Stephen Snyder

Coin Locker Babies is Ryu Murakami's cult cyperpunk novel. Two babies are left in a Tokyo station coin locker and survive against the odds, but their lives are forever tainted by this inauspicious start. As they grow up, they join the ranks of Toxitown: a district of addicts, freaks and prostitutes. One becomes a bisexual rock star and looks for his mother, while the other one, an athlete, seeks revenge. This savage and stunning story unfolds in a surrealistic whirl of violence. Coin Locker Babies is translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder and published by Pushkin Press 'A cyber-Bildungsroman of playful breadth and uncertain depth' Publishers Weekly 'A fascinating peek into the weirdness of contemporary Japan' Oliver Stone 'Like a cross between a Grimms fairy tale and Katsuhiro Otomo's classic manga comic series Akira...A deliriously ambitious novel...recalls Thomas Pynchon.' Ben Jeffery, Times Literary Supplement A great big pulsating parable ...wildly undisciplined, occasionally tongue-in-cheek.' Washington Post 'The explosive rhythms of hard rock, the intensity of emotions, and the highly vivid images make ...Murakami's postmodern novel an exceptionally successful one' World Literature Today Ryu Murakami is the enfant terrible of contemporary Japanese literature.Awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1976 for his first book, a novel about a group of young people drowned in sex and drugs, he has gone on to explore with cinematic intensity the themes of violence and technology in contemporary Japanese society. His novels include Coin Locker Babies, Sixty-Nine, Popular Hits of the Showa Era, Audition, In the Miso Soup and From the Fatherland, with Love. Murakami is also a screenwriter and a director; his films include Tokyo Decadence, Audition and Because of You.

He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury seventeen years ago, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is a sensitive but astute young housekeeper who is entrusted to take care of him. Each morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms between them. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - based on her shoe size or her birthday - and the numbers reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her ten-year-old son. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory.

Authors Dave Bonta and Stephen Snyder of USA Solar Stores illustrate exceptional homes that are groundbreaking not only in their use of renewable energy but also in their commitment to recycling and repurposing materials used in construction and reducing the impact on the surrounding environment through sensitive building methods. With details on why these homeowners decided to go solar and how having a solar home can save money in the long run, these solar beauties are sure to inspire homeowners to create or remodel their own solar sanctuaries. Dave Bonta writes about alternative energy and sustainable living for Green Living, Back Home Magazine, Alternative Energy Retailer, and the Vermont Guardian. He is a frequent speaker at major green energy conferences and lives in Perkinsville, Vermont. Stephen Snyder, communications director for USA Solar Stores, is a freelance writer who lives inPerkinsville, Vermont. Shows how solar technology can be stylishly utilized in various home sizes and locales.

'A conspicuously gifted writer...To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state tinged with a nightmare, and her stories continue to haunt. She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance' Guardian Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders - locked in the embrace of an ominous and darkly beautiful web, their fates all converge through the eleven stories here in Yoko Ogawa's Revenge. As tales of the macabre pass from character to character - an aspiring writer, a successful surgeon, a cabaret singer, a lonely craftsman - Ogawa provides us with a slice of life that is resplendent in its chaos, enthralling in its passion and chilling in its cruelty. Translated by Stephen Snyder Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.