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Poetic, comic, obsessed with minutiae, My Beautiful Bus is a welcome dose of serious frivolity at the expense of the contemporary novel. Based on an actual bus trip across France taken by Oulipo-member Jacques Jouet in the late '80s, his fictional reconstruction of the experience twenty years later focuses not so much on the scenery as on the possibilities offered an author by the eponymous vehicle and its occupants. With detours through everything from Puss in Boots to Pascal's maxims, we are introduced to each eccentric passenger as they climb aboard (one, for example, claims to have a corpse in his luggage), every character bringing us one step further into Jouet's imaginative universe: their conversations, preoccupations, reactions, and possibilities taking their places as elements of a fiction in the narrator's mind. In the final pages it becomes clear that the book itself is a sort of bus, boarded impulsively and with no fixed destination in mind, and that it has carried its readers to places they could not have imagined.

Mathilde Lewly-a female painter at the dawn of the twentieth century-has achieved notoriety among the Parisian avant-garde. She and her husband, also a talented young artist, pursue their separate visions side by side in a Clichy atelier, galvanized by the artistic ferment that surrounds them. But the couple are threatened by the shadow of Mathilde's little sister, Eugenie: since the two girls' sudden departure from their native England, Eugenie has been determined to vault the eight years separating her from Mathilde. Now, devoured by envy and haunted by a past she never actually experienced, the "e;little one"e; hurls herself into the artistic and personal life of her elder sister. It is the birth of a fierce rivalry, an emotional tug-of-war, played out against the bohemian riot of the last century's wildest years. But will the First World War's sudden and brutal eruption allow Mathilde to escape this intimate conflict and achieve her destiny?

In this comic novel of political intrigue, Adam Gorozpe, a respected businessman in Mexico, has a life so perfect that he might as well be his namesake in the Garden of Eden-but there are snakes in this Eden too. For one thing, Adam's wife Priscila has fallen in love with the brash director of national security-also named Adam-who uses violence against token victims to hide the fact that he's letting drug runners, murderers, and kidnappers go free. Another unlikely snake is the little Boy-God who's started preaching in the street wearing a white tunic and stick-on wings, inspiring Adam's brother-in-law to give up his job writing soap operas to follow this junior deity and implore Adam to do the same. Even Elle, Adam's mistress, thinks the boy is important to their salvation-especially now that it seems the other Adam has put out a contract on Adam Gorozpe. To save his relationship, his marriage, his life, and the soul of his country, perhaps Adam will indeed have to call upon the wrath of the angels to expel all these snakes from his Mexican Eden.

Emil, the unwanted child of two young parents, is adopted by Yoel and Leah, a childless couple. Yet, as the years pass, it becomes clear that Emil doesn't bear much resemblance to the parents who've loved and raised him. Is his name the only thing his real parents have left him? Kin traces the movements of Emil and his four parents as they walk through the same city, nearby but apart, searching for each other in the faces of passersby; until Yoel, now old, becomes determined to do the impossible: return his grown son-a lonely man approaching middle age-to his birth parents. In prose that is both minimal and subtly off kilter, acclaimed Israeli novelist Dror Burstein introduces us to an Israel that is as peculiar, and poignant, as Donald Barthelme's America: ranging from an apocalyptic future to the petty annoyances of daily life, from shifting continents to tiny heartbreaks.

Complex and hauntingly beautiful, Lygia Fagundes Telles¿s most acclaimed novel is a journey into the inner lives of three young women, each revealing her secrets and loves, each awaiting a destiny tied to the colorful and violent world of modern Brazil. Sensual and wealthy Lorena dreams of a tryst with a married man. Unhappy Lia burns with a frantic desire to free her imprisoned fiancé. Glamorous Ana Clara, unable to escape her past, falls toward a tragedy of drugs and obsession. Intimate and unforgettable, The Girl in the Photograph creates an extraordinary picture of the wonder and the darkness that come to possess a woman¿s mind, and stands as one of the greatest novels to come out of Brazil in the late twentieth century.

A collision between contemporary poetics and the Renaissance lyric, between aestheticism and political engagement, The Master of Insomnia is a collection of Slovenian poet Boris A. Novak's verse from the last fifteen years, including numerous poems never before available in English. In these sensitive translations, Novak stands revealed as both innovator and observer; as critic Ales Debeljak has written: "e;The poet's power in bearing witness to Sarajevo and Dalmatia, to his childhood room and his retired father, to the indifferent passage of time and the desperate pain of loss, confirms the melancholy clairvoyance of Walter Benjamin, who stated that what is essential hides in the marginal, negligent, and hardly observed details. Whoever strives to see the "e;big picture"e; will inevitably overlook the essential . . . [Novak's] wide-open eyes must watch over both the beauty of this life and the horror of its destruction."e;

When Vic meets Lali, they stumble into a dysfunctional ten-year relationship that leaves him in ruins and raising a child on his own. As Vic strives to protect their daughter from the cruel truths of his relationship with her mother, he finds himself hopelessly submerged in Lali's seemingly inexplicable contradictions, and their implications concerning his own inability to move on. Huddleston Road is an honest, often brutal examination of the loneliness that results from our inability to truly know the people who share our lives-and about our need to reach out and try nonetheless.

A hidden classic of Brazilian literature, "P's Three Women" is a bonbon laced with slow-acting poison--but delicious nonetheless.

With a name like Jacques Boucher de Cr?vecoeur de Perthes, it ought to be easy to become a hero. Yet, how to go about it? A reallife nineteenth-century paleontologist and explorer, excavated here by Christine Montalbetti to serve as her protagonist, Jacques has tried everything: fighting off pirates, writing poetry, becoming a dandy, a man of culture... all without ever quite feeling he fits the bill. At last, when Jacques decides he'll make his name by discovering evidence of early man, it seems we, his, will be treated to a novel about mankind itself--unless, of course, our putative hero gets shanghaied into a love story along the way. "The Origin of Man" is the story of one man--and all humanity--waging a war against oblivion without ever quite winning the day. It's also a comedy about being immersed in heroic and fantastical events without one's ever noticing.

In the tour de force called America, one of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses struggles upward to the penthouse of God, discovering too late he's taken the elevator marked down. Resurrected from the rubble of dreams as a messiah and accidental revolutionary, his cry for freedom echoes like a broken record as they lower him into the ground. Like a hopelessly lost coal miner, he digs on, deflating the gloom with slapstick, pensive as a clown, gathering strength for the next round.

In this collection of two novellas and seven short stories, Alf MacLochlainn comically reduces life¿s problems to the minute details of everyday existence. Socks, shoes, and trousers suggest perplexing difficulties: how best to put them on, the intricacies involved in keeping them on, the physical (as well as psychological) laws related to the interaction of body and clothing. All such speculations come to an absurd, crashing halt as the contemporary mind, filled with an overload of information, attempts but fails to make sense of some of the simplest, though of course complex, mundane facts of daily life.From Dublin to Central Illinois to Outer Space, MacLochlainn¿s stories embody the imaginative spirit of Samuel Beckett and Flann O¿Brien.

"Yasuoka s venal, youthful first-person narrators grasp at beauty and romance amid a changing Japan in these nine stories, all published in Japan in the early 1950s . . . Tyler s translation captures Yasuoka s effortless style, registering dark but delightful impressions of youth." Publishers Weekly

From The Mirror in the Well, by Micheline Aharonian Marcom From Prairie Style, by C.S. Giscombe From Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine, by Stanley Crawford From The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Burton Pike) From Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique, by Gert Jonke (translated by Jean M. Snook) From The One Marvelous Thing, by Rikki Ducornet From The Bathroom, by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux & Paul De Angelis) From Talking Out of School, by Kass Fleisher From A Nest of Ninnies, by John Ashbery & James Schuyler From Pigeon Post, by Dumitru Tsepeneag (translated by Jane Kuntz) From Dust, by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (translated by Evgeny Pavlov) From Anonymous Celebrity, by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (translated by Nelson H. Vieira) From Hoppla! 1 2 3, by Gérard Gavarry (translated by Jane Kuntz) From News from the Empire, by Fernando del Paso (translated by Alfonso Gonzalez & Stella Clark) From Encounters with Samuel Beckett, by Charles Juliet (translated by Axel Nesme & Tracy Cooke) From Western, by Christine Montalbetti (translated by Betsy Wing) From Jerusalem, by Gonçalo M. Tavares (translated by Anna Kushner)

In this eerie, compelling, and playful novel, a young man tormented by his feeble memory meets an elderly man, Robert, endowed with the recall of an elephant. Soon, in exchange for becoming his live-in servant, Robert agrees to allow his young protege to inherit his prodigious memory upon his death. While this might seem a fair if absurd exchange, Robert's demands become progressively more macabre, until the narrator is forced to decide what he is truly willing to sacrifice for the ability to remember. The debut novel of Bernard Comment, acclaimed author and editor, now available in English for the first time, The Shadow of Memory brings a fairy-tale premise into the modern world, where information-and its loss-can be a matter of life and death.

The denizens of Kelton, New York - a bedroom community some fifty miles from Manhattan - are a well-heeled bunch who spend an awful lot of time playing rummy. There is Alice, an unfulfilled cellist, and her complacent brother Marshall, who doesn't like his friends to confide in him. There are the bumbling and overindulged Fabia and Victor, another sibling duo, and their friend Irving, a meek mama's boy. Into their cloistered lives come Claire and Nadia Tosti, two sisters from Paris, whose take-charge tactics stir the winds of enterprise, romance, and change. Through them, Alice is led to a swarthy Italian who helps her orchestrate a successful restaurant business. Irving pairs up with Claire, finally winning freedom from his eccentric, cat-loving mother. Victor embraces Nadia and the antiques trade, while Fabia discovers a potential romance with Victor's French pen pal. Only Marshall finds himself eluded by love, a predicament that will lead him from the snug environs of Kelton to the crude energies of the Midwest. In bistros, galleries, bars, and theaters, the protagonists eat, drink, criticize each other, and debate the worlds of art, music, literature, life, and love.

These fifteen journeys--fourteen of them within Poland--take six years, 1940-1946. The distances vary. Sometimes they are minimal, as short as a two-stop bus ride in a city, or a twenty-minute walk, and sometimes they are longer--much longer. The traveler is a young girl, who we meet at age seven. Along the way, she loses her home, her family, her name, her hair, and finally, her fear. Two things help her on her journeys during these difficult years: some lessons from her parents and a large share of luck, which never deserts her.

Returning to London from a trip to the West Indies, an aspiring writer encounters a bewitching trio of friends whose magic lies in their ability to turn any situation into fantasy. Previously out of place in the world, the narrator falls in love with the young brother-sister pair of Peter and Annabelle, as well as the older, more political Marius. Reality soon encroaches upon the foursome, however, in the form of Marius's ailing wife, forcing the narrator to confront the dark emptiness and fear at the heart of his friends' joie de vivre. In this, his second novel-written in the '50s and never before published-Nicholas Mosley weighs questions of responsibility and sacrifice against those of love and earthly desire, the spirit versus the flesh.

In this collection of thematically related stories, celebrated Belgian author Francois Emmanuel shows his indebtedness to the great poetic iconoclasts of the French language not least Charles Baudelaire, after whose famous poem this book was named.

Giovanni Orelli's docufictional phantasmagoria revisits a lesser-known painting by Paul Klee titled Alphabet I, which features black letters and symbols scrawled over the sports page of a newspaper reporting Switzerland's victory over Nazi Germany in the 1938 Swiss National Cup. This play of coincidences sets the stage for Orelli's encyclopedic portrait of European culture under Nazism, where a motley crew of philosopher-peasants as well as historical luminaries like Arthur Schopenhauer, Vincent van Gogh, Viktor Shklovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Klee himself, and the titular footballer Eugene Walaschek all meet at the local tavern and debate the significance of Klee's work.