'Someone jolted my elbow as I drank and said, "*Je vous demande pardon,*" and as I moved to give him space he turned and stared at me and I at him, and I realised, with a strange sense of shock and fear and nausea all combined, that his face and voice were known to me too well. I was looking at myself.' By chance, two men - one English, the other French - meet in a provincial railway station. Their resemblance is uncanny, and they spend the next few hours talking and drinking - until at last John, the Englishman, falls into a drunken stupor. It's to be his last carefree moment, for when he wakes, his French companion has stolen his identity and disappeared. So John steps into the Frenchman's shoes, and faces a variety of perplexing roles - as owner of a chateau, director of a failing business, head of a fractious family, and master of nothing.

From the author of Blackfishing the IUD, a darkly hilarious novel about familial trauma, chronic illness, academic labor, and contemporary art. In the tradition of Rabelais, Swift, and Fran Ross—the tradition of biting satire that joyfully embraces the strange and fantastical—and drawing upon documentary strategies from Sheila Heti, Caren Beilin offers a tale of familial trauma that is also a broadly inclusive skewering of academia, the medical industry, and the contemporary art scene.One day Iris, an adjunct at a city arts college, receives a terrible package: recently unearthed letters that her father had written to her in her teens, in which he blames her for their family’s crises. Driven by the raw fact of receiving these devastating letters not once but twice in a lifetime, and in a panic of chronic pain brought on by rheumatoid arthritis, Iris escapes to the countryside—or some absurdist version of it. Nazi...

Wayne Koestenbaum's first book of short fiction: a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables.In Koestenbaum's first book of short fiction—a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables—Koestenbaum takes the gloom and melancholy of our own terrifying political moment and finds subversive solace by overturning the customary protocols of tale-telling. Characters and narrators wander into strange locales; the difference between action and thinking, between reality and dream, grows moot in a heightened yet burlesque manner. The activities in The Cheerful Scapegoat are a cross between a comedy of manners and a Sadean orgy. Language has its own desires: figures of speech carry an erotic charge that straddles the line between slapstick and vertigo. Punishment hangs over every dialogue—but in the fable-world of The Cheerful Scapegoat, abjection comes with an undertaste of...

A mesmerizing postmodern debut novel, The Scapegoat is a propulsive and destabilizing literary mystery that follows a man at a university in the San Francisco Bay area as he investigates his father's deathN is employed at a prestigious California university, where he has distinguished himself as an aloof and somewhat eccentric presence. His meticulous, ordered life is violently disrupted by the death of his estranged father—unanticipated and, as it increasingly seems to N, surrounded by murky circumstances. His investigation leads him to a hotel built over a former Spanish mission, a site with a dark power and secrets all its own. On campus, a chance meeting with a young doctor provokes uncomfortable feelings on the direction of his life, and N begins to have vivid, almost hallucinatory daydreams about the year he spent in Ottawa, and a shameful episode from his past.Meanwhile, a shadowy group of fringe academics surfaces in relation to his father's...

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Revolving around the opera, these tales are an "archaeological excavation of the slag-heaps of our collective existence" (W. G. Sebald)Combining fact and fiction, each of the one hundred and two tales of Alexander Kluge's Temple of the Scapegoat (dotted with photos of famous operas and their stars) compresses a lifetime of feeling and thought: Kluge is deeply engaged with the opera and an inventive wellspring of narrative notions. The titles of his stories suggest his many turns of mind: "Total Commitment," "Freedom," "Reality Outrivals Theater," "The Correct Slowing-Down at the Transitional Point Between Terror and an Inkling of Freedom," "A Crucial Character (Among Persons None of Whom Are Who They Think They Are)," and "Deadly Vocal Power vs. Generosity in Opera." An opera, Kluge says, is a blast furnace of the soul, telling of the great singer Leonard Warren who died onstage, having literally sung his heart out. Kluge introduces a Tibetan scholar who realizes that...

Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse’ is a radical new account of one of Britain’s greatest naval disasters. Making full use of modern research and unrivalled access to privazte family papers, it suggests that Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, the commander of the so-called ‘Force Z’, was made the scapegoat for a battle in which he was blameless, and that Winston Churchill, the Admiralty and chronic failures in ship design and Intelligence were what sank the ships. The book also shows what a very close run thing the sinkings were, and how Japanese success depended on them having luck on their side. ‘Scapegoat’ is a convincing attempt to right a wrong that has been allowed to stand for over 70 years, as well as a prime illustration of the way in which the Establishment always protects itself first.

From a major new Greek writer, never before translated--a wide-ranging, muck-raking, beautifully written novel about the unsolved murder of an American journalist in Greece in the fortiesIn 1948, the body of an American journalist is found floating in the bay off Thessaloniki. A Greek journalist is tried and convicted for the murder . . . but when he's released twelve years later, he claims his confession was the result of torture.Flash forward to modern day Greece, where a young, disaffected high school student is given an assignment for a school project: find the truth.Based on the real story of famed CBS reporter George Polk--journalism's prestigious Polk Awards were named after him--who was investigating embezzlement of U.S. aid by the right-wing Greek government, Nikolaidou's novel is a sweeping saga that brings together the turbulent Greece of the post-war period with the current era, where the country finds itself facing turbulent political...