"One autumn morning, Jia Jia walks into the bathroom of her lavish Beijing apartment to find her husband dead. One minute she was breakfasting with him and packing for an upcoming trip, the next, she finds him motionless in their bathtub. Like something out of a dream, next to the tub Jia Jia discovers a pencil sketch of a strange watery figure, an image that swims into Jia Jia's mind and won't leave. The mysterious drawing launches Jia Jia on an...

Notes from the Underground is Fyodor Dostoevsky's ninth novel, and considered to be one of the first examples of the existential novel. In this radically inventive work, an alienated former minor administrator in nineteenth-century Russia has broken away from society and withdrawn into an underground identity. With its piercing insight into political, social, and moral issues, this classic is one of the most provocative work of literature ever written. In...

CLASSIC FICTION (PRE C 1945). Franz Kafka's 1915 novella of unexplained horror and nightmarish transformation became a worldwide classic and remains a century later one of the most widely read works of fiction in the world. It is the story of traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. This hugely influential work inspired George Orwell, Albert Camus, Jorge Louis Borges, and Ray Bradbury,...

Up in the Air meets Inception in this smart, innovative, genre-synthesizing novel from the acclaimed author of Care of Wooden Floors—hailed as "Fawlty Towers crossed with Freud," by the Daily Telegraph—that takes the polished surfaces of modern life, the branded coffee, and the free wifi, and twists them into a surrealistic nightmare of infinite proportions.

Neil Double is a "conference surrogate," hired by his

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The bestselling classic novel about an American traveler's spiritual journey into the world of golf   When Michael Murphy first meets golf pro Shivas Irons on one of the most beautiful courses in Scotland, he doesn't know that his life-and his golf game-will change forever. But with the first swing of the Scotsman's club Murphy realizes he is in for a most extraordinary day.  By turns comic, philosophical, mythic, and autobiographical, this tale...

hikikomori, n. h?kik?'mo?ri; literally pulling inward; refers to those who withdraw from society. Inspired by the real-life Japanese social phenomenon called hikikomori and the professional "rental sisters" hired to help, Hikikomori and the Rental Sister is about an erotic relationship between Thomas, an American hikikomori, and Megumi, a young Japanese immigrant hiding from her own past. The strange, insular world they create together in a New York...

"My brain was famous, but I was not. Not every gifted child invents a pollutant-free fuel, paints a masterpiece, or finds the cure for cancer," Jack MacLeod tells us. "Some of us just live out our lives." Jack died in 1974; now, he's ready to narrate his story from beyond the grave. Jack's prodigious memory, which allows him to memorize books, and his penchant for psychic connections give him unusual insights into the events of his past life and...

"Two friends, Tonnison and Berregnog, stumble upon an old house in rural Ireland and discover the journal of "the Recluse," an unidentified man who recorded his last days in the house before its destruction. The journal recounts strange visions that dogged the Recluse--terrifying creatures that crawl up from below the house to torment him. But the journal is unfinished, and the friends are left to speculate on the man's fate--and their own. First...

Bridge of Souls is a fascinating and endearing story about an Italian Nonna's past and her great granddaughter finding her true destiny. It is a creative blend of spiritual, paranormal, and a very bizarre love/hate relationship involving psychological domination. There are chilling hidden dangers, when people depend on psychics for answers. People seeking enlightenment may risk being emotionally controlled, and financially raped at the hands of people...

Tilde Colon hates her name and the two English Majors who gave it to her: her parents. She seems an incomplete person, totally absorbed in herself, but dismissive and judgmental about other people in her environment: she is a high school student, fifteen years old...and a loner. No, wait, she has just made an acquaintance, a boy named Jake - Jacob White - who is as much a misfit as she is.What makes a young perople with promising futures embrace an...