Conan at 25, he thought he'd hit it big. But 10 years later, he's still spending his days working at his parents' grocery store, bicycling to the local open mic, and writing letters to a girlfriend who lives halfway around the world. Theo's desperate for a break. But when he brings his 13-year-old niece to the horse track to place a birthday bet - a Potiris family tradition - the goddess of good luck strikes her instead, in the form of a small fortune.

Is what you see all there is? Look again. Playful, frightening, even shocking - the stories in this collection blur the lines between illusion and reality. This is a writer at the height of his power, making the listener think, making them laugh, and sometimes making them want to look away while holding their gaze. Stories here are set in London, in Byzantium, in the ghetto, in the Andes, in a printer's shop in Spain. The characters include a murderer, a writer, a detective, a man in a cave, a man in a mirror, two little boys, a prison door, and the author himself.