"With Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata, whose Convenience Store Woman has now sold more than a million copies worldwide, returns with a brilliant and wonderfully unsettling collection, her most recent fiction to be published in Japan. In these twelve stories, Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror and turns the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. In "A First-Rate Material," Nana and Naoki...

"For readers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Mona Awad, this fearless debut chronicles one woman's escape into a world of obsessive imagination. Bonnie Lincoln just wants to be left alone. To come home from work, shut out the voice that reminds her of some devastating losses, and unwind in front of the nostalgic, golden glow of her favorite TV show, Three's Company. When Bonnie wins the lottery, a more grandiose vision- to completely shuck off her own troublesome...

The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road),...

"Es lunes, aunque no importa –podría ser cualquier otro día laborable–. El abogado y propietario de la oficina, por el bien de todos, designa a cada uno de sus subalternos las tareas que hay que resolver. Tres sencillas palabras, pronunciadas por el último empleado contratado, harán que, desde esos despachos, el mundo comience a tambalearse. Con su «preferiría no hacerlo», Bartleby deja perplejo a todo aquel incapaz de ver más allá de...

Mikhail Bulgakov's devastating satire of Soviet life was written during the darkest period of Stalin's regime. Combining two distinct yet interwoven parts-one set in ancient Jerusalem, one in contemporary Moscow-the novel veers from moods of wild theatricality with violent storms, vampire attacks, and a Satanic ball; to such somber scenes as the meeting of Pilate and Yeshua, and the murder of Judas in the moonlit garden of Gethsemane; to the substanceless,...

"A tragicomic novel of a fame-obsessed American society yet again on the brink. Evoking such classics as Elmer Gantry and The Day of the Locust, William Giraldi's About Face boldly transfers the perennial literary themes of celebrity, ambition, and obsession to twenty-first-century Boston. There we meet Val Face, a charismatic self-help guru who captivates multitudes with his uncanny ability to heal adherents using only the power of his words, the...

I was feeling pretty down on myself... until I received a visit from a barely defined visitor from the depths of space. This kind, and slightly infuriating, entity explained how other outsiders, from a host of worlds, might benefit from reading my work. He gave me the confidence I needed to publish this volume of eclectic work including...

A true hors d'oeuvre, this literary short story is one of the shortest ever published. It is the narration of an unexpected death, of an abrupt, absurd and frustrating stop, of a final point in Russian roulette. A story above all of nothingness and blank pages, the simultaneous end of a narrator, a hero, a reader, a book, the extinction of an entire universe. It is, in a way, a literary abortion. The reader is advised that this book contains a dedication,...

In the magical world of cinema it is the actors and the directors who recieve most of the credit. For the more serious movie buffs, that praise may extend to the cinematographer, screenwriter, costume designers or the special effects crew. All of whom are duly acknowledged with a nomination category at the most pestigious of film awards, The Academy Awards. But there is one group of individuals, so intergral to the movie making industry, which for...

chistes, para estar en la sala de espera, mientras llega nestro turno