A Katha Trailblazer volume, this collection brings together three works of Ambai that explore the issue of female fertility. C S Lakshmi, who writes under the pen name Ambai, strikingly approaches the issue to unveil how women are oppressed and suppressed in the guise of love.
What secrets lurk in a family’s past—and how important are they in the here and now? Sudha Murty’s new book comprises two novellas that explore two quests by two different men—both for mothers they never knew they had. Venkatesh, a bank manager, stumbles upon his lookalike one fine day. When he probes further, he discovers his father’s hidden past, which includes an abandoned wife and child. Ventakesh is determined to make amends to his impoverished stepmother—but how can he repay his father’s debt? Mukesh, a young man, is shocked to realize after his father’s death that he was actually adopted. He sets out to find his biological mother, but the deeper he delves, the more confused he is about where his loyalties should lie: with the mother who gave birth to him, or with the mother who brought him up. The Mother I Never Knew is a poignant, dramatic book that reaches deep into the human heart to reveal what we really feel about those closest to us.
An unforgettable collection of fairy tales for grownups—from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession. • “A delight.... provoking and alarming, richly yet tautly rendered.... [She] has the sheer narrative skill to raise the hairs on the back of your neck and make your pulse race.” —The New York Times Book Review Like Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, Isak Dinesen and Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt knows that fairy tales are for adults. And in this ravishing collection she breathes new life into the form. Little Black Book of Stories offers shivers along with magical thrills. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women, childhood friends reunited by chance, venture into a dark forest where once, many years before, they saw–or thought they saw–something unspeakable. Another woman, recently bereaved, finds herself slowly but surely turning into stone. A coolly rational ob-gyn has his world pushed off-axis by a waiflike art student with her own ideas about the uses of the body. Spellbinding, witty, lovely, terrifying, the Little Black Book of Stories is Byatt at the height of her craft.
Over the last decade, Yan Lianke has been continually heralded as one of the “best contemporary Chinese writers” (The Independent) and “one of the country’s fiercest satirists” (The Guardian). Among many awards and honors, he has been twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize and he was awarded the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize for his impressive body of work. Now, for the first time, his two most acclaimed novellas are being published in English. “Timeless” and “marvelous” (Asian Review of Books), Marrow is a haunting story of a widow who goes to extremes to provide a normal life for her four physically and mentally disabled children. When she finds out that bones “the closer from kin the better” can cure their illnesses and prevent future generations from the same fate, she feeds them a medicinal soup made from the bones of her dead husband. But after running out of bones, she resorts to a measure that only a mother can take. A luminous, moving fable, The Years, Months, Days—a bestselling classic in China and winner of the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize—tells of an elderly man who stays in his small village after a terrible drought forces everyone to leave. Unable to make the grueling march through the mountains, he becomes the lone inhabitant, along with a blind dog. Tending to a single ear of corn, and fending off the natural world from overtaking the village, every day is a victory over death. With touches of the fantastical, these two novellas—masterpieces of the form—reflect the universality of mankind’s will to live, live well, and live with purpose.
Celebrated author Richard Wagamese artfully crafts these thrilling yet vulnerable stories of two young men trying to find their place in the world. The volume brings together two previously published novellas by Richard Wagamese, Him Standing and The Next Sure Thing, with a foreword from author Waubgeshig Rice. Both stories follow the lives of young men who have dreams for a better future. In their search for fame and fortune, Cree Thunderboy and Lucas Smoke end up on paths where their biggest challenge is staying true to themselves. In Him Standing, Lucas Smoke learns the art of carving from his grandfather. He discovers that he is a natural; he can literally make people come to life in wood. But when Lucas is asked to carve a spirit mask by a mysterious stranger, he quickly learns that his skill with a knife could cost him his dreams. In The Next Sure Thing, Cree Thunderboy has two things he does well: playing blues guitar and picking winning horses at the track. Picking winners is just meant to be a means to an end—Cree's goal is to make his living playing the blues. He meets a powerful man at the racetrack who convinces him he can parlay his special skill with the horses into a shot at the fame and fortune he seeks.
Countless stories. One incredible ending. A major league baseball player. a Tennessee pastor. A reality TV star. a single mom. A multi-platinum rocker. What do these people have in common? They’ve all hit bottom. And none of them stayed there. Famous or unfamiliar, these are the stories of real people who reached the end of their strength, the end of their control, and found the most surprising truths. It taught them not to rely on self or substance but to lean on the only completely reliable source of love, hope, and freedom: the God who created them. Shocking in their honesty, inspiring in their courage, these testimonies are critical reminders that no one is too far from God to find him. Join these and thousands more who have discovered the lifechanging power in putting God first and proclaiming, “I am Second.”
The Mayor's Tongue is a bold, vertiginous debut novel that unfolds in two narratives, one following a young man and the other an old man. The young man is Eugene Brentani, a devotee of the reclusive author and adventurer Constance Eakins, who goes to Trieste to find the girl he loves, who has in turn gone there herself to find Eakins. The old man is Mr. Schmitz, whose wife is dying, and who longs to confide in his dear friend Rutherford. But Rutherford has disappeared, and his letters, postmarked from Italy, become more and more ominous as the weeks pass. From a young writer of exceptional promise, this exhilarating novel is a meditation on the frustrations of love, the madness of mayors, the failings of language and the transformative powers of storytelling.
'A groundbreaking work of Afrofuturism before the term was even coined' Guardian 'A lush, exciting, inspiring read' Sarah Waters In this radically reimagined vampire myth, the night hides many things... Louisiana, 1850. A young girl escapes slavery and is taken in by two mysterious women. Rumoured to be witches, the pair travel only at night, dress in men's clothing and seem to know others' innermost thoughts. But the girl sees the promise of true freedom in their dark glittering eyes: the promise to 'share the blood' and live forever. They name her Gilda. Over the next two hundred years, Gilda moves through unseen spaces: through antebellum brothels, gold-rush bars, Black women's suffrage groups, hair salons and jazz clubs, searching for a way to exist in the world. Her body, powerful against the passage of time, will know both beauty and horror through the women she desires and the blood she craves. But can Gilda truly outrun the darkness of history and face a future where the lives of everyone she loves are at stake?
From the celebrated, award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and War and Peace a lavish, masterfully rendered volume of stories by one of the most influential short fiction writers of all time. Chekhov's genius left an indelible impact on every literary form in which he wrote, but none more so than short fiction. Now, renowned translators and longtime house authors Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky give us their peerless renderings of fifty-two Chekhov stories--a full deck These stories, which span the full arc of his career, reveal the extraordinary variety and unexpectedness of his work, from the farcically comic to the darkly complex, showing that there is no one type of "Chekhov story." They are populated by a remarkable range of characters who come from all parts of Russia, all walks of life, and who, taken together, have democratized the short story. Included here are a number of never-before-translated stories, including "Reading" and "An Educated Blockhead." Here is a collection that promises profound delight.