Chloe Jarren's La Cucaracha is a new novel by Matthew Stadler, the author of Allan Stein and Landscape: Memory. In a provincial Mexican capital a well-known expat gringa is found dead on a remote hillside. Narco gangs are suspected, but the real killer might be closer to home.The novel is a "cover" of another book, John Le Carre's A Murder of Quality (in the pop music tradition of cover songs, which are new renditions of old standards). The author explains his precise method in a special afterword to this unusual book.

Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in the fifteenth century introduced an era of mass communication that permanently altered the structure of society. While publishing has been buffeted by persistent upheaval and transformation ever since, the current combination of technological developments, market pressures, and changing reading habits has led to an unprecedented paradigm shift in the world of books. Bringing together a wide range of perspectives—industry veterans and provocateurs, writers, editors, and digital mavericks—this invaluable collection reflects on the current situation of literary publishing, and provides a road map for the shifting geography of its future: How do editors and publishers adapt to this rapidly changing world? How are vibrant public communities in the Digital Age created and engaged? How can an industry traditionally dominated by white men become more diverse and inclusive? Mindful of the stakes of the ongoing transformation, Literary Publishing in the 21st Century goes beyond the usual discussion of 'print vs. digital' to uncover the complex, contradictory, and increasingly vibrant personalities that will define the future of the book.

Maxwell Field Kosegarten, son of a suffragette mother and an eccentric ornothologist father, writes down his account of his passage to manhood in San Francisco of 1914, and his tragically ended love affair with his friend Duncan.

In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood, noted contributor to the New Yorker, has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that, of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works - among others, Chekhov's story "The Kiss," W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, and Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a provincial boy growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret joy of his childhood reading, the links he makes between reading and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. The Nearest Thing to LifeÊis not simply a brief, tightly argued book by a man commonly regarded as our finest living critic - it is also an exhilarating personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to reconsider everything that is at stake when we read and write fiction.

The author of Landscape: Memory presents a provocative look at the nature of love in the study of a man found guilty of having a love affair with a twelve-year-old boy and the confusions and complexities of the cure for child molestation. Reprint.

'Snapshot Chronicles' is a visual exploration of the creative outpouring made possible by the camera.

Movieola is a collection of linked short stories that delights and exploits the language and paraphernalia of industrial Hollywood. The collection delves into a night at the movies, featuring all the familiar types -- the rom-com, the action-adventure, the superhero and the spy -- but the narratives are still under construction, and every story line is an opportunity for the unimaginable twist. Motive and identity are constantly shifting in these short stories that offer both narrative andanti-narrative, while the stunted shoptalk of the movie business struggles to keep up. With the wit of Steve Erickson'sZeroville and the inventive spirit of Italo Calvino'sCosmicomics, John Domini offers a collection at once comical and moving, carefully suspended between a game of language and a celebration of American film.