A blazing new story collection that will make you feel like the house is collapsing in on you, from the 3 time International Booker Prize finalist, "lead[ing] a vanguard of Latin American writers forging their own 21st-century canon.” – O , the Oprah magazine

The seven houses in these seven stories are strange. A person is missing, or a truth, or memory; some rooms are enticing, some unmoored, others empty. But in Samanta Schweblin's tense, visionary tales, something always creeps back a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a list of things to do before you die, a child's first encounter with darkness or the fallibility of parents.

In each story, twists and turns will unnerve and Schweblin never takes the expected path and instead digs under the skin, revealing surreal truths about our sense of home, of belonging, and of the fragility of our connections with others. This is a masterwork from one of our most brilliant modern writers.

These Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover editions are popular for their compact size and reasonable price which do not compromise content. Poems: Blake contains a full selection of Blake's work, including Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience , poems from Blake's Ms. book, poems from The Prophetic Books , and an index of first lines.

Gravity and Grace was the first ever publication by the remarkable thinker and activist, Simone Weil. In it Gustave Thibon, the farmer to whom she had entrusted her notebooks before her untimely death, compiled in one remarkable volume a compendium of her writings that have become a source of spiritual guidance and wisdom for countless individuals. On the fiftieth anniversary of the first English edition - by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1952 - this Routledge Classics edition offers English readers the complete text of this landmark work for the first time ever, by incorporating a specially commissioned translation of the controversial chapter on Israel. Also previously untranslated is Gustave Thibon's postscript of 1990, which reminds us how privileged we are to be able to read a work which offers each reader such 'light for the spirit and nourishment for the soul'. This is a book that no one with a serious interest in the spiritual life can afford to be without.

We all expect to be able to buy an excellent cup of coffee from the many brilliant coffee shops available. But what about the coffee we make at home? Shouldn't that be just as good?

Coffee guru James Hoffmann runs Square Mile Coffee, as well as creating extremely informative, and popular, kit and coffee reviews for his YouTube and Instagram channels. In his latest book he demonstrates everything you need to know to make consistently excellent coffee at home, including: what kit is worth buying, and what isn't; how to grind coffee; the basics of brewing for all major equipment (cafetiere, aeropress, stovetop etc); understanding coffee drinks, from the cortado to latte; the perfect espresso; and taking it to the next level - home roasting.

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, "A Walk in the Wild Side" has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called 'Walking the Wild Side of Life.' I've stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since." Perhaps the author's own words describe this classic work best: "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind."

Mark Haddon's bitterly funny debut novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is a murder mystery of sorts--one told by an autistic version of Adrian Mole. Fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone is mathematically gifted and socially hopeless, raised in a working-class home by parents who can barely cope with their child's quirks. He takes everything that he sees (or is told) at face value, and is unable to sort out the strange behavior of his elders and peers.
Late one night, Christopher comes across his neighbor's poodle, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork. Wellington's owner finds him cradling her dead dog in his arms, and has him arrested. After spending a night in jail, Christopher resolves--against the objection of his father and neighbors--to discover just who has murdered Wellington. He is encouraged by Siobhan, a social worker at his school, to write a book about his investigations, and the result--quirkily illustrated, with each chapter given its own prime number--is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.


Haddon's novel is a startling performance. This is the sort of book that could turn condescending, or exploitative, or overly sentimental, or grossly tasteless very easily, but Haddon navigates those dangers with a sureness of touch that is extremely rare among first-time novelists. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is original, clever, and genuinely moving: this one is a must-read. --Jack Illingworth, Amazon.ca--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From one of our most preeminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past, and how our experience colors those meanings.
Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now defunct (for thirty-four years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school's ethos and his fascination with his own family's heritage--in particular, his illustrious cousin, the renowned archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie--he reconstructs the passions of a childhood encounter with the oddly named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt's Elephantine Island. From this seed emerges one of Cynthia Ozick's most wondrous tales, touched by unsettling irony and the elusive flavor of a Kafka parable, and weaving, in her own distinctive voice, myth and mania, history and illusion.

The Good Conscience is Carlos Fuentes's second novel. The scene is Guanajuato, a provincial capital in Central Mexico, once one of the world's richest mining centers. The Ceballos family has been reinstated to power, and adolescent Jaime Ceballos, its only heir, is torn between the practical reality of his family's life and the idealism of his youth and his Catholic education. His father is a good man but weak; his uncle is powerful, yet his actions are inconsistent with his professed beliefs. Jaime's struggle to emerge as a man with a "good conscience" forms the theme of the book: can a rebel correct the evils of an established system and at the same time retain the integrity of his principles?

👘【编辑推荐】
★个性缭乱×文学生猛×艺术狂气：
日本文坛“第一 奇女子”、女性先锋、天才作家冈本加乃子杰作精选集
在她身上，我看见了属于我们人生道路的光明。——川端康成
加乃子是我所知道的女人中，最优秀聪明的人。——芥川龙之介
日本近代文坛女性作家辈出，与谢野晶子、樋口一叶、林芙美子……而其中有一颗奇异明星闪亮于文坛——冈本加乃子，她是被众多文豪，包括川端康成、芥川龙之介盛赞的女作家，也是被后辈（涩泽龙彦、吉本芭娜娜、新井一二三）所憧憬的屈指可数的优秀作家。
而她个人奇特而复杂的一生与绚烂绽放的才情也使她在同时代作家中备受瞩目。加乃子能从黑暗中攫取能量，外界环境的一切都可以被她吸取，滋养她。而她笔下的人物亦如此。她老后，有不甘，有追忆，有温情，有禅意，有释怀。她从未老去，她一直是任性温柔的少女。
★尖锐清醒的人间洞察，传奇彷徨的总决算
一部新旧时代夹缝里的人类处境和自觉之书
她的笔刻出“生”之流转、“命”之执念——
加乃子的写作看似内敛，实际上蕴含着奔腾的热情——“人啊，都是有血有肉的活人。”
《老妓抄》犹如新旧时代夹缝里的人类处境和自觉之书，通过对不同境遇人的描写，传达着蓬勃的“生”之渴望，即使在厄运中也勇于面对的坦荡情怀。年老与年轻之人、生命衰败之人、困窘之人穿梭来去，在寂寥的生命末途，却有着种种悸动，反射出蓬勃的“生”之渴望。
人在世间辗转往复，历尽种种苦，小说在生命的变化与时间的流逝中，探索“生”的渴望与追求。正如我们普通人的一生，文字间触碰着每一个人生命之路上难解的隐秘之处。
★“她们”的故事由《老妓抄》起，《舞妓》终
艺妓，游泳教练，料理店女将……眼泪与热情，独立与坚韧，璀璨与丰饶
全新选篇，注入女性凝视，浓缩女性的丰饶与美好、爱意与狂气
知名译者蕾克精选10篇短篇代表作，建构全新选篇思路。其中《蝙蝠》国内首次披露；《家灵》入选日本国语教科书，属公认经典之作。
一页版《老妓抄》从名作《老妓抄》起，《舞妓》终，仿若传奇女人的一场人生倒叙。被称为明治以来首屈一指的完美短篇作品《老妓抄》，到半自传小说《舞妓》，暗含加乃子从和歌诗人转为小说家的经历。10篇作品中，细腻的女性凝视从不缺席，不论是否担当主角，她们的独立与坚韧都令人为之动容。
★对最稀松平常的事物抱有的怜爱，呈现日本特有的古典式柔弱、细腻和寂寥
冈本加乃子用平稳细腻的笔触，举重若轻地展现出日常间最平常的事物中丰沛饱满之美。是穿着绀飞白和服、带着忧郁表情的人；是用盐渍秋刀鱼押的寿司；是雕金手艺，也是欲罢不能的东海道徒步……作品字里行间充满东瀛之美：物哀、无常、寂寥。
★ 新锐名译者蕾克，倾尽温柔，全力译介
冈本加乃子的作品浓密、惑溺、混沌、芳醇， 新锐译者蕾克倾全力翻译，精心传达日式文学之美，极大限度贴合原文，文风优美，情感真挚。
★ 知名画手×新锐设计师：匠心设计，珍藏佳品
视觉呈现上，设计师汐和挑选插画师芜意的《骨花》之作，契合加乃子作品的内核——繁花白骨：“死之上，活着的每一天都是花。”精装方脊，外封特种纸专色印刷，内文使用瑞典轻型纸，翻阅轻松熨帖、细腻护眼。
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🏮【内容简介】
“我们经历的一生，是迟滞缓慢的一生。仿佛一直在对付旧纸灯笼，点亮了灭掉，灭掉了，再幽亮地点起。”
本书精选日本大正文坛女性作家冈本加乃子10篇短篇代表作，收录《老妓抄》《寿司》《家灵》《舞妓》等经典之作，堪称一部新旧时代夹缝里的人类处境和自觉之书：年老与年轻之人、生命衰败之人、困窘之人皆在岔路口上挣扎迷惘，内敛而强韧的生命力流转其中。
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🍶【名人推荐】
今后，在文学的世界里，像冈本这样丰盛而深奥的女性，到什么时候才能再度出现？！我不禁感到我身边的温暖都消逝了。……她兼具西洋和东洋特质，也确实怀着颓废、虚无、怀疑……她将这些理应是消极的要素，献给自己巨大且积极的生命。在她身上，我看见了属于我们人生道路的光明。——川端康成
加乃子是我所知道的女人中，最优秀聪明的人。——芥川龙之介
簇拥在加乃子身边的人，就像附属在母神身边的男小神。小神的死，是母神用来滋养自身的肥料。——涩泽龙彦
在加乃子的小说中，看得到加乃子的曲线、颜色、厚度、音调、眼睛移动的方式、言行举止，但是当加乃子真的出现时，却无法一眼看透她，觉得好像了解了什么，又不怎么了解。”——宫本百合子
她的作品实在杰出，当重新评价。──吉本隆明(吉本芭娜娜之父)
冈本加乃子以华丽绚烂的笔触，描摹女性对生命的渴望与热情。——文洁若

In this witty “how-to” guide, Wislawa Szymborska has nothing but sympathy for the labors of would-be writers generally: “I myself started out with rotten poetry and stories,” she confesses in this collection of pieces culled from the advice she gave―anonymously―for many years in the well-known Polish journal Literary Life. She returns time and again to the mundane business of writing poetry properly, that is to say, painstakingly and sparingly. “I sigh to be a poet,” Miss A. P. from Bialogard exclaims. “I groan to be an editor,” Szymborska responds. Szymborska stubbornly insists on poetry’s “prosaic side”: “Let’s take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we?” This delightful compilation, translated by the peerless Clare Cavanagh, will delight readers and writers alike.

十个相互陌生、身份各异的人受邀前往德文郡海岸边一座孤岛上的豪宅。客人到齐后，主人却没有出现。
当晚，一个神秘的声音发出指控，分别说出每个人心中罪恶的秘密。接着，一位客人离奇死亡。暴风雨让小岛与世隔绝，《十个小士兵》——这首古老的童谣成了死亡咒语。如同歌谣中所预言的，客人一个接一个死去……杀人游戏结束后，竟无一人生还！

Brevity is the soul of beauty in these tiny masterworks of short short fiction Gorgeously translated by Lydia Davis, the miniature stories of A. L. Snijders might concern a lost shoe, a visit with a bat, fears of travel, a dream of a man who has lost a glass uniting them is their concision and their vivacity. Lydia Davis in her introduction delves into her fascination with the pleasures and challenges of translating from a language relatively new to her. She also extols Snijders’s “straightforward approach to storytelling, his modesty and his thoughtfulness.”
      Selected from many hundreds in the original Dutch, the stories gathered here―humorous, or bizarre, or comfortingly homely―are something like daybook entries, novels-in-brief, philosophical meditations, or events recreated from life, but―inhabiting the borderland between fiction and reality―might best be described as autobiographical mini-fables.
This morning at 11:30, in the full sun, I go up into the hayloft where I haven’t been for years. I climb over boxes and shelving, and open the door. A frightened owl flies straight at me, dead quiet, as quiet as a shadow can fly, I look into his eyes―he’s a large owl, it’s not strange that I’m frightened too, we frighten each other. I myself thought that owls never move in the daytime. What the owl thinks about me, I don’t know.

“[Plath’s] story is stirring, in sneaky, unexpected ways. . . . Look carefully and there’s a new angle here — on how, and why, we read Plath today.”— Parul Sehgal, New York TimesNever before published, this newly discovered story by literary legend Sylvia Plath stands on its own and is remarkable for its symbolic, allegorical approach to a young woman’s rebellion against convention and forceful taking control of her own life. Written while Sylvia Plath was a student at Smith College in 1952, Mary Ventura and The Ninth Kingdom tells the story of a young woman’s fateful train journey.Lips the color of blood, the sun an unprecedented orange, train wheels that sound like “guilt, and guilt, and guilt”: these are just some of the things Mary Ventura begins to notice on her journey to the ninth kingdom.“But what is the ninth kingdom?” she asks a kind-seeming lady in her carriage. “It is the kingdom of the frozen will,” comes the reply. “There is no going back.”Sylvia Plath’s strange, dark tale of female agency and independence, written not long after she herself left home, grapples with mortality in motion.

From Pulitzer Prize–winner Mark Strand comes an exquisitely witty and poignant series of prose poems. Sometimes appearing as pure prose, sometimes as impure poetry, but always with Strand’s clarity and simplicity of style, they are like riddles, their answers vanishing just as they appear within reach. Fable, domestic satire, meditation, joke, and fantasy all come together in what is arguably the liveliest, most entertaining book that Strand has yet written.

A haunting new book by a poet whose voice speaks of all our lifetimes
The 2020 Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück’s thirteenth book is among her most haunting. Here as in the Wild Iris there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and ancient.
Winter Recipes from the Collective is chamber music, an invitation into that privileged realm small enough for the individual instrument to make itself heard, dolente, its line sustained, carried, and then taken up by the next instrument, spirited, animoso, while at the same time being large enough to contain a whole lifetime, the inconceivable gifts and losses of old age, the little princesses rattling in the back of a car, an abandoned passport, the ingredients of an invigorating winter sandwich, a sister’s death, the joyful presence of the sun, its brightness measured by the darkness it casts.
“Some of you will know what I mean,” the poet says, by which she means, some of you will follow me. Hers is the sustaining presence, the voice containing all our lifetimes, “all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last.” This magnificent book couldn’t have been written by anyone else, nor could it have been written by the poet at any other time in her life. （那颗晴空 摘自 亚马逊美国）

“As a bookseller, I loved Shelf Life for the chance to peer behind the curtain of Diwan, Nadia Wassef’s Egyptian bookstore—the way that the personal is inextricable from the professional, the way that failure and success are often lovers, the relationship between neighborhoods and books and life. Nadia’s story is for every business owner who has ever jumped without a net, and for every reader who has found solace in the aisles of a bookstore.”
—Emma Straub, author of All Adults Here

“Shelf Life is such a unique memoir about career, life, love, friendship, motherhood, and the impossibility of succeeding at all of them at the same time. It is the story of Diwan, the first modern bookstore in Cairo, which was opened by three women, one of whom penned this book. As a bookstore owner I found this fascinating. As a reader I found it fascinating. Blunt, honest, funny.”
—Jenny Lawson, author of Broken (in the best possible way)

The warm and winning story of opening a modern bookstore where there were none, Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller recounts Nadia Wassef’s troubles and triumphs as a founder and manager of Cairo-based Diwan

The streets of Cairo make strange music. The echoing calls to prayer; the raging insults hurled between drivers; the steady crescendo of horns honking; the shouts of street vendors; the television sets and radios blaring from every sidewalk. Nadia Wassef knows this song by heart.

In 2002, with her sister, Hind, and their friend, Nihal, she founded Diwan, a fiercely independent bookstore. They were three young women with no business degrees, no formal training, and nothing to lose. At the time, nothing like Diwan existed in Egypt. Culture was languishing under government mismanagement, and books were considered a luxury, not a necessity. Ten years later, Diwan had become a rousing success, with ten locations, 150 employees, and a fervent fan base.

Frank, fresh, and very funny, Nadia Wassef’s memoir tells the story of this journey. Its eclectic cast of characters features Diwan’s impassioned regulars, like the demanding Dr. Medhat; Samir, the driver with CEO aspirations; meditative and mythical Nihal; silent but deadly Hind; dictatorial and exacting Nadia, a self-proclaimed bitch to work with—and the many people, mostly men, who said Diwan would never work.

Shelf Life is a portrait of a country hurtling toward revolution, a feminist rallying cry, and an unapologetic crash course in running a business under the law of entropy. Above all, it is a celebration of the power of words to bring us home.

本部书初发行是以「素心剑」为名，是金庸先生以小时候一段回忆为主而发展出来的故事，疼爱他的家中长工因为冤狱郁郁一生，心中的委屈至垂死才吐露于他。
「连城诀」以一部剑诀及其中的宝藏秘密揭露了人性贪婪的一面，写人的“坏“这本书可说是第一把交椅，狼心狗肺的丈夫，心机深疑心重的师 父，还有逼死自己女儿的父亲……憨直的乡下小子狄云，落入一个个圈套，失去了心爱的师妹，还有对人心的信赖。但是从这本书看来，当坏人也不是都很好过的，像有人半夜梦中爬起来堆尸砌墙，有人为了金银财宝发了狂……撇开这些可厌的事，丁典和凌霜华短暂的绿菊之恋，虽然淡淡如一阵幽香，却是全书最凄美的一段。

With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.
In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.