"[A] translucent novel of passion, illusion and social class....slyly witty and luminous." —Francine Prose in O, The Oprah Magazine During working hours, Mario is a dutiful bureaucrat, scrupulously earning his paycheck as an employee of the provincial Spanish town where he lives. But when he walks through the door of his apartment, he is transformed into the impassioned lover of Blanca, the beautiful, inscrutable wife he saved from the brink of personal crisis. For the love of Blanca, Mario eats sushi and carpaccio, nods in feigned understanding at experimental films, sits patiently through long conversations with her avant-garde friends, and conceals his disgust at shocking art exhibits. Then, little by little, a strange and ominous threat begins to weigh on the marriage. How can love survive its own disappearance? The desperate answer that Antonio Muñoz Molina proposes in this short, circular novella is a model of literary strategy and style, a splendid homage to Flaubert.

For Alex Gifford, Hamilton, Montana isn't home; it's the place where her twin sister, Allie, was brutally murdered when they were 17. Alex has never let go of the guilt she feels for the part she played in her sisters death, and she hasn't been home in 13 years. Until now. Allie's killer has struck again, and Alex finds herself taken back to that fateful summer. Alex always knew that her sister had been keeping secrets, and when she finds Allie's diary hidden away, she starts to investigate the clues it holds. And she will stop at nothing to find her sister's killer.

Winner of the 2012 National Translation Award “What Sinan [Antoon] has done with In the Presence of Absence is a kind of miraculous work of dedication and love. Reading this volume is sheer enjoyment and sublimity.” —Saadi Yousef “There are two maps of Palestine that politicians will never manage to forfeit: the one kept in the memories of Palestinian refugees, and that which is drawn by Darwish’s poetry.” —Anton Shammas One of the most transcendent poets of his generation, Darwish composed this remarkable elegy at the apex of his creativity, but with the full knowledge that his death was imminent. Thinking it might be his final work, he summoned all his poetic genius to create a luminous work that defies categorization. In stunning language, Darwish’s self-elegy inhabits a rare space where opposites bleed and blend into each other. Prose and poetry, life and death, home and exile are all sung by the poet and his other. On the threshold of im/mortality, the poet looks back at his own existence, intertwined with that of his people. Through these lyrical meditations on love, longing, Palestine, history, friendship, family, and the ongoing conversation between life and death, the poet bids himself and his readers a poignant farewell.

The time is an unspecified modernity, the place possibly Europe. Absence follows four nameless people -- the old man, the woman, the soldier, and the gambler -- as they journey to a desolate wasteland beyond the limits of an unnamed city.

Both a book and a sculptural object, Absence is a memorial to the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Yoon, an architect and designer who is currently an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, chose not to produce a traditional design proposal for the World Trade Center Memorial Competition. Instead she created a non-architectural, non site-specific space of remembrance: a portable personal memorial in the form of book.At almost two pounds, Absence has a considerable physical presence, but it is in every way the ghost of a presence, and it is this ghostliness that gives it its particular emotional weight. A solid white block of thick stock cardboard pages, the books only "text" consists of one pinhole and two identical squares die-cut into each of its one-hundred-and-twenty pages one for each story of the towers including the antenna mast. These removed elements lead the reader floor by floor through the missing buildings towards the final page where the footprint of the entire site of the World Trade Center is die-cut into a delicate lattice of absent structures.

Soon enough, nobody will remember life before the Internet. What does this unavoidable fact mean? Those of us who have lived both with and without the crowded connectivity of online life have a rare opportunity. We can still recognize the difference between Before and After. We catch ourselves idly reaching for our phones at the bus stop. Or we notice how, midconversation, a fumbling friend dives into the perfect recall of Google. In this eloquent and thought-provoking book, Michael Harris argues that amid all the changes we're experiencing, the most interesting is the end of absence-the loss of lack. The daydreaming silences in our lives are filled; the burning solitudes are extinguished. There's no true "free time" when you carry a smartphone. Today's rarest commodity is the chance to be alone with your thoughts. Michael Harris is an award-winning journalist and a contributing editor at Western Living and Vancouvermagazines. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

Things Are Going Great In My Absence is not an ordinary book. It's an astonishing, mind-blowing, life-changing experience, due to the vortex of Energy, Light, and Divine Intelligence it guides you into, step by enjoyable step. Divine Openings realigns you with that organized field of resonance that carries you along in the Flow Of Life. It helps you let in more of the Grace that's been raining on you all along. When you're not able to let in that Grace, you can feel like you're dying of thirst in a rainstorm. Things Are Going Great In My Absence is so powerful and effective, it spread to over 150 countries by word of mouth, before even being in bookstores. We know it might sound too good to be true--but it does work in your life if you simply read it, let it in, and stick to it.

In the biblical canon, two books lack any explicit reference to the name of God: Song of Songs and Esther. What is the nature of God as revealed in texts that don't use his name? Exploring the often overlooked theological connections between these two Old Testament books, Chloe T. Sun takes on the challenges of God's absence and explores how we think of God when he is perceived to be silent.

Winner of the Levis Poetry Prize selected by Jean Valentine. "Valerie Martínez has written an extraordinary book: these poems are expansive, surprising, intelligent; her subjects are as alive as her language. Her willingness to take risks is uncommon, and so is her compassion; she doesn't shy away from pain, and she lives in the poet's task of praise." -- Jean Valentine

A Grief Observed is a collection of Lewis's reflections on the experience of bereavement following the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, in 1960. The book was first published under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk as Lewis wished to avoid identification as the author. Though republished in 1963 after his death under his own name, the text still refers to his wife as "H" (her first name, which she rarely used, was Helen). The book is compiled from the four notebooks which Lewis used to vent and explore his grief. He illustrates the everyday trials of his life without Joy and explores fundamental questions of faith and theodicy. Lewis's step-son (Joy's son) Douglas Gresham points out in his 1994 introduction that the indefinite article 'a' in the title makes it clear that Lewis's grief is not the quintessential grief experience at the loss of a loved one, but one individual's perspective among countless others. The book helped inspire a 1985 television movie Shadowlands, as well as a 1993 film of the same name. Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was a British novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, lay theologian and Christian apologist. He is best known for his fictional work, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.