Literature - International

• Marina Lewycka
• Penguin, 2005
• Paperback, 293 pages
• 9780143036746

With this wise, tender, and deeply funny novel, Marina Lewycka takes her place alongside Zadie Smith and Monica Ali as a writer who can capture the unchanging verities of family. When an elderly and newly widowed Ukrainian immigrant announces his intention to remarry, his daughters must set aside their longtime feud to thwart him. For their fathers intended is a voluptuous old-country gold digger with a proclivity for green satin underwear and an appetite for the good life of the West. As the hostilities mount and family secrets spill out, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian combines sex, bitchiness, wit, and genuine warmth in its celebration of the pleasure of growing old disgracefully.

• Jack Kerouac & William Burroughs
• Grove Press, 2008
• Paperback, 215 pages
• 9780802144348

More than sixty years ago, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac sat down in New York City to write a novel about the summer of 1944, when one of their friends killed another in a moment of brutal and tragic bloodshed. The two authors were then at the dawn of their careers, having yet to write anything of note. Alternating chapters and narrators, Burroughs and Kerouac pieced together a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and obsession, art and violence. The manuscript, called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks after a line from a news story about a fire at a circus, was submitted to publishers but rejected and confined to a filing cabinet for decades. This legendary collaboration between two of the twentieth centuries most influential writers is set to be published for the first time in the fall of 2008. A remarkable, fascinating piece of American literary history, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is also an engrossing, atmospheric novel that brings to life a shocking murder at the dawn of the Beat Generation.

• Toni Morrison (ed.)
• HarperCollins, 2009
• Hardcover, 118 pages
• ISBN: 9780061774003

Published in conjunction with the PEN American Center, Burn This Book is a powerful collection of essays that explore the meaning of censorship and the power of literature to inform the way we see the world, and ourselves.

Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the author of many novels, including Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and, most recently, A Mercy. She has also received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction.

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999
• Paperback, 343 pages
• ISBN: 9780060932688

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (2-4 weeks).

Collected here are twenty-six of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most brilliant and enchanting short stories, presented in the chronological order of their publication in Spanish from three volumes: Eyes of a Blue Dog, Big Mama's Funeral, and The Incredible and Sad Tale of lnnocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother.Combining mysticism, history, and humor, the stories in this collection span more than two decades, illuminating the development of Marquez's prose and exhibiting the themes of family, poverty, and death that resound throughout his fiction.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Colombia in 1927. His many books include The Autumn of the Patriarch; No One Writes to the Colonel; Love in the Time of Cholera; a memoir, Living to Tell the Tale; and, most recently, a novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

• George Orwell
• Penguin, 2003
• Paperback, 355 pages
• ISBN: 9780141191201

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks).

A new edition to celebrate sixty years since the first publication ofNineteen Eighty-Four, one of the most important books of all time.

First published in 1949, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has lost none of its impact and vision with which it first hit readers. Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in London, chief city of Airstrip One. Big Brother stares out from every poster, the Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal. When Winston finds love with Julia, he discovers that life does not have to be dull and deadening, and awakens to new possibilities. Despite the police helicopters that hover and circle overhead, Winston and Julia begin to question the Party; they are drawn towards conspiracy. Yet Big Brother will not tolerate dissent - even in the mind. For those with original thoughts they invented Room 101...

• Bob Dylan
• Scribner, 2004
• Paperback, 137 pages
• 9780743230414

Bob Dylan wrote Tarantula in 1966. It existed for years only in dog-eared bootleg copies, but was eventually published in 1971. The book captures the tone and spirit of the turbulent times in which it was written.

• Eduardo Galeano (translated by Cedric Belfrage)
• W.W. Norton, 1991
• Paperback, 281 pages
• 9780393308556

A collection of short, often lyrical stories presenting Galeano's views on emotion, art, politics, and values, as well as offering a scathing critique of modern capitalistic society and views on an ideal society and mindset. Parable, paradox, anecdote, dream, and autobiography blend into an exuberant world view and affirmation of human possibility.

• Charles Bukowski
• Ecco Books, 2009
• Hardcover, 127 pages
• 9780061771200

A volume of never-before-collected poems from America’s most imitated and influential poet.

In the literary pantheon, Charles Bukowski remains a counterculture icon. A hard-drinking wild man of literature, a stubborn outsider to the poetry world, he has struck a chord with generations of readers, writing raw, tough poetry about booze, work, and women that speaks to his fans as being "real" and, like the work of the Beats, even dangerous.

Edited by his longtime publisher John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, The Continual Condition includes more of this legend's never-before-collected poems.

• Arundhati Roy
• Vintage Canada, 1997
• Paperback, 321 pages
• ISBN: 9780679309413

The international publishing sensation of 1997 -- translated into 18 languages -- a magical, sophisticated tour de force. The God of Small Things heralds a voice so powerful and original that it burns itself into the reader's memory. Set mainly in Kerala, India, in 1969, it is the story of Rahel and her twin brother Estha, who learn that their whole world can change in a single day, that love and life can be lost in a moment. Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they seek to craft a childhood for themselves amid the wreckage that constitutes their family. Sweet and heartbreaking, ribald and profound, this is a novel to set beside those of Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Arundhati Roy was trained as an architect and is also an award-winning screenwriter. The God of Small Things is her first novel. Like her twin protagonists, she was raised near her grandmother's pickle factory in Kerala, India. She now resides in New Delhi.

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Knopf Canada, 2009
• Hardcover, 218 pages
• ISBN: 9780307397898

These twelve dazzling stories from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — the Orange Broadband Prize–winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun — are her most intimate works to date.

In these stories Adichie turns her penetrating eye to the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the United States. In “A Private Experience,” a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman, and the young mother at the centre of “Imitation” finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when she learns that her husband has moved his mistress into their Lagos home.

Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow and longing, this collection is a resounding confirmation of Adichie’s prodigious literary powers.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003, the New Yorker, Granta, the Financial Times and Zoetrope. Her most recent novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Broadband Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

• Zora Neale Hurston
• Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006
• Paperback, 205 pages
• ISBN: 9780061120060

One of the most important works of twentieth-century American literature, Zora Neale Hurston's beloved 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story of fair-skinned, fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood through three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose. A true literary wonder, Hurston's masterwork remains as relevant and affecting today as when it was first published -- perhaps the most widely read and highly regarded novel in the entire canon of African American literature.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist whose fictional and factual accounts of black heritage remain unparalleled. Her many books include Dust Tracks on a Road; Their Eyes Were Watching God; Jonah's Gourd Vine; Moses, Man of the Mountain; Mules and Men; and Every Tongue Got to Confess.

• Dave Eggers
• Vintage Canada, 2007
• Paperback, 538 pages
• ISBN: 9780676979497

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks).

What Is the What is the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee in war-ravaged southern Sudan who flees from his village in the mid-1980s and becomes one of the so-called Lost Boys. Valentino’s travels bring him in contact with

enemy soldiers, with liberation rebels, with hyenas and lions, with disease and starvation, and with deadly murahaleen (militias on horseback)–the same sort who currently terrorize Darfur. Eventually Deng is resettled in the United States with almost 4000 other young Sudanese men, and a very different struggle begins. Based closely on true experiences, What Is the What is heartbreaking and arresting, filled with adventure, suspense, tragedy, and, finally, triumph.

Dave Eggers is the author of three previous books, is the editor of McSweeney’s, a quarterly magazine and book-publishing company, and is co-founder of 826 Valencia, a network of nonprofit writing and tutoring centres for young people. As a journalist, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire and The Believer. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and daughter.

• Dave Eggers
• Knopf Canada; 2010
• Paperback; 368 pages
• 9780307399069

A riveting account of Hurricane Katrina and a shocking tale of wrongful arrest and racism, Zeitoun is the true story of one Syrian-American, plucked from his home and accused of terrorism, written by one of America's most high-profile literary writers, now available for the first time in paperback from Vintage Canada.

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later Zeitoun abruptly disappeared. Eggers's riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun's roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy — an American who converted to Islam — and their children, and the surreal atmosphere in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research — in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria.