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1) The factory
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1460
Language
English
Description
In an unnamed Japanese city, three seemingly normal and unrelated characters find work at a sprawling industrial factory. They each focus intently on their specific jobs: one studies moss, one shreds paper, and the other proofreads incomprehensible documents. Life in the factory has its own logic and momentum, and, eventually, the factory slowly expands and begins to take over everything, enveloping these poor workers. The very margins of reality...
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 357
Language
English
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Description
Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. His attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a "clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual...
3) Praiseworthy
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1585
Language
English
Description
"In a small town in the north of Australia, a mysterious cloud heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors. A crazed visionary looks to donkeys to solve the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife, seeking solace from his madness, follows the dance of butterflies and scours the internet to find out how her Aboriginal/Chinese family could be repatriated to China. One of their...
4) Nightwood
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes's strange and sinuous tour de force novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna-a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous. The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction-there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate...
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1212
Language
English
Description
"The devastating final work by Brazil's greatest modern writer, The Hour of the Star tells the haunting tale of Macabéa-a typist who lives in the slums of Rio-underfed, sickly, and unloved, yet inwardly free"--
6) Moods
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Moods by Yoel Hoffmann--"Israel's celebrated avant-garde genius" (The Forward)--supplies the magic missing link between the infinitesimal and the infinite. Part novel and part memoir, Yoel Hoffmann's Moods is flooded with feelings--about his family, losses, loves, the soul's hidden powers, old phone books, and life in the Galilee, with its every scent, breeze, notable dog, and odd neighbor. Carrying these shards is a general tenderness accentuated...