“ Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place. ” ― Rumi
Umberto Eco, international best-selling novelist and leading literary theorist, here brings together these two roles in a provocative discussion of the vexed question of literary interpretation. The limits of interpretation--what a text can actually be sa
A woman about to lose her job as a professor of literature and history delivers a passionate, witty, and word-mad monologue in this inventive novel, which was called "brilliant" (The Listener), "dazzling" (The Guardian), "elegant, rueful and witty" (The O
Djinn is the story of a young man who joins a clandestine organization under the command of an alluring, androgynous American girl named Djinn (or Jean). His search for the meaning of his mission and for possible clues to the identity of the mysterious Dj
Part prophecy and part erotic fantasy, this classic tale of otherworldly depravity features New York itself—or a foreigner's nightmare of New York—as its true protagonist. Set in the towers and tunnels of the quintessential American city, Alain Robbe-
Here, in one volume, are two remarkable novels by the chief spokesman of the so-called “new novel” which has caused such discussion and aroused such controversy. “Jealousy,” said the New York Times Book Review “is a technical masterpiece, impecc
Alain Robbe-Grillet is internationally hailed as the chief spokesman for the noveau roman and one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. The Erasers, his first novel, reads like a detective story but is primarily concerned with weaving and then
Reminiscent of Orson Welles's The Third Man, Repetition is an atmospheric spy novel of violence, mystery, and tricks of the eye, set in a bombed-out 1949 Berlin. Henri Robin, a special agent of the French secret service, arrives in the ruined city and fee
