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Autumn of the Patriarch
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gregory Rabassa

ISBN 0060882867 (0-06-088286-7)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
"Majestic . . . Superb . . . a stunning portrait of the archetype, the pathological fascist tyrant. Garcia Marquez is as exorbitant as Melville and Dostoyevsky."New York Times Book Review [via]
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Dance, Dance, Dance
by Alfred Birnbaum, Haruki Murakami

ISBN 0679753796 (0-679-75379-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
In this propulsive novel by the author of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Elephant Vanishes, one of the most idiosyncratically brilliant writers at work in any language fuses science fiction, the hard-boiled thriller, and white-hot satire into a new element of the literary periodic table.

As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, Haruki Murakami's protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls; plays chaperone to a lovely teenaged psychic; and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man. Dance Dance Dance is a tense, poignant, and often hilarious ride through the cultural Cuisinart that is contemporary Japan, a place where everything that is not up for sale is up for grabs. [via]
More editions of Dance, Dance, Dance:
- Dance, Dance, Dance: ISBN 0679753796 (0-679-75379-6)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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Dance, Dance, Dance
by Haruki Murakami, Alfred Birnbaum

ISBN 4770016832 (4-7700-1683-2)
Hardcover, Kodansha Amer Inc

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He burst upon the international scene with the wildly acclaimed A Wild Sheep Chase. He quickly came to represent the quirky voice of a new generation of Japanese writers. Now Haruki Murakami gives us his wittiest, boldest, most daring work to date. Dance dance dance continues the extraordinary adventure of an ordinary man. At thirty something, Murakami's nameless hero lives in a hi-tech, high-rise world where old virtues die fast and success is all that matters. He has shared in the glittering city's spoils, and while he has not sold his soul, he knows that something is lacking in his life. Now, in dreams, a mysterious woman weeps softly - for him. Yet, even as he tries to understand why, the voice that beckons is not hers. And still he dreams. Bizarre dreams that propel him down byways of his life in search of ... ? His is a strange odyssey: en route, a thirteen-year-old girl, distressingly beautiful and clairvoyant, is his constant companion; a classmate, now oozing charm on TV soaps, grapples with murder; a lady of the night becomes his guardian angel; and an eccentric Sheep Man materializes to counsel and cajole. What's a fellow to do? Dance. You gotta dance as long as the music plays. And dance is what our hero does ... in the most unexpected ways! [via]
More editions of Dance, Dance, Dance:
- Dance, Dance, Dance: ISBN 4770016832 (4-7700-1683-2)
  Hardcover, Kodansha Amer Inc
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Dangerous Angels
by Francesca Lia Block

ISBN 0064406970 (0-06-440697-0)
Softcover, Trophy Pr

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Book summary:
Lanky lizards! The slinkster-cool novels in Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat series have finally been compiled into one delicious volume. All of the ethereal, mesmerizing titles are here--Weetzie Bat, Witch Baby, Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys, Missing Angel Juan, and Baby Be-Bop--together like the big, beautiful family described on their pages. Block's unique, poetic style immediately draws readers into an intoxicating magical-realist world populated by empathetic, original characters (as well as a few ghosts, fairies, and genies): "He kissed her. A kiss about apple pie à la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate, when you haven't eaten chocolate in a year. A kiss about palm trees speeding by, trailing pink clouds when you drive down the Strip sizzling with champagne. A kiss about spotlights fanning the sky and the swollen sea spilling like tears all over your legs."
We cheer for these young women and men as they struggle with the universal trials of growing up, finding love, and letting go--all within the vivid, glittering, urban embrace of Los Angeles. Block's stories about finding yourself, being true to your dreams, and believing in what might seem impossible will inspire teens and adults alike with the resounding messages of hope and the transformative power of love. --Brangien Davis [via]
More editions of Dangerous Angels:
- Dangerous Angels: ISBN 0613114647 (0-613-11464-7)
  Hardcover, Bt Bound
- Dangerous Angels: ISBN 0064406970 (0-06-440697-0)
  Softcover, Trophy Pr
Dangerous Angels the Weetzie Bat Books
by Francesca Lia Block

ISBN 060616975X (0-606-16975-X)
Hardcover, Demco Media

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More editions of Dangerous Angels the Weetzie Bat Books:
- Dangerous Angels the Weetzie Bat Books: ISBN 060616975X (0-606-16975-X)
  Hardcover, Demco Media
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Daughter of Fortune
by Isabel Allende

ISBN 1417755946 (1-4177-5594-6)
Hardcover, Bt Bound

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Book summary:
Oprah Book Club® Selection, February 2000: Until Isabel Allende burst onto the scene with her 1985 debut, The House of the Spirits, Latin American fiction was, for the most part, a boys' club comprising such heavy hitters as Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Mario Vargas Llosa. But the Chilean Allende shouldered her way in with her magical realist multi-generational tale of the Trueba family, followed it up with four more novels and a spate of nonfiction, and has remained in a place of honor ever since. Her sixth work of fiction, Daughter of Fortune, shares some characteristics with her earlier works: the canvas is wide, the characters are multi-generational and multi-ethnic, and the protagonist is an unconventional woman who overcomes enormous obstacles to make her way in the world. Yet one cannot accuse Allende of telling the same story twice; set in the mid-1800s, this novel follows the fortunes of Eliza Sommers, Chilean by birth but adopted by a British spinster, Rose Sommers, and her bachelor brother, Jeremy, after she is abandoned on their doorstep.
"You have English blood, like us," Miss Rose assured Eliza when she was old enough to understand. "Only someone from the British colony would have thought to leave you in a basket on the doorstep of the British Import and Export Company, Limited. I am sure they knew how good-hearted my brother Jeremy is, and felt sure he would take you in. In those days I was longing to have a child, and you fell into my arms, sent by God to be brought up in the solid principles of the Protestant faith and the English language."
The family servant, Mama Fresia, has a different point of view, however: "You, English? Don't get any ideas, child. You have Indian hair, like mine." And certainly Eliza's almost mystical ability to recall all the events of her life would seem to stem more from the Indian than the Protestant side.
As Eliza grows up, she becomes less tractable, and when she falls in love with Joachin Andieta, a clerk in Jeremy's firm, her adoptive family is horrified. They are even more so when a now-pregnant Eliza follows her lover to California where he has gone to make his fortune in the 1849 gold rush. Along the way Eliza meets Tao Chi'en, a Chinese doctor who saves her life and becomes her closest friend. What starts out as a search for a lost love becomes, over time, the discovery of self; and by the time Eliza finally catches up with the elusive Joachin, she is no longer sure she still wants what she once wished for. Allende peoples her novel with a host of colorful secondary characters. She even takes the narrative as far afield as China, providing an intimate portrait of Tao Chi'en's past before returning to 19th-century San Francisco, where he and Eliza eventually fetch up. Readers with a taste for the epic, the picaresque, and romance that is satisfyingly complex will find them all in Daughter of Fortune. --Margaret Prior [via]
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Doce Cuentos Peregrinos / Twelve Pilgrim Tales
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

ISBN 9500707756 (950-07-0775-6)
Softcover, Aims Intl Books Corp

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Book summary:
En Barcelona, una prostituta que va entrando en la vejez entrena su perro a llorar ante la tumba que ha escogido para sí misma. En Viena, una mujer se vale de su don de ver el futuro para convertirse en la adivina de una familia rica. En Ginebra, el conductor de una ambulancia y su esposa acogen al abandonado y aparentemente moribundo ex presidente de un país caribeño, sólo para descubrir que sus ambiciones políticas siguen intactas.

En estos doce relatos magistrales acerca de las vidas de latinoamericanos en Europa, García Márquez logra transmitir la amalgama de melancolía, tenacidad, pena y ambición que forma la experiencia del emigrante. [via]
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El Otono Del Patriarca / the Autumn of the Patriarch
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

ISBN 0307350525 (0-307-35052-5)
Softcover, Random House Espanol

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Book summary:
This one of the most important novels written by this author which everyone must read. [via]
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The Elephant Vanishes
by Haruki Murakami

ISBN 0679750533 (0-679-75053-3)
Softcover, Vintage Books

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Book summary:
With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.

By turns haunting and hilarious, The Elephant Vanishes is further proof of Murakami's ability to cross the border between separate realities -- and to come back bearing treasure.

From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]
More editions of The Elephant Vanishes:
- The Elephant Vanishes: Stories: ISBN 0679420576 (0-679-42057-6)
  Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
- The Elephant Vanishes: ISBN 0679750533 (0-679-75053-3)
  Softcover, Vintage Books
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Ficciones
by Jorge Luis Borges, John Sturrock

ISBN 0679422994 (0-679-42299-4)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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Book summary:
Reading Jorge Luis Borges is an experience akin to having the top of one's head removed for repairs. First comes the unfamiliar breeze tickling your cerebral cortex; then disorientation, even mild discomfort; and finally, the sense that the world has been irrevocably altered--and in this case, rendered infinitely more complex. First published in 1945, his Ficciones compressed several centuries' worth of philosophy and poetry into 17 tiny, unclassifiable pieces of prose. He offered up diabolical tigers, imaginary encyclopedias, ontological detective stories, and scholarly commentaries on nonexistent books, and in the process exploded all previous notions of genre. Would any of David Foster Wallace's famous footnotes be possible without Borges? Or, for that matter, the syntactical games of Perec, the metafictional pastiche of Calvino? For good or for ill, the blind Argentinian paved the way for a generation's worth of postmodern monkey business--and fiction will never be simply "fiction" again.
Its enormous influence on writers aside, Ficciones has also--perhaps more importantly--changed the way that we read. Borges's Pierre Menard, for instance, undertakes the most audacious project imaginable: to create not a contemporary version of Cervantes's most famous work but the Quixote itself, word for word. This second text is "verbally identical" to the original, yet, because of its new associations, "infinitely richer"; every time we read, he suggests, we are in effect creating an entirely new text, simply by viewing it through the distorting lens of history. "A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships," Borges once wrote in an essay about George Bernard Shaw. "All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare," he tells us in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." In this spirit, Borges is not above impersonating, even quoting, himself.
It is hard, exactly, to say what all of this means, at least in any of the usual ways. Borges wrote not with an ideological agenda, but with a kind of radical philosophical playfulness. Labyrinths, libraries, lotteries, doubles, dreams, mirrors, heresiarchs: these are the tokens with which he plays his ontological games. In the end, ideas themselves are less important to him than their aesthetic and imaginative possibilities. Like the idealist philosophers of Tlön, Borges does not "seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding"; for him as for them, "metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature." --Mary Park [via]
More editions of Ficciones:
- Ficciones: ISBN 0802130305 (0-8021-3030-5)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
- Ficciones: ISBN 0679422994 (0-679-42299-4)
  Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Fictions
by Jorge Luis Borges, Anthony Kerrigan

ISBN 0714540838 (0-7145-4083-8)
Softcover, Riverrun Pr

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Book summary:
Reading Jorge Luis Borges is an experience akin to having the top of one's head removed for repairs. First comes the unfamiliar breeze tickling your cerebral cortex; then disorientation, even mild discomfort; and finally, the sense that the world has been irrevocably altered--and in this case, rendered infinitely more complex. First published in 1945, his Ficciones compressed several centuries' worth of philosophy and poetry into 17 tiny, unclassifiable pieces of prose. He offered up diabolical tigers, imaginary encyclopedias, ontological detective stories, and scholarly commentaries on nonexistent books, and in the process exploded all previous notions of genre. Would any of David Foster Wallace's famous footnotes be possible without Borges? Or, for that matter, the syntactical games of Perec, the metafictional pastiche of Calvino? For good or for ill, the blind Argentinian paved the way for a generation's worth of postmodern monkey business--and fiction will never be simply "fiction" again.
Its enormous influence on writers aside, Ficciones has also--perhaps more importantly--changed the way that we read. Borges's Pierre Menard, for instance, undertakes the most audacious project imaginable: to create not a contemporary version of Cervantes's most famous work but the Quixote itself, word for word. This second text is "verbally identical" to the original, yet, because of its new associations, "infinitely richer"; every time we read, he suggests, we are in effect creating an entirely new text, simply by viewing it through the distorting lens of history. "A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships," Borges once wrote in an essay about George Bernard Shaw. "All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare," he tells us in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." In this spirit, Borges is not above impersonating, even quoting, himself.
It is hard, exactly, to say what all of this means, at least in any of the usual ways. Borges wrote not with an ideological agenda, but with a kind of radical philosophical playfulness. Labyrinths, libraries, lotteries, doubles, dreams, mirrors, heresiarchs: these are the tokens with which he plays his ontological games. In the end, ideas themselves are less important to him than their aesthetic and imaginative possibilities. Like the idealist philosophers of Tlön, Borges does not "seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding"; for him as for them, "metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature." --Mary Park [via]
More editions of Fictions:
- Fictions: ISBN 0714509574 (0-7145-0957-4)
  Hardcover, Calder & Boyars
- Fictions: ISBN 0714540838 (0-7145-4083-8)
  Softcover, Riverrun Pr
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The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
by Haruki Murakami, Alfred Birnbaum

ISBN 0679743464 (0-679-74346-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
By the author of "A Wild Sheep Chase", which won the Noma Literary Award for New Writers, this novel combines science-fiction, satire and a warning of the dangerous powers of corporations. [via]
More editions of The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World:
- The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: ISBN 0241131448 (0-241-13144-8)
  Hardcover, Hamish Hamilton
- The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: ISBN 0679743464 (0-679-74346-4)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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Haroun and the Sea of Stories
by Salman Rushdie

ISBN 0140157379 (0-14-015737-9)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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Book summary:
Immediately forget any preconceptions you may have about Salman Rushdie and the controversy that has swirled around his million-dollar head. You should instead know that he is one of the best contemporary writers of fables and parables, from any culture. Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a delightful tale about a storyteller who loses his skill and a struggle against mysterious forces attempting to block the seas of inspiration from which all stories are derived. Here's a representative passage about the sources and power of inspiration:
So Iff the water genie told Haroun about the Ocean of the Stream of Stories, and even though he was full of a sense of hopelessness and failure the magic of the Ocean began to have an effect on Haroun. He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead, but alive.
"And if you are very, very careful, or very, very highly skilled, you can dip a cup into the Ocean," Iff told Haroun, "like so," and here he produced a little golden cup from another of his waistcoat pockets, "and you can fill it with water from a single, pure Stream of Story, like so," as he did precisely that.
[via]
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Hija De La Fortuna / Daughter of Fortune
by Isabel Allende

ISBN 0060932767 (0-06-093276-7)
Softcover, Perennial

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Book summary:
Eliza Sommers es una joven chilena que vive en Valparaíso en 1849, el año en que se descubre oro en California. Su amante, Joaquín Andieta, parte hacia el norte decidido a encontrar fortuna, y ella decide seguirlo. El viaje infernal, escondida en la cala de un velero, y la búsqueda de su amante en una tierra de hombres solos y prostitutas atraídos por la fiebre del oro, transforman a la joven inocente en una mujer fuera de lo común. Eliza recibe ayuda y afecto de Tao Chi'en, un médico chino, quien la conducirá de la mano en un itinerario memorable por los misterios y contradicciónes de la condición humana. hija de la fortuna es un retrato palpitante de una época marcada por la violencia y la codicia en la cual los protagonistas rescatan el amor, la amistad, la compasión y el valor.
[via]
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Jorge Luis Borges: El Aleph/ Ficciones/ Antologia Poetica / El Aleph/ Fictions/ Poetic Anthology
by Jorge Luis Borges

ISBN 1853995908 (1-85399-590-8)
Softcover, Duckbacks

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More editions of Jorge Luis Borges: El Aleph/ Ficciones/ Antologia Poetica / El Aleph/ Fictions/ Poetic Anthology:
- Jorge Luis Borges: El Aleph/ Ficciones/ Antologia Poetica / El Aleph/ Fictions/ Poetic Anthology: ISBN 1853995908 (1-85399-590-8)
  Softcover, Duckbacks
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Life of Pi
by Yann Martel

ISBN 0156027321 (0-15-602732-1)
Softcover, Harcourt

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Yann Martel's imaginative and unforgettable Life of Pi is a magical reading experience, an endless blue expanse of storytelling about adventure, survival, and ultimately, faith. The precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry, India, where he tries on various faiths for size, attracting "religions the way a dog attracts fleas." Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker ("His head was the size and color of the lifebuoy, with teeth"). It sounds like a colorful setup, but these wild beasts don't burst into song as if co-starring in an anthropomorphized Disney feature. After much gore and infighting, Pi and Richard Parker remain the boat's sole passengers, drifting for 227 days through shark-infested waters while fighting hunger, the elements, and an overactive imagination. In rich, hallucinatory passages, Pi recounts the harrowing journey as the days blur together, elegantly cataloging the endless passage of time and his struggles to survive: "It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none the champion."
An award winner in Canada (and winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize), Life of Pi, Yann Martel's second novel, should prove to be a breakout book in the U.S. At one point in his journey, Pi recounts, "My greatest wish--other than salvation--was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One that I could read again and again, with new eyes and fresh understanding each time." It's safe to say that the fabulous, fablelike Life of Pi is such a book. --Brad Thomas Parsons [via]
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Little, Big
by John Crowley

ISBN 1568654294 (1-56865-429-4)
Softcover, Doubleday Book & Music Clubs

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John Crowley's masterful Little, Big is the epic story of Smoky Barnable, an anonymous young man who travels by foot from the City to a place called Edgewoodnot found on any mapto marry Daily Alice Drinkawater, as was prophesied. It is the story of four generations of a singular family, living in a house that is many houses on the magical border of an otherworld. It is a story of fantastic love and heartrending loss; of impossible things and unshakable destinies; and of the great Tale that envelops us all. It is a wonder.
[via]
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Moor's Last Sigh
by Salman Rushdie

ISBN 0679744665 (0-679-74466-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
In The Moor's Last Sigh Salman Rushdie revisits some of the same ground he covered in his greatest novel, Midnight's Children. This book is narrated by Moraes Zogoiby, aka Moor, who speaks to us from a gravestone in Spain. Like Moor, Rushdie knows about a life spent in banishment from normal society--Rushdie because of the death sentence that followed The Satanic Verses, Moor because he ages at twice the rate of normal humans. Yet Moor's story of travail is bigger than Rushdie's; it encompasses a grand struggle between good and evil while Moor himself stands as allegory for Rushdie's home country of India. Filled with wordplay and ripe with humor, it is an epic work, and Rushdie has the tools to pull it off. He earned a 1995 Whitbread Prize for his efforts. [via]
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Nights at the Circus
by Angela Carter, Emma Rice

ISBN 1840026316 (1-84002-631-6)
Softcover, Theatre Communications Group

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Sophi Fevversthe toast of Europe's capitals, courted by the Prince of Wales, painted by Toulouse-Lautrecis an aerialiste extraordinaire, star of Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover Fevvers's true identity: Is she part swan or all fake? Dazzled by his love for Fevvers, and desperate for the scoop of a lifetime, Walser joins the circus on its tour. The journey takes himand the readeron an intoxicating trip through turn-of-the-century London, St. Petersburg, and Siberiaa tour so magical that only Angela Carter could have created it.
[via]
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Noruwei No Mori
by Haruki Murakami

ISBN 4062035162 (4-06-203516-2)
Hardcover, Kodansha

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Book summary:
Noruwei no mori, Vol. 2 (Japanese Edition) by Murakami, Haruki [via]
More editions of Noruwei No Mori:
- Noruwei No Mori: ISBN 4062035162 (4-06-203516-2)
  Hardcover, Kodansha
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Norwegian Wood
by Haruki Murakami

ISBN 1860468004 (1-86046-800-4)
Softcover, Random House

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Book summary:
In 1987, when Norwegian Wood was first published in Japan, it promptly sold more than 4 million copies and transformed Haruki Murakami into a pop-culture icon. The horrified author fled his native land for Europe and the United States, returning only in 1995, by which time the celebrity spotlight had found some fresher targets. And now he's finally authorized a translation for the English-speaking audience, turning to the estimable Jay Rubin, who did a fine job with his big-canvas production The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Readers of Murakami's later work will discover an affecting if atypical novel, and while the author himself has denied the book's autobiographical import--"If I had simply written the literal truth of my own life, the novel would have been no more than fifteen pages long"--it's hard not to read as at least a partial portrait of the artist as a young man.
Norwegian Wood is a simple coming-of-age tale, primarily set in 1969-70, when the author was attending university. The political upheavals and student strikes of the period form the novel's backdrop. But the focus here is the young Watanabe's love affairs, and the pain and pleasure and attendant losses of growing up. The collapse of a romance (and this is one among many!) leaves him in a metaphysical shambles:
I read Naoko's letter again and again, and each time I read it I would be filled with the same unbearable sadness I used to feel whenever Naoko stared into my eyes. I had no way to deal with it, no place I could take it to or hide it away. Like the wind passing over my body, it had neither shape nor weight, nor could I wrap myself in it.
This account of a young man's sentimental education sometimes reads like a cross between Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Stephen Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women. It is less complex and perhaps ultimately less satisfying than Murakami's other, more allegorical work. Still, Norwegian Wood captures the huge expectation of youth--and of this particular time in history--for the future and for the place of love in it. It is also a work saturated with sadness, an emotion that can sometimes cripple a novel but which here merely underscores its youthful poignancy. --Mark Thwaite [via]
More editions of Norwegian Wood:
- Norwegian Wood: ISBN 0375704027 (0-375-70402-7)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
- Norwegian Wood: ISBN 1860468004 (1-86046-800-4)
  Softcover, Random House
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The Passion
by Jeanette Winterson

ISBN 0802135226 (0-8021-3522-6)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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Book summary:
In 1985 Jeanette Winterson won the Whitbread Award for best first fiction for the semi-autobiographical Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, an often wry exploration of lesbian possibility bumping up against evangelical fanaticism. She was 25. Two years later, The Passion, her third novel, appeared, the fantastical tale of Henri--Napoleon's cook--and Villanelle, a Venetian gondolier's daughter who has webbed feet (previously an all-male attribute), works as a croupier, picks pockets, cross-dresses, and literally loses her heart to a beautiful woman. Written in a lyrical and jolting combination of fairy tale diction and rhythm and the staccato, the book would be a risky proposition in lesser hands. Winterson has said that she wanted to look at people's need to worship and examine what happens to young men in militaristic societies. The question was, how to do so without being polemical and didactic? Only she could have come up with such an exquisite answer. In the end, Henri, incarcerated on an island of madmen, becomes aware that his passion, "even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else." [via]
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Retrato En Sepia
by Isabel Allende

ISBN 8401341558 (84-01-34155-8)
Softcover, Downtown Book Center Inc

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Book summary:
A finales del siglo XIX en Chile, Aurora del Valle sufre de un trauma brutal que borra de su mente los primeros cinco años de su vida. Criada por su ambiciosa abuela, Paulina del Valle, crece en un ambiente privilegiado, pero se ve atormentada por horribles pesadillas. Cuando debe afrontar la traición del hombre que ama, y la soledad, decide explorar el misterio de su pasado.
[via]
More editions of Retrato En Sepia:
- Retrato En Sepia: ISBN 9500718863 (950-07-1886-3)
  Softcover, Downtown Book Center Inc
- Retrato En Sepia: ISBN 8401341558 (84-01-34155-8)
  Softcover, Downtown Book Center Inc
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South of the Border, West of the Sun
by Haruki Murakami

ISBN 1860465943 (1-86046-594-3)
Softcover, Harvill Pr

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Book summary:
In South of the Border, West of the Sun, the arc of an average man's life from childhood to middle age, with its attendant rhythms of success and disappointment, becomes the kind of exquisite literary conundrum that is Haruki Murakami's trademark. The plot is simple: Hajime meets and falls in love with a girl in elementary school, but he loses touch with her when his family moves to another town. He drifts through high school, college, and his 20s, before marrying and settling into a career as a successful bar owner. Then his childhood sweetheart returns, weighed down with secrets:
When I went back into the bar, a glass and ashtray remained where she had been. A couple of lightly crushed cigarette butts were lined up in the ashtray, a faint trace of lipstick on each. I sat down and closed my eyes. Echoes of music faded away, leaving me alone. In that gentle darkness, the rain continued to fall without a sound.
Murakami eschews the fantastic elements that appear in many of his other novels and stories, and readers hoping for a glimpse of the Sheep Man will be disappointed. Yet South of the Border, West of the Sun is as rich and mysterious as anything he has written. It is above all a complex, moving, and honest meditation on the nature of love, distilled into a work with the crystal clarity of a short story. A Nat "King" Cole song, a figure on a crowded street, a face pressed against a car window, a handful of ashes drifting down a river to the sea are woven together into a story that refuses to arrive at a simple conclusion. The classic love triangle may seem like a hackneyed theme for a writer as talented as Murakami, but in his quietly dazzling way, he bends us to his own unique geometry. --Simon Leake [via]
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Sputnik Sweetheart
by Haruki Murakami, J. Philip Gabriel, Philip Gabriel

ISBN 0375726055 (0-375-72605-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
Sputnik Sweetheart finds Haruki Murakami in his minimalist mode. Shorter than the sweeping Wind-up Bird Chronicle, less playfully bizarre than A Wild Sheep Chase, the author's seventh novel distills his signature themes into a powerful story about the loneliness of the human condition. "There was nothing solid we could depend on," the reader is told. "We were nearly boundless zeros, just pitiful little beings swept from one kind of oblivion to another."
The narrator is a teacher whose only close friend is Sumire, an aspiring young novelist with chronic writer's block. Sumire is suddenly smitten with a sophisticated businesswoman and accompanies her love object to Europe where, on a tiny Greek island, she disappears "like smoke." The schoolteacher hastens to the island in search of his friend. And there he discovers two documents on her computer, one of which reveals a chilling secret about Sumire's lover.
Sputnik Sweetheart is a melancholy love story, and its deceptively simple prose is saturated with sadness. Characters struggle to connect with one another but never quite succeed. Like the satellite of the title they are essentially alone. And by toning down the pyrotechnics of his earlier work, Murakami has created a world that is simultaneously mundane and disturbing--where doppelgängers and vanishing cats produce a pervasive atmosphere of alienation, and identity itself seems like a terribly fragile thing. --Simon Leake [via]
More editions of Sputnik Sweetheart:
- Sputnik Sweetheart : A Novel: ISBN 0375411690 (0-375-41169-0)
  Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
- Sputnik Sweetheart: ISBN 0375726055 (0-375-72605-5)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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Strange Pilgrims
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edith Grossman

ISBN 1400034698 (1-4000-3469-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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In Barcelona, an aging Brazilian prostitute trains her dog to weep at the grave she has chosen for herself. In Vienna, a woman parlays her gift for seeing the future into a fortunetelling position with a wealthy family. In Geneva, an ambulance driver and his wife take in the lonely, apparently dying ex-President of a Caribbean country, only to discover that his political ambition is very much intact.

In these twelve masterly stories about the lives of Latin Americans in Europe, García Márquez conveys the peculiar amalgam of melancholy, tenacity, sorrow, and aspiration that is the émigré experience.

From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]
More editions of Strange Pilgrims:
- Strange Pilgrims: ISBN 0679425667 (0-679-42566-7)
  Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
- Strange Pilgrims: ISBN 1400034698 (1-4000-3469-8)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories by Gabriel García Márquez
by Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman

ISBN 0140239405 (0-14-023940-5)
Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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More editions of Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories by Gabriel García Márquez:
- Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories by Gabriel García Márquez: ISBN 0140239405 (0-14-023940-5)
  Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
A Wild Sheep Chase
by Haruki Murakami, Alfred T. Birnbaum

ISBN 0870119052 (0-87011-905-2)
Hardcover, Kodansha America, Incorporated

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Book summary:
Murakami has crafted a taut and suspenseful novel that is equal parts detective story, fantasy, and Kafkaesque allegory. In a Japan of the imagination, an advertising executive is sent on a harrowing journey in pursuit of a mythical sheep reported to embody an irresistible will to absolute power. [via]
More editions of A Wild Sheep Chase:
- A Wild Sheep Chase: ISBN 0452265169 (0-452-26516-9)
  Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
- A Wild Sheep Chase: ISBN 0870119052 (0-87011-905-2)
  Hardcover, Kodansha America, Incorporated
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A Wild Sheep Chase: Library Edition
by Alfred Birnbaum, Haruki Murakami

ISBN 037571894X (0-375-71894-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
A marvelous hybrid of mythology and mystery, A Wild Sheep Chase is the extraordinary literary thriller that launched Haruki Murakamis international reputation.

It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance companys advertisement. What he doesnt realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within himself. Quirky and utterly captivating, A Wild Sheep Chase is Murakami at his astounding best. [via]
More editions of A Wild Sheep Chase: Library Edition:
- A Wild Sheep Chase: Library Edition: ISBN 037571894X (0-375-71894-X)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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Winter's Tale
by Mark Helprin

ISBN 0156031191 (0-15-603119-1)
Softcover, Harcourt

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Book summary:
A bestseller that takes readers on a journey to New York of the Belle Epoque, where Peter Lake attempts to rob a Manhattan mansion only to find the daughter of the house at home. Thus begins the love between the middle-aged Irishman and Beverly Penn, a young girl who is dying. This novel...is a gifted writers love affair with the language (Newsday).
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The Wooden Sea
by Jonathan Carroll

ISBN 0765300133 (0-7653-0013-3)
Softcover, St Martins Pr

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Frannie McCabe was an obnoxious juvenile delinquent in his teens, but has settled down into comfortable middle age in the small town of Crane's View as its chief of police; like other Jonathan Carroll protagonists, the hero of The Wooden Sea is about to find himself caught up in uncanny goings-on. First a dog walks into his office and drops dead--more importantly, it will not stay buried. Then a quarreling couple simply disappears, and then Frannie finds himself haunted by his younger, more abrasive self, and by visions of the last day of his life, as an old man about to be knocked down by a motorbike in Vienna.
What all this means and what lessons Frannie is supposed to take from it all are where the questions lie; anyone who has read an earlier Carroll novel will know the sorts of thing that are liable to happen, the sorts of thing that they are likely to mean--but any reader of an earlier Carroll novel will almost certainly be buying any of his books they can get hold of, anyway. This is an inventive and moving fantasy by a writer who more or less defined dark fantasy as a critical term. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk [via]
More editions of The Wooden Sea:
- The Wooden Sea: ISBN 0312878230 (0-312-87823-0)
  Hardcover, St Martins Pr
- The Wooden Sea: ISBN 0765300133 (0-7653-0013-3)
  Softcover, St Martins Pr