These four novels display Oe’s passionate and original vision. Oe was ten when American jeeps first drove into the mountain village where he lived, and his literary work reveals the tension and ambiguity forged by the collapse of values of his childhood on the one hand and the confrontation with American writers on the other. The earliest of his ...more
Jorge Luis Borges was a literary spellbinder whose tales of magic, mystery and murder are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes. This collection brings together many of his stories, including the celebrated "Library of Babel".
This is Jeremy Reed's first novel, a powerfully evocative and beautifully written book that takes one on a young man's journey to the bottom of the night. As Kathleen Raine notes in her introduction, it is also the novel of a poet: full of imaginative compassion for the night lost and a testament to poetic conviction, the word that is delivered fro...more
A collection of poetry which draws on visual imagery and explores a series of paintings which is both analytical and celebratory of the beauty of art. Other poems such as "Aids", "Transsexual" and "Shoe Fetishist" use modern themes and words that embody human compassion.
The Showa Anthology is the first comprehensive collection of Japanese short stories to appear in English translation in over eight years. These twenty-five stories, most of them newly translated, were composed during the six decades of the Showa period (from 1926 to 1989) by some of the finest Japanese writers of this century. The variety and scope...more
Kazu runs her restaurant with charm and shrewdness, but when she falls in love with one of her clients, she renounces her business to become his wife. When Kazu decides to ressurect her husbands political career she is forced to choose between her marriage and her irrepressible vitality.
Oe’s most important novel, A Personal Matter, has been called by The New York Times “close to a perfect novel.” In A Personal Matter, Oe has chosen a difficult, complex though universal subject: how does one face and react to the birth of an abnormal child? Bird, the protagonist, is a young man of 27 with antisocial tendencies who more than o...more
This book is a retelling of the Gospel following the life of Christ from his conception to his crucifixion. A naive Jesus is the son not of God, but of Joseph. In the desert it is not Satan, but God that Christ tussles with, an autocrat with whom he has an unbalanced and unsettled relationship.