Early fiction of one of the most daring and influential writers of postwar Germany, a man often called the German James Joyce due to the linguistic inventiveness of his fiction.

MacLeish famous poem based upon Blake.

Things in the Night explores a world on the edge of disaster--plagued by mysterious power-outages and threatened by ominous conspiracies--juxtaposed against images and stories of unsurpassed beauty and tenderness. Beginning with the simple but moving words, "My Dear, I feel I owe you an explanation," and ending with the passionate, lyrical, and immensely sad, "Those were beautiful years, beautiful autumn days," this astounding novel, set in Estonia near the end of the millennium, is a hymn to the very best in the human imagination and a eulogy for what humans, at their worst, may destroy.

Miss MacIntosh herself, who hails from What Cheer, Iowa, and seems downright and normal, with an incorruptible sense of humor and the desire to put an end to phantoms; Catherine Cartwheel, the opium lady, a recluse who is shut away in a great New England seaside house and entertains imaginary guests; Mr. Spitzer, the lawyer, musical composer and mystical space traveler, a gentle man, wholly unsure of himself and of reality; his twin brother Peron, the gay and raffish gambler and virtuoso in the world of sports; Cousin Hannah, the horsewoman, balloonist, mountain-climber and militant Boston feminist, known as Al Hamad through all the seraglios of the East; Titus Bonebreaker of Chicago, wild man of God dreaming of a heavenly crown; the very efficient Christian hangman, Mr. Weed of the Wabash River Valley; a featherweight champion who meets his equal in a graveyard--these are a few who live with phantasmagorical vividness in the pages of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.

"This bitterly funny memoir reads like an expose of the power structures in America's higher-education system: who's got it, how they're abusing it, what everyone else is willing to do to get it, and the social cost of doing educational business this way. We follow our protagonist, Kassie, as the academic world reshapes her life, her worse secrets and most humiliating mistakes revealing deep problems of race, class, gender, and sexuality. We watch as she alienates her family by hanging her "snobbish" nose over books; as she embarks on an adulterous affair with her instructor; as she comes to terms with her racist attitudes towards her own inner-city students; and as she abandons her principles for the sake of her career."--BOOK JACKET.

A journalist by trade, who now suffers from an immune deficiency developed while researching this book, presents personal accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus after the nuclear reactor accident in 1986, and the fear, anger, and uncertainty that they still live with. Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2015.

"This bizzare, lyrical romp of a novel begins with two wealthy siblings preparing their estate for their annual garden party, to which they've invited "several artists and above all many of the people variously involved in the further development of intellectual life." The first sign that this year's party will be a little different is that the siblings have had paintings made of every inch of their garden, and are hanging the paintings in place of the garden itself. We soon learn that this is just the beginning: the siblings have decreed that this year's party will be an exact repetition of the party they held last year. Everyone will say and do exactly the same things, whether they'd like to or not."--BOOK JACKET.

Welcome to Brighton Beach of the 1930s and early '40s as filtered through Simon Sloan, from youth to would-be artist-as-a-young-man at Brooklyn College to the eve of his induction into the army. Wallace Markfield perfectly captures this Jewish neighborhood--its speech, its people, its unique zaniness. But like any masterpiece--Joyce's "Dubliners" comes readily to mind--"Teitlebaum's Window "both survives and expands upon its time and place. While remaining rooted in the specifics of its own world, thirty-seven years after first being published it teems with Markfield's inventiveness, hilarity, and singular voice.

This inventive first novel explores the widespread problem of female depression. A 27-year-old drama teacher named Joy Stone is losing her grip on the world. The problems of everyday living accumulate and begin to torture the narrator, who blames her problems not on her work or on the accidental death of her illict lover, but on herself. She reads horoscopes, plucks hairs, holds conversations inside and outside herself. A terrible memory tries to unfold but is resisted. Family and friends take on monstrous or pitiful guises; food threatens to become a major character. Clutching at the wrong things, the trick is to find those that let life go on. As things seen, things bought, and things said become obsessions, so the author conjures up the homely or horrifying world of litter in which the reader, like the heroine, lives.

When an unknown black poodle inexplicably explodes in philosophy professor Timothy Chesterton-Brown's back yard--paralyzing the professor and killing his guest--the "mystery of the sardine" begins. Its solution will involve such unwitting detectives as a twelve-year-old mathematician, his mother, his beloved, a palmist named Miss Prentice, and a bureaucrat dubbed the Minister of Imponderabilia. The clues they unearth--drawing on logic, the occult, intuition, and everything in between--lead them far away from the tiny seaside town where they begin. We follow them to Majorca, Rome, Warsaw, and London, but in the end, the solution lies beyond even the furthest and most magical reaches of reason.