An American cult figure, Paul Bowles has fascinated such disparate talents as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Gore Vidal, and Tobias Wolff. From “The Delicate Prey” to “Too Far from Home,” this definitive collection celebrates the Bowles’s masterful artistry in short fiction.

Finnegans Wake is the greatest challenge in 20th-century literature. Who is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker? And what did he get up to in Phoenix Park? And what did Anna Livia Plurabelle have to say about it? In the rich nighttime and the language of dreams, here are history, anecdote, myth, folk tale and, above all, a wondrous sense of humor, colored by a clear sense of humanity. In this exceptional reading by the Irish actor Barry McGovern, with Marcella Riordan, the world of the Wake is more accessible than ever before.

Once an inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his longtime mistress—an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring surpassed even his own—Sabbath, bereft and grieving and besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.

The Decameron is one of the greatest literary works of the Middle Ages. Ten young people have fled the terrible effects of the Black Death in Florence and, in an idyllic setting, tell a series of brilliant stories, by turns humorous, bawdy, tragic and provocative. This celebration of physical and sexual vitality is Boccaccio's answer to the sublime other-worldliness of Dante's Divine Comedy.

Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of François's union with Barbara; of Chloe, the result of that union.

He thinks, as he escapes from Zanzibar, that he will probably never return, and yet the dream of studying in England matters above that. Things do not happen quite as he imagined—the school where he teaches is cramped and violent, he forgets how it feels to belong. But there is Emma, beautiful, rebellious Emma, who turns away from her white, middle-class roots to offer him love and bear him a child. And in return, he spins stories of his home and keeps her a secret from his family. Twenty years later, the barriers come down in Zanzibar and he is able and compelled to go back.

Nearly two weeks early, on March 3, 1947, in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born. From that single beginning, Ferguson’s life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four identical Fergusons made of the same DNA, four boys who are the same boy, go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives. Family fortunes diverge. Athletic skills and sex lives and friendships and intellectual passions contrast.

On a peaceful Sunday afternoon, Arthur Rowe comes upon a charity fete in the gardens of a Cambridgeshire vicarage where he wins a game of chance. If only this were an ordinary day. Britain is under threat by Germany, and the air raid sirens that bring the bazaar to a halt expose Rowe as no ordinary man. Recently released from a psychiatric prison for the mercy killing of his wife, he is burdened by guilt, and now, in possession of a seemingly innocuous prize, on the run from a nest of Nazi spies who want him dead.

Anna Kerrigan, nearly 12 years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles. Years later her father has disappeared, and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men.

For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state.

The legendary writer Patricia Highsmith is best remembered today for her chilling psychological thrillers The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train. A critically acclaimed, best-selling author in Europe, Highsmith has for too long been underappreciated in the United States. Eleven is Highsmith's first collection of short stories, an arresting group of dark masterpieces of obsession and foreboding, violence and instability.

The first audiobook which appeared in Georges Simenon's famous Maigret series, in a gripping new translation by David Bellos.Inevitably Maigret was a hostile presence in the Majestic. He constituted a kind of foreign body that the hotel's atmosphere could not assimilate. Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn't have a moustache and he didn't wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted. He shaved every day and looked after his hands. But his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man.

A brilliant new translation of one of Simenon's best loved masterpieces. 'A certain furtive, almost shameful emotion...disturbed him whenever he saw a train go by, a night train especially, its blinds drawn down on the mystery of its passengers.' Kees Popinga is a respectable Dutch citizen and family man. Then he discovers that his boss has bankrupted the shipping firm he works for - and something snaps.

For almost four decades Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City has blazed its own trail through popular culture - from a groundbreaking newspaper serial to a classic novel, to a television event that entranced millions around the world. The first of nine novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales is both a sparkling comedy of manners and an indelible portrait of an era that changed forever the way we live.

In the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a young cavalry officer is invited to a dance at the home of a rich landowner. There - with a small act of attempted charity - he commits a simple faux pas. But from this seemingly insignificant blunder comes a tale of catastrophe arising from kindness and of honour poisoned by self-regard. Beware of Pity has all the intensity and the formidable sense of torment and of character of the very best of Zweig's work. Definitive translation by the award-winning Anthea Bell.

An American cult figure, Paul Bowles has fascinated such disparate talents as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Gore Vidal, and Tobias Wolff. From “The Delicate Prey” to “Too Far from Home,” this definitive collection celebrates the Bowles’s masterful artistry in short fiction.

The dilemma of the outsider in an alien society, and the gap in understanding between cultures, recurrent themes of Paul Bowles’s writings, are dramatized with brutal honesty in this novel set in Fez, Morocco, during that country’s 1954 nationalist uprising. Totally relevant to today’s political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere, richly descriptive of its setting, and uncompromising in its characterizations, The Spider’s House is perhaps Bowles’s best, most beautifully subtle novel.

In Let It Come Down, Paul Bowles plots the doomed trajectory of Nelson Dyar, a New York bank teller who comes to Tangier in search of a different life and ends up giving in to his darkest impulses. Rich in descriptions of the corruption and decadence of the International Zone in the last days before Moroccan independence, Bowles's second novel is an alternately comic and horrific account of a descent into nihilism.

In Morocco is Edith Wharton's remarkable account of her journey to that country during World War I. With her characteristic sense of adventure, Wharton set out to explore Morocco and its people, traveling by military jeep to Rabat, Moulay Idriss, Fez, and Marrakech, from the Atlantic coast to the high Atlas. Along the way, she witnessed religious ceremonies and ritual dances, visited the opulent palaces of the Sultan, and was admitted to the mysterious world of his harem.

Travels is a thrilling anthology of the travel writings of Paul Bowles, author of the era-defining post-war novel The Sheltering Sky. The acclaimed essays in Travel—never before collected in a single volume—span more than sixty years and range from Bowles’s early days in Paris to his time spent in Ceylon, Thailand, Kenya, and his expatriate life in Morocco. Insightful, exciting, and evocative, Travels is a stunning collection of rarely seen shorter works—a showcase of the literary artistry of one of the truly great American writers of the twentieth century.

After World War II, Mathilde leaves France for Morocco to be with her husband, whom she met while he was fighting for the French army. A spirited young woman, she now finds herself a farmer’s wife, her vitality sapped by the isolation, the harsh climate, and the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner. But she refuses to be subjugated or confined to her role as mother of a growing family.

Morocco, 1941. With France having fallen to Nazi occupation, twelve-year-old Josie has fled with her family to Casablanca, where they await safe passage to America. Life here is as intense as the sun, every sight, smell and sound overwhelming to the senses in a city filled with extraordinary characters. It’s a world away from the trouble back home—and Josie loves it. Seventy years later, another new arrival in the intoxicating port city, Zoe, is struggling—with her marriage, her baby daughter and her new life as an expat in an unfamiliar place.

Independent-minded Sibylla Spencer feels trapped in 19th-century London, where her strong will and progressive views have rendered her unmarriageable. Still single at 23, she is treated like a child and feels stifled in her controlling father's house. When Benjamin Hopkins, an ambitious employee of her father's trading company, shows an interest in her, she realizes marriage is her only chance to escape.

West with the Night is the story of a remarkable woman molded and shaped by many things: the African jungle, a certain dog, horses, airplanes, friendships with white men and black. There is no life, no story quite like it.

Shifting Sands is about that other Sahara, not the empty wasteland of the romantic imagination but the vast and highly differentiated space in which Saharan peoples and, increasingly, new arrivals from other parts of Africa live, work, and move. It takes us from the ancient Roman Empire through the bloody colonial era to the geopolitics of the present, questioning easy clichés and exposing fascinating truths along the way.

Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustave von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.

Eamon Redmond is a judge in Ireland’s high court, a completely legal creature who is just beginning to discover how painfully unconnected he is from other human beings. With effortless fluency, Colm Tóibín reconstructs the history of Eamon’s relationships - with his father, his first "girl", his wife, and the children who barely know him - and he writes about Eamon’s affection for the Irish coast with such painterly skill that the land itself becomes a character. The result is a novel of stunning power.

Casablanca's stinking alleys are the only home that 19-year-old Youssef El-Mekki has ever known. Raised by his mother in a one-room home, he dreams of escape - until, one day, the father he thought dead turns out to be very much alive and whisks him from the slums into the luxurious life of Casablanca's elite. But as he leaves the poverty of his childhood behind him, he comes up against a starkly unglittering reality...

As four Moroccans illegally cross the Strait of Gibraltar in an inflatable boat headed for Spain, author Laila Lalami asks: What has driven them to risk their lives? And will the rewards prove to be worth the danger? There's Murad, a gentle, unemployed man who's been reduced to hustling tourists around Tangier; Halima, who's fleeing her drunken husband and the slums of Casablanca; Aziz, who must leave behind his devoted wife in hope of securing work in Spain; and Faten, a student and religious fanatic whose faith is at odds with an influential man determined to destroy her future.

Their Heads are Green, Their Hands are Blue deals largely with places in the world that few Westerners have ever heard of, much less seen—places as yet unencumbered by the trappings, luxuries, and corruptions of modern civilization. Bowles is a sympathetic and discerning observer of these alien cultures, and his eyes and ears are especially alert both to what is bizarre and what is wise in the civilizations in which he settles.