In August 1984, Michigan housewife Betty Mahmoody accompanied her husband to his native Iran for a two-week vacation. To her horror, she found herself and her four-year-old daughter, Mahtob, virtual prisoners of a man rededicated to his Shiite Moslem faith, in a land where women are near-slaves and Americans are despised. Their only hope for escape...more
Here in its American debut edition, Loving Sabotage is the remarkable second novel by young Belgian literary phenomenon Amelie Nothomb. "I lived everything during these three years: heroism, glory, treachery, love, indifference, suffering, humiliation. It was in China, I was seven years old." So announces the narrator of Loving Sabotage, Amelie Not...more
From France's 'literary lioness' (Elle), The Book of Proper Names is the story of the hapless orphan girl, Plectrude. Raised by her aunt, and unaware of the dark secret behind her past, she is a troubled but dreamy child who is both blessed and cursed by her intoxicating eyes. Discovered to have enormous gifts as a dancer, she is accepted at Paris'...more
A hapless young Western woman spends a year toiling in a Japanese company, making one terrible cultural blunder after another as she struggles to survive in an unfamiliar environment. By the author of The Stranger Next Door and Loving Sabotage.
In a wistful, clever and unusual novel, Amelie Nothomb casts herself as hunger: hunger for experience, hunger for life, hunger for sweetness and, in what is the book's nucleus, hunger for hunger (the period during which she was afflicted by acute anorexia). Recounting the formative journeys of her youth, from Tokyo to Peking to Paris to New York, "...more
Considered one of the most important works of one of France's foremost philosophers, and long-awaited in English, begins with an extended exegesis of Lewis Carroll's . Considering stoicism, language, games, sexuality, schizophrenia, and literature, Deleuze determines the status of meaning and meaninglessness, and seeks the 'place' where sense and ...more
In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, an “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s written a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women cr...more
Osama bin Laden's former sister-in-law provides a penetrating, unusually inti- mate look into Saudi soci-ety and the bin Laden family's role within it, as well as the treatment of Saudi women. On September 11th, 2001, Carmen bin Ladin heard the news that the Twin Towers had been struck. She instinctively knew that her ex-brother-in-law was in...more