“ 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
Combining fiction and autobiography in a quite unprecedented way, Georges Perec leads the reader inexorably towards the horror that lies at the origin of the post-World War Two world and at the crux of his own identity.
Georges Perec, the celebrated author of Life: A User's Manual (Godine, 1987) and A Void, was working on this "literary thriller" at the time of his death. He had fully completed only eleven chapters of a planned twenty-eight, but left extensive drafts and
From one of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the twentieth century–two novels, six short stories, and a pair of essays in a single volume. In both his essays and his fiction, Albert Camus (1913—1960) de-ployed his lyric eloquence in defe
In the 1930s, two young American scholars journey to Albania to research the oral epics of Homer. Mistaken for foreign spies, the two find themselves under the surveillance of a near-sighted informer. Research and intrigue proceed, but soon involve a Serv
From behind the closed door, the man shouts, 'Be on your way - you have no business here!''Open up, I am the messenger of Death'.As spring arrives in the Albanian mountain town of B, some strange things are emerging in the thaw. Bank robbers strike the Na
Meet Robert Dubois. Cheek resting on a pile of manuscripts, he is the ageing and perhaps too comfortable publisher of Robert Dubois Books, alone one evening in his office. In walks a pretty intern with an ereader. For a man who thought he had seen it all,
A long-lost French novel in which three soldiers return home from an unpopular, unspeakable warWhen On Leave was published in Paris in 1957, as France's engagement in Algeria became ever more bloody, it told people things they did not want to hear. It viv
