Search results for ""Author Adrian Nathan West""

The first of the late Marianne Fritz's works to be translated into English. This dark gem of a novel swerves from uneasy pantomime comedy to sheer domestic horror. Fritz has a clammy handle on all that makes humans miserable: roll up for the horrors of jealousy, war, confinement, mental illness, regret and unhappy motherhood.The Weight of Things is the first book, and the first translated book by Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948-2007). After winning acclaim with this novel-awarded the Robert Walser Prize in 1978-she embarked on a brilliant and ambitious literary project called "The Fortress," which earned her cult status, comparisons to James Joyce, and admirers including Elfriede Jelinek and W. G. Sebald.Yet in this, her first novel, we discover not an eccentric fluke of literary nature but rather a brilliant and masterful satirist, philosophically minded yet raging with anger and wit, who under the guise of a domestic horror story manages to expose the hypocrisy and deep abiding cruelties running parallel, over time, through the society and the individual minds of a century.

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In a broken-down Middle American town, the disintegration of a struggling family - its ambitions and emotions worn thin - is laid bare through the cold eyes of its only son. While studying at the local community college to finish his degree, he works what his divorced parents deem to be menial jobs and tries to stay out of their way, keeping his pitiless observations about their lives to himself. He says nothing about his semi-estranged father's doomed attempts to find meaning in strip-mall spirituality. He says nothing about his mother's willingness to subjugate herself to men he deems unworthy. He says nothing about the anonymity and emptiness to which their social classes and places of birth seem to have condemned everyone he knows, robbing them of even the vocabulary to express their grievances. He says nothing about his own pity, disgust, compassion, tenderness, and love - and when his father enters a bodybuilding competition, he swallows his scorn and agrees to help. Instantly relatable, impeccably realized, and grimly hilarious, My Father's Diet is equal parts Kierkegaard, This Side of Paradise, and Pumping Iron: an autopsy of antiquated notions of manhood, and the perfect, bite-sized novel for a world always keen to mistake narcissism for introspection.

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Translated for the first time into English, cult German author Rainald Goetz’s debut novel Insane draws upon his clinical psychiatric experience to paint a portrait of the asylum as a total institution. We follow a young psychiatrist, Dr Raspe, who enters the profession dreaming of revolutionising its methods. Confronted by day-to-day practices and the reality of life in the psychiatric hospital, Raspe begins to fray at the edges. The very concept of madness is called into question in a brutal portrayal of patients and psychiatrists and the various treatments administered, from psychotherapy to electroshock therapy. What is madness? And who is truly mad? Diving headlong into a terrifying and oppressive world, Insane is a veritable journey into the madhouse by one of Germany’s most prominent and contentious authors.

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When We Cease to Understand the World shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness. Some of their discoveries revolutionise our world for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. With breakneck pace and wondrous detail, Benjamín Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to break open the stories of scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.

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'Sharp, savage and tense' Sunday Times Crime ClubSHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA CRIME FICTION IN TRANSLATION DAGGERLuis Machi has had enemies for a long time thanks to his corrupt business dealings and cooperation with the military junta's coup, not to mention the numerous infidelities of his love life. What is new, however, is the corpse chained to the boot of Machi's car with furry pink handcuffs . . . Someone is trying to set him up and the number of suspects is incalculable. Machi is stuck dredging his guilty past for clues and trying to dispose of the mystery corpse. But time is just another enemy and it's running out fast.

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THE NEW NOVEL FROM THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE"A wildly enjoyable book; the 85-year-old Vargas Llosa is as sharp and mordantly funny as ever." Financial TimesGuatemala, 1954. A CIA-supported military coup topples the government. Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changed the development of Latin America: that those in power encouraged the spread of Soviet communism in the Americas. Mario Vargas Llosa has written a drama on a world stage, in which some persecutors end up as victims of the very plot they helped construct. Ironic and sensual, provocative and redemptive, Harsh Times is a story of international conspiracies and conflicting interests in the time of the Cold War, the echoes of which are still felt today.

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Mei is a forty-two year-old editor living in Barcelona. After years of unsuccessfully trying to become pregnant, and having grown apart from her husband, she decides to escape her crude reality when she’s made redundant from her job at a publishing house. When she moves to the cottage where she grew up, hidden in a remote forest of Catalunya, she believes this to be the perfect opportunity to finish the novel she’s been obsessing over. But as she begins writing, or trying to, tragedy hits her and solitude possesses her, forcing her to face her past, an unsolicited present and a future that is adrift. As Mei’s chance encounters and new relationships with figures from her childhood seem to keep her grounded, the forest and its inhabitants take over her as she fights to finish her novel and attempt to escape solitude unscathed.

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“Hermann Burger is one of the truly great authors of the German language: a writer of consummate control and range, with a singular and haunting worldview.” –Uwe Schütte In the tunnel-village of Göschenen, a man named Hermann Burger has vanished without a trace from his hotel room, suspected of suicide. What is found in his room is not a note, but a 124-page manuscript entitled Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis: an exhaustive manifesto comprising 1,046 “thanatological” aphorisms (or “mortologisms”) advocating suicide. This “grim science of killing the self” studies the predominance of death over life, in traumatic experiences such as the breakup of a marriage, years of depression, the erosion of friendships and the disgrace of impotence—but the aphoristic text presents something more complicated than a logical conclusion to life experience. Drawing inspiration from such authors as Wittgenstein, Cioran and Bernhard, Burger’s unsettling work would be published shortly before the author would take his own life. Hermann Burger (1942–89) was a Swiss author, critic and professor. Author of four novels and several volumes of essays, short fiction and poetry, he first achieved fame with his novel Schilten, the story of a mad village schoolteacher who teaches his students to prepare for death. At the end of his life, he was working on the autobiographical tetralogy Brenner, one of the high points of 20th-century German prose. He died by overdose days after the first volume’s publication.

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Longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award 2020. Spain's greatest living poet, Pere Gimferrer (b.1945) has written more than thirty books spanning verse, fiction, essay, and criticism. His earliest writings appeared in Spanish. In 1970 he began publishing in Catalan, and has alternated between the two languages since (with occasional forays into French and Italian). The present collection, the first book-length publication of Gimferrer's Catalan poetry in English, brings together work from all phases of his career. His poetry is a marvel of syncretism: Billie Holiday, the medieval polymath Ramon Llull, Ezra Pound, and the artist Tapies all appear in his pages. His style draws equally on modernism, on Galician-Portuguese love lyrics, on Gongora and on the Valencian metaphysical poet Ausias March. Rounding out the volume is a selection from the Dietari, an artistic diary that outlines his poetics and his sense of the artist's vocation through a series of meditations on Casanova, Octavio Paz and others.

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As if Borges wrote The DecameronDuring an atomic alarm in Barcelona in the year 2025, the thirty-year old hero takes refuge in a luxurious mansion in the mountains where he is put up, along with other guests, awaiting the outcome of the conflict. For the following seven days the residents of the mansion spend their spare time reading and taking walks , and, above all, telling stories to each other. The narrators (most of whom belong to the generation thirty years older than the hero's) are eight in number, and the stories they tell can be taken as autonomous ones, although, as the novel advances, it may soon be that when juxtaposed, they do indeed weave a web of intrigue about a family of bankers—a web that gradually involves some of the guests in the mansion.

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THE NEW NOVEL FROM THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE"A wildly enjoyable book; the 85-year-old Vargas Llosa is as sharp and mordantly funny as ever." Financial Times"A compelling and propulsive literary thriller." Hari Kunzru, New York Times Book Review"A splendidly rich and absorbing novel." The Scotsman"Compelling . . . full of intrigue, backstabbing and shifting power dynamics." Irish TimesGuatemala, 1954. A CIA-supported military coup topples the government. Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changed the development of Latin America: that those in power encouraged the spread of Soviet communism in the Americas.Mario Vargas Llosa has written a drama on a world stage, in which some persecutors end up as victims of the very plot they helped construct. Ironic and sensual, provocative and redemptive, Harsh Times is a story of international conspiracies and conflicting interests in the time of the Cold War, the echoes of which are still felt today.

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THE NEW NOVEL FROM THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE"A wildly enjoyable book; the 85-year-old Vargas Llosa is as sharp and mordantly funny as ever." Financial Times"A compelling and propulsive literary thriller." Hari Kunzru, New York Times Book Review"A splendidly rich and absorbing novel." The Scotsman"Compelling . . . full of intrigue, backstabbing and shifting power dynamics." Irish TimesGuatemala, 1954. A CIA-supported military coup topples the government. Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changed the development of Latin America: that those in power encouraged the spread of Soviet communism in the Americas. Mario Vargas Llosa has written a drama on a world stage, in which some persecutors end up as victims of the very plot they helped construct. Ironic and sensual, provocative and redemptive, Harsh Times is a story of international conspiracies and conflicting interests in the time of the Cold War, the echoes of which are still felt today.

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A vivid and inspiring adventure story from the father of magical realismDissatisfied with his empty, Sisyphus-like existence in New York City, where he has abandoned his creative dreams for a job in corporate advertising, an aspiring composer wants nothing more than to tear his life up from the root. He soon finds his escape hatch: a university-sponsored mission to South America to look for indigenous musical instruments in one of the few areas of the world safely untouched by the industrial world. Retracing the steps of time, he voyages with his lover into a land that feels outside of history, searching not just for music but ultimately for himself, and turning away from modernity towards the very heart of what makes us human.

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