May 1992. In Russia, Boris Yeltsin is showing millions of communists the specter of capitalism. Yugoslavia is disintegrating. United Germany is uncertain about their next move, and communism is collapsing all around. And in a corner of old Calcutta, Herbert Sarkar, sole proprietor of a company that delivers messages from the dead, decides to give up the ghost. Decides to give up his aunt and uncle, his friends and foes, his fondness for kites, his aching heart that broke for Buki, his top terrace from where he stared up at the sky, his Ulster overcoat with buttons like big black medals, his notebook full of poems, his Park Street every evening when the sun goes down, his memory of a Russian girl running across the great black earth as the soldiers lift their guns and get ready to fire, his fairy who beat her wings against his window and filled his room with blue light . Surreal, haunting, painful, beautiful and astonishing in turn, and sweeping us along from Herbert's early orphan years to the tumultuous Naxalite times of the 1970s to the explosive events after his death, Bhattacharya's groundbreaking novel is now available in a daring new translation and holds up before us both a fascinating character and a plaintive city.

Four classical Greek myths retold with unexpected twists by an East German dissident. Franz Fuhmann's subversive retellings of four Greek legends were first published in East Germany in 1980. In them, Fuhmann plumbs the ancient tales' depths and makes them his own. Attuned to conflict and paradox, he sheds light on the complexities of sex and love, art and beauty, politics and power. In the title story, the love of the goddess Eos for the mortal Tithonos reveals the blessing and curse of transience, while "Hera and Zeus" probes the divine couple's tumultuous relationship and its devastating consequences for a world embroiled in war. Fuhmann's unflinching account of Marsyas' flaying by Apollo has been widely read as a dissident political statement that has lost none of its incisive force. At times charged with sensuality, and at others honed to a keen analytical edge, Fuhmann's shimmering prose is matched by Sunandini Banerjee's exquisite collages.

Science has given us several explanations for how humans evolved from walking on four limbs to two feet. None, however, is as riveting as what master storyteller Ngugi wa Thiong'o offers in The Upright Revolution. Blending myth and folklore with an acute insight into the human psyche and politics, Wa Thiong'o conjures up a fantastic fable about how and why humans began to walk upright. It is a story that will appeal to children and adults alike, containing a clear and important message: "Life is connected." Originally written in Gikuyu, this short story has been translated into sixty-three languages--forty-seven of them African--making it the most translated story in the history of African literature. This new collector's edition of The Upright Revolution is richly illustrated in full color with Sunandini Banerjee's marvellous digital collages, which open up new vistas of imagination and add unique dimensions to the story.

"Not writing is always a relief and sometimes a pleasure. Writing about what cannot be written, by contrast, is the devil's own job." In this unusual text, a blend of essay, fiction, and literary genealogy, South African novelist Ivan Vladislavic explores the problems and potentials of the fictions he could not bring himself to write. Drawing from his notebooks of the past twenty years, Vladislavic records here a range of ideas for stories--unsettled accounts, he calls them, or case studies of failure--and examines where they came from and why they eluded him. In the process, he reveals some of the principles that matter to him as a writer, and pays tribute to the writers-- such as Walser, Perec, Sterne, and DeLillo--who have been important to him as both a reader and an author. At the heart of the text, like a brightly lit room in a field of debris, stands Vladislavic's Loss Library itself, the shelves laden with books that have never been written. On the page, Vladislavic tells us, every loss may yet be recovered. An extraordinary book about both the nature of novels and the process of writing, The Loss Library will appeal to anyone seeking to understand the almost magical and mythical experience of breathing life into a new work of fiction. Praise for Vladislavic "In the tradition of Elias Canetti, a tour de force of the imagination."--Andre Brink "The prose is stunning. It gives the impression of the words and the phrases having been caught from the inside--as though the author lives on the other side of language, where every word is strange and dancing, and the way they are put together produces complicated patterned exchanges like minuets."--Tony Morphet

Cees Nooteboom wrote the poems that make up Monk's Eye on two islands: he began them on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog and finished them on the Spanish island of Minorca, where he has spent summers for decades. The poems--which can be read individually or, all together, as the record of a poet's life--are about the two islands. But they're also about islands as an archetype, about the serenity that we can find on beaches and amid dunes, the sea sweeping imperturbably around us. Accompanied by Sunandini Banerjee's collages, the poems in this volume are rich in allusion; they address the past, memories, illusions, dreams, and the heart of all poetry--which Nooteboom locates in the opening line of Plato's Phaedrus, when Socrates, walking with his admirer, asks, "My dear Phaedrus, whence came you, and whither are you going?"

In Paris, Montreal, Seville, Berlin, and towns large and small, Diane Meur has dreamt - and she has remembered her dreams. In this small volume the author shares her dreams of the years 2008-10, a time of global upheaval that happened to coincide with upheavals in her own life. As she writes in the preface, "They are not my life, they are not my writing, they are just the dreams I had, remembered, and noted down: all of them, and every part of them, without censure or omission." Some dreams are humorous: peeling a scorpion like a shrimp and finding it isn't half bad; some are poignant: a tiny doll-like baby encountered in a train; and, as in many dreams, there is much anxiety: old boyfriends encountered again; children in distress; unusual, threatening spaces and people. Though dreamt by the author, Meur's dreams share a common human intimacy - in them we recognize our own innermost thoughts, concerns, desires, and fears. Accompanied by the otherworldly illustrations of collage artist Sunandini Banerjee, Meur's dreams come alive, inspiring our own reveries and becoming part of our nocturnal imaginings.