Literary Realism

In a crumbling apartment block in the Angolan city of Luanda, families work, laugh, scheme, and get by. In the middle of it all is the melancholic Odonato, nostalgic for the country of his youth and searching for his lost son. As his hope drains away and as the city outside his doors changes beyond all recognition, Odonato’s flesh becomes transparent and his body increasingly weightless.

Anthropologist Calliope Santiago awakens to find herself in a strange and sinister wasteland, a shadow of the New Mexico she knew. Empty vehicles litter the road. Everyone has disappeared - or almost everyone. Calliope, heavy-bellied with the twins she carries inside her, must make her way across this dangerous landscape with a group of fellow survivors in search of answers. Long-dead volcanoes erupt, the ground rattles and splits, and monsters come to ominous life. Calliope will be forced to reconcile the geological record with the heritage she once denied.

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.

In a secret, subterranean world beneath the prairie of the Old West, a homesteader risks her life in search of a safe haven. A workman in Andrew Carnegie's steel mills is turned into a medical oddity by the brutal power of the furnaces. A young woman created through genetic manipulation is destroyed by the same force that gave her life. With her distinctive blend of magical realism, science, and poetic prose, Anjali Sachdeva demonstrates a preternatural ability to laser in on our fears, our hopes, and our longings in order to point out intrinsic truths about society and humanity.

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.

In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.

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.

In the not-too-distant future, a young spy named Elísabet Eva finds herself mentally unraveling following an assignment in Paris. Everything in Elísabet’s life in the city—her friends, social engagements, and late nights—revolved around her work as a spy with the Special Unit. To regain her mental balance, Elísabet finds herself taking long solitary walks near the lake.

What if the drink you just spilled, the train you just missed, or the lottery ticket you just found was not just a random occurrence? What if it's all part of a bigger plan? What if there's no such thing as a chance encounter? What if there are people we don't know determining our destiny? And what if they are even planning the fate of the world? Enter the Coincidence Makers - Guy, Emily, and Eric - three seemingly ordinary people who work for a secret organization devoted to creating and carrying out coincidences. What the rest of the world sees as random occurrences, are, in fact, carefully orchestrated events.

In 1980s Yugoslavia, a young Muslim girl is married off to a man she hardly knows, but what was meant to be a happy match goes quickly wrong. Soon thereafter her country is torn apart by war, and she and her family flee. Years later her son, Bekim, grows up a social outcast in present-day Finland, not just an immigrant in a country suspicious of foreigners but a gay man in an unaccepting society.

En este libro se incluye su primer cuento célebre, «Monólogo de Isabel viendo llover en Macondo», ambientado en lo que sería el escenario de sus obras posteriores. El personaje de Isabel reaparecerá en su primera novela, y el tema de la lluvia cayendo interminablemente, en su personal versión del diluvio universal, acabaría integrándose suave y flexiblemente en Cien años de soledad. Esta edición incluye, además, cuentos: «Tubal-Caín forja una estrella», «De cómo Natanael hace una visita» y «Un hombre viene bajo la lluvia».

When John Harvey’s watch stops working on the morning of February 3rd, 1987, he has an epiphany. It occurs to him that every personal trauma he is trying to forget has had one thing in common: they all occurred at some point on the face of that very watch. The loss of his job, the death of his child, Zola’s suicide, all contained right there in that tiny circle of finite numbers. So he smashes the watch. Problem solved. But when John steps out the door to make his daily trek to the local bar as a man newly freed from the tyrannies of time, he is met by a snowstorm.

Almost immediately upon Julie Bird’s return to the small port town where she was raised, everyday life is turned upside down. Julie’s Gulf War vet father, Marty, has been on the losing side of a battle with PTSD for too long. A day of boating takes a dramatic turn when a majestic blue whale beaches itself and dies. A blond stranger sets up camp oceanside: she’s an agitator, musician-impersonator, and armchair philosopher named Jennie Lee Lewis - and Julie discovers she’s connected to her father. As the blue whale decays on the beach, more wildlife turns up dead - apparently by suicide - echoing Marty’s deepest desire.

The late Nobelist's masterpiece takes a candid look into the lives of Holocaust survivors during the late 40s. Set in New York City, Shadows on the Hudson, Volume 1, the first in a four volume audiobook series, draws us into the intertwined lives of a circles of prosperous Jewish refugees.

Theo Potiris is a grocer and a comedian who never repeats his jokes. After 15 years of open mics, he's still waiting for his break - bicycling to the comedy club at night, stacking plums at his family's grand and ramshackle supermarket by day. His girlfriend is halfway around the world, searching for enlightenment with a patron who happens to be the richest man on Earth, and when two other loved-ones get struck by bolts from the blue, Theo decides he can't keep chasing his old dreams any longer. He resolves to trade his wishes in, pursuing a bigger score.

One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she’s written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris. This is the legend of a she-dandy’s life. Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part history of tailoring, part bibliophilic anthem, part love affair with nineteenth-century painting, The Baudelaire Fractal is poet and art writer Lisa Robertson’s first novel.

By a riverbank in Africa, two lovers meet for the first time. They make a promise to meet again the next day, same time, same place, but only one of them shows up. This sounds like the beginning of a love story, but it's more than that, for this breath-taking tale takes the listener into the heart of a vibrant world, a complex and intriguing civilization of warriors and kings, philosophers and artists, parents and lovers. A world and culture which is about to end, for glimpsed on the horizon, seen but unsuspected, beautiful ships with white sails are waiting.

"We'd had to be cut free of our mother's womb. Abby and I were fused, you see. But here's the real kicker; Abby had the magic, I didn't." Now adults, Makeda and Abby still share their childhood home. The surgery to separate the two girls left Makeda with what feels like an even worse deformity: no mojo. The daughters of a celestial demigod and a human woman, Makeda and Abby were raised by their magical father. Today, Makeda has decided it's high time to move out and make her own life.

Calamity is confronting two big transitions: the death of her beloved father and the beginning of menopause, a physical shift that has rekindled her gift for finding lost things. Suddenly, she is getting hot flashes that seem to forge objects out of thin air, most notably a four-year old boy. As Calamity takes the child into her care, she discovers that all is not as it seems. Then, Calamity must reawaken to the mysteries surrounding her own childhood and the early disappearance of her mother.

García Márquez construyó, en El otoño del patriarca, una maquinaria narrativa perfecta que desgrana una historia universal -la agonía y muerte de un dictador- en forma cíclica, experimental y real al mismo tiempo, en seis bloques narrativos sin diálogos, sin puntos y aparte, repitiendo una anécdota siempre igual y siempre distinta, acumulando hechos y descripciones deslumbrantes.