In the early morning of March 31, 1970 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the annual birthday celebration of a prominent and wealthy young artist is taking place; and a train docked in Plaza Station filled with starving, drought-stricken migrant workers seeking relief gets turned away by the authorities, sparking a riot. From these seemingly unrelated events, Ivan Angelo's remarkable debut novel connects and implicates the lives of a complex of characters spanning three decades of tumultuous social and political history in twentieth-century Brazil. But with the central event - the celebration - mis...
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The Nic Sacco and Bart Vanzetti of Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die are not exactly the infamous anarchists controversially sentenced to death by the United States government. Instead, in this hilarious first novel, they are silent film stars, slapstick comedians--and this is the story of their rise to fame, from a seedy New York vaudeville club (where they introduce their famous knife-throwing gag) to huge movies and USO tours (where they open, with disastrous results, for Bob Hope). We see them deliberating about who--one will be fat, the other skinny; one will be contemplative, the other imp...
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The Nic Sacco and Bart Vanzetti of Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die are not exactly the infamous anarchists controversially sentenced to death by the United States government. Instead, in this hilarious first novel, they are silent film stars, slapstick comedians--and this is the story of their rise to fame, from a seedy New York vaudeville club (where they introduce their famous knife-throwing gag) to huge movies and USO tours (where they open, with disastrous results, for Bob Hope). We see them deliberating about who--one will be fat, the other skinny; one will be contemplative, the other imp...
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Welcome to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in the not too distant future. Water is scarce, garbage clogs the city, movement is restricted, and the System--sinister, omnipotent, secret--rules its subjects' every moment and thought. Here, middle-aged Souza lives a meaningless life in a world where hope is a lie and all memory of the past is forbidden. A classic novel of "dystopia," looking back to Orwell's "1984" and forward to Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," "And Still the Earth" stands with Loyola Brandao's "Zero" as one of the author's greatest, and darkest, achievements.
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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 prot?g? 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...
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Aldous Huxley spares no one in his ironic, piercing portrayal of a group gathered in an Italian palace by the socially ambitious and self-professed lover of art, Mrs. Aldwinkle. Here, Mrs. Aldwinkle yearns to recapture the glories of the Italian Renaissance, but her guests ultimately fail to fulfill her na?ve expectations. Among her entourage are: a suffering poet and reluctant editor of the "Rabbit Fanciers' Gazette" who silently bears the widowed Mrs. Aldwinkle's desperate advances; a popular novelist who records every detail of her affair with another guest, the amorous Calamy, for futur...
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"The Barnum Museum" is a combination waxworks, masked ball, and circus sideshow masquerading as a collection of stories. Within its pages, note such exhibits as: a study of the strategies used by the participants in the game of "Clue"; a dilettante who constructs an imaginary woman, and loses her to an imaginary man; and a legendary magician so skilled at sleight-of-hand that he is pursued by police for the crime of erasing the line between the real and the conjured. Ingeniously written, each exhibit in "The Barnum Museum"--including the story upon which the movie "The Illusionist" was base...
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"Accident," Nicholas Mosley's brilliantly conceived and efficiently structured novel about Oxford University and environs, is a prose poem about marriage and infidelity, as well as the relationship between writing and existence, imagination and action. It is a study of the games academics play both with their students and with themselves, on campus and off, in bed or on the cricket fields or baronial halls of the landed gentry. By probing the mind of one philosopher-don, Stephen, who has second thoughts about what constitutes an "accident," Mosley gives us an unforgettable view of life at t...
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Manuel Puig's masterful and ironic "detective novel" concerns the abduction of a woman, an impending murder, and the dim memories of a thousand old glamour queens--Garbo, Dietrich, Veronica Lake, Rita Hayworth--all combining to make a powerful portrait of two decidedly unglamorous lives: Gladys Hebe D'Onofrio, a lonely 35-year-old sculptor, tormented by her fantasies and perpetually in search of the ideal lover; and Leo Druscovich, an outwardly confident and successful art critic, deeply troubled by a terrible guilt that surfaces in his repeated sexual failures. Taking on, exchanging, and g...
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