Berlin Tales is a collection of seventeen translated stories associated with Berlin. The book provides a unique insight into the mind of this fascinating city through the eyes of its story-tellers.Nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the stories collected here reflect on the city's fascinating recent history, setting out with the early twentieth-century Berlin of Siegfried Kracauer and Alfred Döblin and culminating in an excellent selection of stories from the best of the new voices in the current boom in German fiction. They are chosen for their conscious exploration of the city's image, meaning, and attraction to immigrants and tourists as well as Berliners fromboth sides of the Wall. These stories also depict Berlin's distinct districts, not just the differences between East and West but also iconic sites such as Alexanderplatz, individual neighbourhoods (Jewish Mitte, Turkish Kreuzberg) and individual streets.There is an introduction and notes to accompany the stories and a selection of Further Reading. Each story is illustrated with a striking photograph and there is a map of Berlin and its transport system (a frequent motif). There is an introduction and notes to accompany the stories and a selection of Further Reading. The book will appeal to people who love travelling or are armchair travellers, as much as to those who love Berlin.

Hailed a “Best Book of the Year” by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Vulture, and the New York Public Library, Some Trick is now in paperback Finalist for the Saroyan Prize for Fiction For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most far-reaching dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. “Look,” a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even in the face of situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, where things prove “more complicated than they had first appeared” and “at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate.” In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt’s signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly “taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination.”

A collection of short stories that "offers an idiosyncratic series of 'what-ifs' about our fragile human condition ... What if your perfect hermaphrodite match existed on another planet? What if you could suddenly see through everybody's skin to their organs? What if you knew the exact date of your death? What if your city was filled with doppelgangers of you? Forced to navigate these bizarre scenarios, Phillips' characters search for solutions to the problem of how to survive in an irrational, infinitely strange world"--

***LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION*** “An extraordinary and dazzlingly original work from one of our most gifted and interesting writers” (Emily St. John Mandel, author of The Glass Hotel). The Need, which finds a mother of two young children grappling with the dualities of motherhood after confronting a masked intruder in her home, is “like nothing you’ve ever read before…in a good way” (People). When Molly, home alone with her two young children, hears footsteps in the living room, she tries to convince herself it’s the sleep deprivation. She’s been hearing things these days. Startling at loud noises. Imagining the worst-case scenario. It’s what mothers do, she knows. But then the footsteps come again, and she catches a glimpse of movement. Suddenly Molly finds herself face-to-face with an intruder who knows far too much about her and her family. As she attempts to protect those she loves most, Molly must also acknowledge her own frailty. Molly slips down an existential rabbit hole where she must confront the dualities of motherhood: the ecstasy and the dread; the languor and the ferocity; the banality and the transcendence as the book hurtles toward a mind-bending conclusion. In The Need, Helen Phillips has created a subversive, speculative thriller that comes to life through blazing, arresting prose and gorgeous, haunting imagery. “Brilliant” (Entertainment Weekly), “grotesque and lovely” (The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice), and “wildly captivating” (O, The Oprah Magazine), The Need is a glorious celebration of the bizarre and beautiful nature of our everyday lives and “showcases an extraordinary writer at her electrifying best” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

French Tales is a collection of twenty-two translated stories associated with the twenty-two regions of France. The book, which includes both well-known and little-known writers, for example Prosper Mérimée in the nineteenth century and Anne-Marie Garat in the twenty-first, affords readers a panoramic view of French society and culture, reflecting, as it does, its variety and diversity from Brittany to Corsica. Writers include among others Maupassant, Zola, Annie Saumont, Marcel Aymé, Didier Daeninckx and Stephane Émond. The subject-matter ranges from stories about marriage, the First World War and homelessness to house-buying, childhood and honour-killing. Following the model of Paris Tales, also translated by Helen Constantine, each story is illustrated with a striking photograph and there is a map indicating the position of the French regions. There is an introduction and notes to accompany the stories and a selection of Further Reading. The book will appeal to people who love travelling or are armchair travellers, as much as to those who love France and things French.

'Come And Tell Me' is an introduction to personal safety for young children. Its central message is that a child should come and tell the adult in charge before going anywhere with someone.

Focuses on Helen Keller's determination to hear, see, and speak and her equal determination to help others with handicaps similar to her own.

In ways no guide book can achieve, these twenty absorbing tales by Italian authors ranging from Boccaccio in the Middle Ages to Giacomo Casanova in the eighteenth century, to Pier-Paolo Pasolini in the twentieth and contemporary new writers such as Melania Mazzucco and Igiaba Scego, offer the delight of discovering and exploring one of the world's most unique cities thorough a wide variety of individual lives and epochs. The tales span seven hundred years but rather than being ordered chronologically, old and new appear alongside one another, reflecting the dual identity of Rome - thriving, modern metropolis and ancient city centre that is one of the wonders of the world. The tales are wonderfully varied in style, tone, and subject matter. Casanova sets about seducing the hotelier's daughter only minutes after his arrival, a notorious Spanish prostitute in Renaissance Rome endures a public hiding without flinching, a Danish tourist in her sixties finds an unusual lover, Pope John Paul II uncovers a vast conspiracy against him, a medieval revolutionary demagogue suffers almost the same fate as Mussolini. Each story is illustrated with a black-and-white photograph and there is a map of Rome to help readers locate the important sites which feature in the text. A deep sense of timelessness, of separate destinies entwined across a gulf of centuries, is the cumulative effect of this vivid mosaic of dramatic, comic, and tragic stories set in the Eternal City.

Acclaimed author Margaret George tells the story of the legendary Greek woman whose face "launched a thousand ships" in this New York Times bestseller. The Trojan War, fought nearly twelve hundred years before the birth of Christ, and recounted in Homer's Iliad, continues to haunt us because of its origins: one woman's beauty, a visiting prince's passion, and a love that ended in tragedy. Laden with doom, yet surprising in its moments of innocence and beauty, Helen of Troy is an exquisite page-turner with a cast of irresistible, legendary characters—Odysseus, Hector, Achilles, Menelaus, Priam, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, as well as Helen and Paris themselves. With a wealth of material that reproduces the Age of Bronze in all its glory, it brings to life a war that we have all learned about but never before experienced.