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Love, faith, and the political mingle in these two short novels by a Nobel Prize-winning Danish author. One about a young couple making a new life in Rome, the other about a priest who goes to live among native peoples in Greenland, both books explore the reaches of the human heart through their complex and unforgettable characters.The White Bear and The Rearguard are two of Nobel laureate Henrik Pontoppidan?s most acclaimed novellas: tales of personal, political, and religious strife, full of keen psychological insight, set amid the sweeping changes of late nineteenth-century Danish society. Pontoppidan?s prose is spellbinding in its taut, unvarnished grace, a quality translator Paul Larkin masterfully captures in this stunning new translation.The White Bear is the odyssey of the priest Thorkild Müller, who becomes minister to a remote Inuit tribe in Greenland and is slowly integrated within the community. After spending much of his adult life in Greenland, he returns to Denmark, where his popularity among his parishioners brings the ire of the Church upon his head.Newlyweds Jorgen Hallager and Ursula Branth are as different as night and day. The brash son of a poor village teacher, Jorgen is an avowed socialist whose revolutionary beliefs translate into his work as a painter of social realism. Ursula, on the other hand, comes from an upper-middle-class family and is politically conservative. Though each strives to change the other?s worldview as they start their new life in Rome, tensions rise, and misunderstandings abound. A searching examination of art and individuality, this version of The Rearguard is the never-before-translated 1905 edition, which elucidates with greater complexity Jorgen?s character as well as Ursula?s resolve to temper him with love.

A Dickensian tale of ambition, family, and financial ruin by the most important Spanish novelist after Cervantes, this tragicomic novel about a patriarch struggling to keep his ungrateful family from ruin is at turns scathing and hilarious.Ramón Villaamil has been a loyal civil servant his whole life, but a change in government leaves him out of a job and still two months short of qualifying for his pension. Initially optimistic that he?ll be able to find work and pull his family out of their financial straits, he spends his days visiting the Administration, pestering his ex-colleagues to put in a good word for him, and begging his friends in high places for money. At home, Villaamil?s wife, daughter, and sister-in-law?whose feline appearances earn them the nickname ?the Miaows??are unimpressed by Villaamil?s failures, and the only joy left in Villaamil?s life is his young grandson Luis. When Luis?s disgraced father, the handsome and dastardly Víctor Cadalso reappears in their lives with promises of easing their financial burdens, Villaamil has no choice but to allow him back into their midst, even as he knows there is nothing pure about Víctor?s intentions, and that his return could bring them all to ruin.Comparable to the best of Balzac and Dickens, Benito Pérez Galdós?s satire of lower middle-class life offers a scathing critique of the hypocrisy and corruption within nineteenth-century Spanish society as well as a potent exploration of the value of human life outside of work. Margaret Jull Costa?s inimitable translation captures all the tragicomic vitality of Pérez Galdós?s prose, and proves that he is indeed ?the best Spanish writer of the nineteenth century? (Mario Vargas Llosa).

A chatty rabbit dares you to solve how he keeps escaping his hutch in this whimsical detective story perfect for reading aloud with animal lovers ages 5 to 9. When Joa~ozinho the rabbit scrunches his nose 15,000 times, he finally comes up with an escape plan!Joaozinho is an ordinary rabbit, happy and hungry. Ideas come to rabbits when they scrunch and unscrunch their noses, but as anyone who has seen a rabbit knows, they do this nonstop. In order to sniff out one single idea, they have to scrunch their noses 15,000 times. Joaozinho comes up with an idea as good as the smell of a fresh carrot. He''s finally figured out how to escape from his rabbit hutch in order to find more food. Joaozinho soon becomes an escape artist?but how does he do it? That''s a mystery he dares you to solve.Clarice Lispector, one of the foremost writers of the twentieth century, wrote this story for her son Paulo, a lover of rabbits when he was small and, as she writes in her introductory note, ?had yet to discover stronger affections.?

In this enthralling re-creation of American novelist Henry James'' famous ten-month trip around the United States, lauded critic Peter Brooks brings to life both the literary giant and America in its Gilded Age.In 1904, after two decades of living and travelling abroad, Henry James returned to the United States to discover a world drastically different from the one he had left behind. Suddenly, the future of the world seemed to be in his native land, which he had once considered provincial, lacking in nourishment for the novelist. James thus set forth to refamiliarize himself with the United States, travelling the breadth of the land and exercising his acute powers of observation to document all that he saw. James''s ten-month journey across America and its product, the ethnographic work The American Scene, are the focus of Henry James Comes Home, scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks?s dazzling follow-up to his book Henry James Goes to Paris. Brooks combines biography and criticism to recreate James''s American journey, tracing his travels around New England, down south to Florida, across the Midwest, up the coast of California, and eventually to Seattle and Portland. For James, being American was "a complex fate," and Brooks shows how James''s keen remarks on rampant materialism and the challenges at the heart of democracy are still of enduring relevance to us in this day.

A thrilling, inventive, playful, and unorthodox detective and caper novel, the latest work by a French master.?Fans of Jean-Patrick Manchette''s deadpan irony will appreciate Command Performance, Echenoz''s vibrant, playful homage to the hard-boiled genre, which plays like The Big Lebowski on the Seine.? ?Publishers WeeklyGerard Fulmard is a loser. A disgraced former flight attendant, he attempts the métier of private detective, with spectacularly disastrous results, then begins working for an obscure political groupuscule beset by an outsized share of infighting and backroom maneuvering. At first employed as an enforcer, Fulmard is then co-opted by one of the party?s less savory factions, sinking in deeper and deeper until he finds himself the reluctant assassin of the party?s own leader?and that?s when things really start going downhill. Meanwhile, projectiles crash down from the sky, corpses turn up in perfect health, main characters suffer sudden death, and nothing is as it seems. In Command Performance, Jean Echenoz, one of France?s most respected contemporary writers, toys with the tropes of genre fiction and high literature, displaying the twists of plot and turns of phrase that have become his signature, and that have made him, in the words of The Washington Post, ?the most distinctive voice of his generation and the master magician of the contemporary French novel.?

In a small town in Switzerland, Franz?ex-clergyman, ex-husband, current counselor of locals at loose ends? is being haunted by his recently deceased father, Klement. In life, Franz was caught cheating on his wife and defrocked, after which Klement never spoke to him again. In death, Klement visits his son in the form of a frog in the throat, choking him, yes, but also giving voice to an old dairy farmer devoted to the old ways, forever railing against his son and the whole modern mess he represents.The same can be said of this novel, in which these two voices clash, harmonize, and ultimately offer up all the mutual recognition and incomprehension that is family life. A miniature tragicomic masterpiece, Markus Werner?s second novel is as bursting with life as a Dickens novel: not only Franz?s high-strung shenanigans and the father?s settled life among the cattle, but the lives of his sister and brother and the land all around.As in all of Werner?s work, the world looks grim (?I sit around, I drink, I brood, I pat myself down for flaws and find many and each evening I say: Starting tomorrowI?m going to get a grip on myself?) but never less than comic?a view captured marvelously in Michael Hofmann?s vivid translation.

A reporter embarks on an investigation of a string of unconnected suicides?which then leads into an exploration of the phenomenon of suicide itself?in this elegant existential novel, the third and final volume of Antonio Di Benedetto?s Trilogy of Expectation. A stymied reporter in his early thirties embarks on an investigation of three unconnected suicides. All he has to go on are photos of the faces of the dead. Other suicides begin to proliferate, while a colleague in the archives sends him historical justifications of self-murder by thinkers of all sorts: Diogenes, David Hume, Emile Durkheim, Margaret Mead. His investigation becomes an obsession, and he finds himself ever more attracted to its subject as it proceeds. The Suicides is the third volume of Antonio Di Benedetto?s Trilogy of Expectation, a touchstone for Roberto Bolano and deemed ?one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century fiction? by Juan José Saer. Following Zama (set during the eighteenth century) and The Silentiary (set during the 1950s), this final work takes place in a provincial city in the late 1960s, as Argentina plummets toward the ?Dirty War.?

Poe and Kafka meet The Twilight Zone in this anthology of fifty fantastical tales, many of them reflecting the political and social energies of the time, by an Italian master of the short story.Dino Buzzati was a prolific writer of stories, publishing several hundred over the course of forty years. Many of them are fantastic?reminiscent of Kafka and Poe in their mixture of horror and absurdity, and at the same time anticipating the alternate realities of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror in their chilling commentary on the barbarities, catastrophes, and fanaticisms of the twentieth century.In The Bewitched Bourgeois, Lawrence Venuti has put together an anthology that showcases Buzzati?s short fiction from his earliest stories to the ones he wrote in the last months of his life. Some appear in English for the first time, while others are reappearing in Venuti?s crisp new versions, such as the much-anthologized ?Seven Floors,? an absurdist tale of a patient fatally caught in hospital bureaucracy; ?Panic at La Scala,? in which the Milanese bourgeoisie, fearing a left-wing revolution, find themselves imprisoned in the opera house; and ?Appointment with Einstein,? where the physicist, stopping at a filling station in Princeton, New Jersey, encounters a gas station attendant who turns out to be the Angel of Death.