Fiction: literary and general non-genre
Graywolf Press Stump
Book Synopsis
£13.50
Graywolf Press Record Palace
Book Synopsis
£13.50
Graywolf Press Authenticity
Book Synopsis
£13.50
Graywolf Press Times Like These: Stories
Book SynopsisHis wasn't a world war. It was one of the smaller wars, but just as deadly as any other. "Wars are like snakes," his first commanding officer said to him. "Some of the little ones can be even worse than the monsters." --from "Veterans"Franklin fears his family is in danger from a fellow veteran he saved during the war. A young boy entranced by opera despite being born into the rock-and-roll generation finds himself playing the lead role in a present-day tragedy. Travel agents happily lost in the paperwork of other people's adventures break away for an impromptu trip without -- to their horror -- a destination. Pitch-perfect and unpredictable, these stories cover a wide terrain of voices, plot, and imagery. Rachel Ingalls's richly drawn characters slip from the ordinary into the surreal with an elegance that can only come from a master of the form. Mostly set in the United States, the stories in Times Like These are available for the first time to American readers.
£14.40
Graywolf Press Wreckage
Book Synopsis"[Wreckage] is a really remarkable piece of work. In the foreground is a caper story; in the background, a poetically expressed, apocalyptic history of Liverpool." The Daily TelegraphThat woman with the grey hair and the specs and the kind face and the accent all like his grandmother, his nain in hospital and when she can talk that is what she sounds like. Don''thitmepleasedon''thitme. These women falling, sliding off this earth and not just from violence but the one commonality that turns life to a wreckage.After their botched and brutal mission to punish a one-armed man in a small Welsh village, Darren and Alastair head back to Liverpool to report to their mob boss. On the way home, Darren robs a rural postal office in Wales that serves as a bank and needlessly cracks the skull of a little old postal lady. Darren''s eyes are full of fire. "We''re rich, Alastair!" But Alastair sees his own nain in this elderly woman and falls victim to his conscience. Darren has finally gone too far.As Alastair and Darren weave their way through the lowlife milieu of Liverpool, we hear many voices: the alky, the crack addict, the busman, the whores, the gangsters, and Darren''s many victims. But we also hear the voices of their ancestors going back generations of unthinkable grief and poverty. A fascinating sequel to Niall Griffiths'' Stump, which Irvine Welsh calls "a magnificent novel of loss and obsession . . . [by] a major talent."
£13.50
Graywolf Press The Translation of Dr. Apelles: A Love Story
Book SynopsisA daring new novel that "may be David Treuer's best book" (Charles Baxter)He realizes he has discovered a document that could change his life forever.Dr Apelles, Native American translator of Native American texts, lives a diligent existence. He works at a library and, in his free time, works on his translations. Without his realizing it, his world has become small. One day he stumbles across an ancient manuscript only he can translate. What begins as a startling discovery quickly becomes a vital quest-not only to translate the document but to find love. Through the riddle of Dr Apelles's heart, The Translation of Dr Apelles explores the boundaries of human emotion, charts the power of the language to both imprison and liberate, and maps the true dimensions of the Native American experience. As Dr Apelles's quest nears its surprising conclusion, the novel asks the reader to speculate on whose power is greater: The imaginer or the imagined? The lover or the beloved?In this brilliant mystery of letters in the tradition of Calvino, Borges, and Saramago, David Treuer excavates the persistent myths that belittle the contemporary Native American experience and lays bare the terrible power of the imagination.
£19.55
Graywolf Press Wounded
Book SynopsisTime Out Chicago, Top 10 Book of 2005Winner of the 2006 PEN USA Literary Award for FictionNew paperback edition available!Training horses is dangerousa head-to-head confrontation with 1,000 pounds of muscle and little sense takes courage, but more important, patience and smarts. It is these same qualities that allow John and his uncle Gus to live in the beautiful high desert of Wyoming. A black horse trainer is a curiosity, at the very least, but a familiar curiosity in these parts. It is the brutal murder of a young gay man, however, that pushes this small community to the teetering edge of intolerance. Highly praised for his storytelling and ability to address the toughest issues of our time with humor, grace, and originality, Wounded by Percival Everett offers a brilliant novel that explores the alarming consequences of hatred in a divided America.
£15.20
Graywolf Press The House of Widows: An Oral History
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£14.40
Graywolf Press Obabakoak: Stories from a Village
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£13.50
Graywolf Press The Accordionist's Son
Book SynopsisThe Accordionist''s Son by Bernardo Atxaga:"The most accomplished novel to date by an internationally celebrated writers" (Bookforum), now in paperback.David Imaz has spent many years living in exile in California, far from his native Basque Country. Nearing fifty and in failing health, he begins to write the story of his youth, a sweeping narrative that spans 1936 to 1999. As a young man, David divides his time between his uncle''s ranch and his life in the village of Obaba, where he practices the accordion at his father''s insistence all in the shadow of the Spanish Civil War. Letters found in a hotel attic, along with a silver pistol, lead David to unravel his family''s involvement in both sides of the conflict.
£13.50
Graywolf Press The Report
Book SynopsisA stunning first novel that is an evocative reimagining of a World War II civilian disasterOn a March night in 1943, on the steps of London''s Bethnal Green tube station, 173 people die in a crowd seeking shelter from what seemed to be another air raid. When the devastated neighborhood demands an inquiry, the job falls to magistrate Laurence Dunne. In this beautifully crafted novel, Jessica Francis Kane paints a vivid portrait of London at war. As Dunne investigates, he finds the truth to be precarious, even damaging. When he is forced to reflect on his report several decades later, he must consider whether the course he chose was the right one. The Report is a provocative commentary on the way all tragedies are remembered and endured.
£13.50
Graywolf Press Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and
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£14.40
Graywolf Press The Last Brother
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£12.60
Graywolf Press Child Wonder
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£13.50
Graywolf Press The Wilding
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£13.50
Graywolf Press Assumption
Book SynopsisA baffling triptych of murder mysteries by the author of I Am Not Sidney PoitierOgden Walker, deputy sheriff of a small New Mexico town, is on the trail of an old woman''s murderer. But at the crime scene, his are the only footprints leading up to and away from her door. Something is amiss, and even his mother knows it. As other cases pile up, Ogden gives chase, pursuing flimsy leads for even flimsier reasons. His hunt leads him from the seamier side of Denver to a hippie commune as he seeks the puzzling solution. In Assumption, his follow-up to the wickedly funny I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett is in top form as he once again upends our expectations about characters, plot, race, and meaning. A wild ride to the heart of a baffling mystery, Assumption is a literary thriller like no other.
£14.40
Graywolf Press Spring
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£13.50
Graywolf Press Almost Never
Book Synopsis"Of my generation I most admire Daniel Sada, whose writing project seems to me the most daring." Roberto BolañoThis Rabelaisian tale of lust and longing in the drier precincts of postwar Mexico introduces one of Latin America''s most admired writers to the English-speaking world. Demetrio Sordo is an agronomist who passes his days in a dull but remunerative job at a ranch near Oaxaca. It is 1945, World War II has just ended, but those bloody events have had no impact on a country that is only on the cusp of industrializing. One day, more bored than usual, Demetrio visits a bordello in search of a libidinous solution to his malaise. There he begins an all-consuming and, all things considered, perfectly satisfying relationship with a prostitute named Mireya. A letter from his mother interrupts Demetrio''s debauched idyll: she asks him to return home to northern Mexico to accompany her to a wedding in a small town on the edge of the desert. Much to his mother''s delight, he meets the beautiful and virginal Renata and quickly falls in lovea most proper kind of love. Back in Oaxaca, Demetrio is torn, the poor cad. Naturally he tries to maintain both relationships, continuing to frolic with Mireya and beginning a chaste correspondence with Renata. But Mireya has problems of her ownboredom is not among themand concocts a story that she hopes will help her escape from the bordello and compel Demetrio to marry her. Almost Never is a brilliant send-up of Latin American machismo that also evokes a Mexico on the verge of dramatic change.
£14.40
Graywolf Press The Life of an Unknown Man
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£12.75
Graywolf Press No Animals We Could Name: Stories
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£13.50
Graywolf Press Four New Messages
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£15.30
Graywolf Press Seven Houses in France
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£13.50
Graywolf Press Familiar
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£13.50
Graywolf Press Spectacle
Book SynopsisAn inventive new collection from the author of Hydroplane and The End of Free Love* A San Francisco Chronicle, Complex, Flavorwire, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Largehearted Boy and Slaughterhouse 90210 Best Book of the Year *In these innovative linked stories, women confront loss and grief as they sift through the wreckage of their lives. In the title story, a woman struggles with the death of her friend in a plane crash. A daughter decides whether to take her father off life support in the Pushcart Prize-winning "Cowboys." And in "Underthings," when a man hits his girlfriend, she calls it an accident. Spectacle bears witness to alarming and strange incidents: carnival rides and plane crashes, affairs spied through keyholes and amateur porn, vandalism and petty theft. These wounded women stand at the edge of disaster and risk it all to speak their sharpest secrets.In lean, acrobatic prose, Susan Steinberg subverts assumptions about narrative and challenges conventional gender roles. She delivers insight with a fierce lyric intensity in sentences shorn of excessive sentiment or unnecessary ornament. By fusing style and story, Steinberg amplifies the connections between themes and characters so that each devastating revelation echoes throughout the collection. A vital and turbulent book from a distinctive voice, Spectacle will break your heart, and then, before the last page is turned, will bind it up anew."Experimental but never opaque, Steinberg's stories seethe with real and imagined menace." -Publishers Weekly
£13.60
Graywolf Press,U.S. Percival Everett by Virgil Russell
Book SynopsisA story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his aging father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write?Let's simplify: a woman seeks an apprenticeship with a painter, claiming to be his long-lost daughter. A contractor-for-hire named Murphy can't distinguish between the two brothers who employ him. And in Murphy's troubled dreams, Nat Turner imagines the life of William Styron. These narratives twist together with anecdotes from the nursing home, each building on the other until they crest in a wild, outlandish excursion of the inmates led by the father. Anchoring these shifting plotlines is a running commentary between father and son that sheds doubt on the truthfulness of each story. Because, after all, what narrator can we ever trust?Not only is Percival Everett by Virgil Russell a powerful, compassionate meditation on old age and its humiliations, it is an ingenious culmination of Everett's recurring preoccupations. All of his prior work, his metaphysical and philosophical inquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this masterful book. Percival Everett has never been more cunning, more brilliant and subversive, than he is in this, his most important and elusive novel to date.
£14.25
Graywolf Press Love Is Power, or Something Like That: Stories
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£13.50
Graywolf Press In Times of Fading Light
Book SynopsisAn enthrallingly expansive family saga set against the backdrop of the collapse of East German communism, from a major new international voice* Over 450,000 copies sold in Germany alone * Rights sold in 20 countries * Winner of the German Book Prize * A PW "First Fiction" pick *In Times of Fading Light begins in September 2001 as Alexander Umnitzer, who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, leaves behind his ailing father to fly to Mexico, where his grandparents lived as exiles in the 1940s. The novel then takes us both forward and back in time, creating a panoramic view of the family''s history: from Alexander''s grandparents'' return to the GDR to build the socialist state, to his father''s decade spent in a gulag for criticizing the Soviet regime, to his son''s desire to leave the political struggles of the twentieth century in the past. With wisdom, humor, and great empathy, Eugen Ruge draws on his own family history as he masterfully brings to life the tragic intertwining of politics, love, and family under the East German regime.
£22.10
Graywolf Press City of Bohane
Book SynopsisA tale set in a near-future coastal Ireland finds the long-time rule of dapper godfather Logan Hartnett threatened by the return of an old nemesis, the ambitions of once-trusted henchmen and his wife''s request for him to abandon his life of crime. A first novel. 15,000 first printing.
£14.40
Graywolf Press Byzantium: Stories
Book SynopsisWinner of the Bakeless Prize for Fiction, an imaginative debut that ranges from Havana to Berlin* A Kansas City Star Best Book of the Year * One of Publishers Weekly''s "Best Summer Books"*Ancient cities and fallen empires come to life in this masterful collection. In the Byzantine court, a noble with a crippled hand is called upon to ensure that a holy man poses no threat to the throne. On an island in Lake Michigan, a religious community crumbles after an ardent convert digs a little too deep. And the black detective Jackson Hieronymus Burke rises to fame and falls from favor in two stories that recount his origins in Havana and the height of his success in Kaiser Wilhelm''s Germany. Ben Stroud''s historical reimaginings twist together with contemporary stories to reveal startling truths about human nature across the centuries. In his able hands, Byzantium makes us believe that these are accounts we haven''t heard yet. As the chronicler of Burke''s exploits muses, "After all, where does history exist, except in our imagination? Does that make it any less true?"
£13.50
Graywolf Press Tumbledown
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£22.10
Graywolf Press There Are Little Kingdoms
Book SynopsisFrom the author of City of Bohane, a debut collection that "could easily have been titled These Are Little Masterpieces''" (The Irish Times)This award-winning story collection by Kevin Barry summons all the laughter, darkness, and intensity of contemporary Irish life. A pair of fast girls court trouble as they cool their heels on a slow night in a small town. Lonesome hill walkers take to the high reaches in pursuit of a saving embrace. A bewildered man steps off a country bus in search of his identityand a stiff drink. These stories, filled with a grand sense of life''s absurdity, form a remarkably sure-footed collection that reads like a modern-day Dubliners. The winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a 2007 book of the year in The Irish Times, the Sunday Tribune, and Metro, There Are Little Kingdoms marks the stunning entrance of a writer who burst onto the literary scene fully formed.
£14.45
Graywolf Press Before I Burn
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£20.80
Graywolf Press Karate Chop: Stories
Book SynopsisThe first book in English by an acclaimed Danish writer: "beautiful, faceted, haunting stories . . . [from] a rising star" (Junot Díaz)Karate Chop, Dorthe Nors''s acclaimed story collection, is the debut book in the collaboration between Graywolf Press and A Public Space. These fifteen compact stories are meticulously observed glimpses of everyday life that expose the ominous lurking under the ordinary. While his wife sleeps, a husband prowls the Internet, obsessed with female serial killers; a bureaucrat tries to reinvent himself, exposing goodness as artifice when he converts to Buddhism in search of power; a woman sits on the edge of the bed where her lover lies, attempting to locate a motive for his violence within her own self-doubt. Shifting between moments of violence (real and imagined) and mundane contemporary life, these stories encompass the complexity of human emotions, our capacity for cruelty as well as compassion. Not so much minimalist as stealthy, Karate Chop delivers its blows with an understatement that shows a master at work.
£13.50
Graywolf Press Woke Up Lonely
Book Synopsis"Intricately imagined and timely . . . Maazel is an entertaining writer with a dry, droll sense of humor." -The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice* Shortlisted for the Believer Book Award * Fiona Maazel's Woke Up Lonely follows a cult leader, his ex-wife, and the four people he takes hostage. It's about loneliness in America, North Korea, espionage, a city underneath Cincinnati, cloud seeding, and eavesdropping. It's also a big, sweeping love story.
£13.50
Graywolf Press The Colour of Memory
Book SynopsisThe first novel, in revised form, from "possibly the best living writer in Britain" (The Daily Telegraph)In The Colour of Memory, six friends plot a nomadic course through their mid-twenties as they scratch out an existence in near-destitute conditions in 1980s South London. They while away their hours drinking cheap beer, landing jobs and quickly squandering them, smoking weed, dodging muggings, listening to Coltrane, finding and losing a facsimile of love, collecting unemployment, and discussing politics in the way of the besotted young-as if they were employed only by the lives they chose. In his vivid evocation of council flats and pubs, of a life lived in the teeth of romantic ideals, Geoff Dyer provides a shockingly relevant snapshot of a different Lost Generation.
£14.40
Graywolf Press The Search
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£13.50
Graywolf Press In Times of Fading Light
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£14.40
Graywolf Press Song of the Shank
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£16.20
Graywolf Press Tumbledown
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£14.40
Graywolf Press Dark Lies the Island: Stories
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£14.40
Graywolf Press Duplex
Book Synopsis"Utterly compelling . . . Davis writes with a stunning brilliance, creating fractured worlds that are both extraordinary and routine." The Boston Globe"A coming-of-age-meets-dystopian-fantasy-meets-alternate-reality novel, or maybe an Ionesco-meets-Beckett-meets-Oulipo novel . . . The world [Duplex] describes has gone cuckoo while its characters'' anxieties remain stubbornly, drably, daringly familiar." Tom Bissell, Harper''s Magazine "Enchanting . . . Hums beautifully to its own rhythm. It''s a series of dreamlike, often erotic, images and interconnected plot lines that . . . swell to create an intoxicating atmosphere." Slate "For fans of the fantastical, Davis''s writing style is a glass of ice-cold water in today''s desert of conventional fiction." Star Tribune (Minneapolis)"[I fell] in love with Davis''s writing . . . I''m grateful for every word . . . When you are lost in the uncanny woods of this astonishing, double-hinged book, just keep reading, and remember to look up. Kathryn Davis knows right where you are." Lynda Barry, The New York Times Book Review"Reading this book is a blast . . . Duplex is a traditional love story tucked inside an adult fairy tale, wrapped in science fiction . . . Thankfully, the laws of quantum mechanics do not power Duplex''s magnetism. Instead, it is Davis''s beautiful prose, her psychological awareness." Rosecrans Baldwin, NPR, All Things Considered
£14.40
Graywolf Press See You in Paradise: Stories
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£14.40
Graywolf Press Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes: Stories
Book SynopsisThe heartwarming debut that brought Per Petterson, the author of the highly acclaimed Out Stealing Horses, to prominenceYoung Arvid Jansen lives on the outskirts of Oslo. It's the early sixties; his father works in a shoe factory and his Danish mother works as a cleaner. Arvid has nightmares about crocodiles and still wets his bed at night, but slowly he begins to understand the world around him. Vivid images accompany each new event: A photo of his mother as a young woman makes him cry as he realizes how time passes, and the black car that comes to collect his father on the day Arvid's grandfather dies reminds him of the passing of his bullfinch. And then, one morning, his teacher tells his class to pray because a nuclear war is looming. Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes, Per Petterson's debut, in which he introduces Arvid Jansen to the world, is a delicate portrait of childhood in all its complexity, wonder, and confusion that will delight fans of Out Stealing Horses and new readers alike.
£12.60
Graywolf Press The Infernal
Book SynopsisA fierce, searing response to the chaos of the war on terror-an utterly original and blackly comic debutIn the early years of the Iraq War, a severely burned boy appears on a remote rock formation in the Akkad Valley. A shadowy, powerful group within the U.S. government speculates: Who is he? Where did he come from? And, crucially, what does he know? In pursuit of that information, an interrogator is summoned from his prison cell, and a hideous and forgotten apparatus of torture, which extracts "perfect confessions," is retrieved from the vaults. Over the course of four days, a cavalcade of voices rises up from the Akkad boy, each one striving to tell his or her own story. Some of these voices are familiar: Osama bin Laden, L. Paul Bremer, Condoleezza Rice, Mark Zuckerberg. Others are less so. But each one has a role in the world shaped by the war on terror. Each wants to tell us: This is the world as it exists in our innermost selves. This is what has been and what might be. This is The Infernal.
£16.20
Graywolf Press A Woman Loved
Book SynopsisThe fascinating story of a young Russian filmmaker''s attempts to portray Catherine the Great, before and after the collapse of the Soviet UnionCatherine the Great''s life seems to have been made for the cinemaher rise to power; her reportedly countless love affairs and wild sexual escapades; the episodes of betrayal, revenge, and even murderthere''s no shortage of historical drama. But Oleg Erdmann, a young Russian filmmaker, seeks to discover and portray Catherine''s essential, emotional truth, her real life beyond the rumors and façade. His first screenplay just barely makes it past the Soviet film board and is assigned to a talented director, but the resulting film fails to avoid the usual clichés. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as he struggles to find a place for himself in the new order, Oleg agrees to work with an old friend on a television series that becomes a quick successas well as increasingly lurid, a far cry from his original vision. He continues to seek the real Catherine elsewhere. With A Woman Loved, Andreï Makine delivers a sweeping novel about the uses of art, the absurdity of history, and the overriding power of human love, if only it can be uncovered and allowed to flourish.
£14.40
Graywolf Press Rails Under My Back
Book Synopsis"Will put Allen in the company of writers such as James Joyce, August Wilson, and Ralph Ellison." -The Philadelphia InquirerWhen it was first published fifteen years ago, Jeffery Renard Allen's debut novel, Rails Under My Back, earned its author comparisons to some of the giants of twentieth-century modernism. The publication of Allen's equally ambitious second novel, Song of the Shank, cemented those lofty claims. Now, the book that established his reputation is being restored to print in its first Graywolf Press edition. Together, the two novels stand as significant achievements of twenty-first-century literature. Rails Under My Back is an epic that tracks the interwoven lives of two brothers, Lucius and John Jones, who are married to two sisters, Gracie and Sheila McShan. For them, their parents, and their children, life is always full of departures; someone is always fleeing town and leaving the remaining family to suffer the often dramatic, sometimes tragic consequences. The multiple effects of the comings and goings are devastating: These are the almost mythic expression of the African American experience in the half century that followed the Second World War. The story ranges, as the characters do, from the city, which is somewhat like both New York and Chicago, to Memphis, to the West, and to many "inner" and "outer" locales. Rails Under My Back is a multifaceted, brilliantly colored, intensely musical novel that pulses with urgency and originality.
£16.20
Graywolf Press Almost Everything Very Fast
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£14.40
Graywolf Press Blackass
Book SynopsisFuro Wariboko, a young Nigerian, awakes the morning before a job interview to find that he's been transformed into a white man. In this condition he plunges into the bustle of Lagos to make his fortune. With his red hair, green eyes, and pale skin, it seems he's been completely changed. Well, almost. There is the matter of his family, his accent, his name. Oh, and his black ass. Furo must quickly learn to navigate a world made unfamiliar and deal with those who would use him for their own purposes. Taken in by a young woman called Syreeta and pursued by a writer named Igoni, Furo lands his first-ever job, adopts a new name, and soon finds himself evolving in unanticipated ways.A. Igoni Barrett's Blackass is a fierce comic satire that touches on everything from race to social media while at the same time questioning the values society places on us simply by virtue of the way we look. As he did in Love Is Power, or Something Like That, Barrett brilliantly depicts life in contemporary Nigeria and details the double-dealing and code-switching that are implicit in everyday business. But it's Furo's search for an identity--one deeper than skin--that leads to the final unraveling of his own carefully constructed story.
£14.40
