Книги жанра «Современная проза» на букву «A»

A is a work of fiction in which Andre Alexis presents the compelling narrative of Alexander Baddeley, a Toronto book reviewer obsessed with the work of the elusive and mythical poet Avery Andrews. Baddeley is in awe with Andrews's ability as a poet — more than anything he wants to understand the inspiration behind his work — so much so that, following in the footsteps of countless pilgrims throughout literary history, Baddeley actually tracks Andrews down thinking that meeting his literary hero will provide some answers. Their meeting results in a meditation and a revelation about the creative act itself that generates more and more questions about what it means to be "inspired." Alexis further develops this narrative through a reflection in essay form presented as an annex that build layers of thought upon not only the original narrative, but provides Alexis's own motives (and perhaps, obsessions) behind writing A.

A highly charged fiction debut about a young woman in India, and the love that both shatters and transforms her.

She is twenty, restless in New Delhi. Her mother has died; her father has left for Singapore.

He is a few years older, just back to India from New York.

When they meet in a café one afternoon, she — lonely, hungry for experience, yearning to break free of tradition — casts aside her fears and throws herself headlong into a love affair, one that takes her where she has never been before.

Told in a voice at once gritty and lyrical, mournful and frank, A Bad Character marks the arrival of an astonishingly gifted new writer. It is an unforgettable hymn to a dangerous, exhilarating city, and a portrait of desire and its consequences as timeless as it is universal.

"The burlesque echoes the greatest Spanish classics, from Quevedo to Camilo José Cela." — M. García Posada, El País

A Bad End is the story of Goyito, a dwarf at the end of his life, who tells us, in a bitter and sarcastic way, the miserable reality of his lonely childhood, his macabre experiences as a circus clown, and his liaisons dangereuses in Madrid's underworld. Mischief, desire, death, ambition, revenge — the life of a rascal told in exuberant, exhilarating language. Winner of the Premio Ojo Crítico.

Fernando Royuela is a Spanish lawyer and fiction writer who lives in Madrid, Spain.

Miles Ryan's life seemed to end the day his wife was killed in a hit-and-run accident two years ago. Missy had been his first love, and Miles fervently believes she will be his last. As a deputy sheriff in the North Carolina town of New Bern, he not only grieves for Missy, but longs to bring the unknown driver to justice.

Then Miles meets Sarah Andrew. The second-grade teacher of his son, Jonah, Sarah had left Baltimore after a difficult divorce to start over in the gentler surroundings of New Bern. Perhaps it is her own emotional wounds that make her sensitive to the hurt she sees first in Jonah's eyes, and then in his father's. Tentatively, Sarah and Miles reach out to each other. Soon they are both laughing for the first time in years.and falling in love.

Neither will be able to guess how closely linked they are to a shocking secret – one that will force them to question everything they ever believed in. and make a heartbreaking choice that will change their lives for ever.

In A Bend In The Road, Nicholas Sparks writes with a luminous intensity about life's bitter turns and incomparable sweetness. His affirming message carries a powerful lesson about the imperfections of being human, the mistakes we all make, and the joy that comes when we give ourselves to love.

The stories in A Better Angel describe the terrain of human suffering — illness, regret, mourning, sympathy — in the most unusual of ways. In “Stab,” a bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. In “Why Antichrist?” a boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. In the remarkable title story, a ne’er do well pediatrician returns home to take care of his dying father, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily-disappointed heavenly agent.

With Gob’s Grief and The Children’s Hospital, Chris Adrian announced himself as a writer of rare talent and originality. The stories in A Better Angel, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and McSweeney’s, demonstrate more of his endless inventiveness and wit, and they confirm his growing reputation as a most exciting and unusual literary voice — of heartbreaking, magical, and darkly comic tales.

Amy Bloom was nominated for a National Book Award for her first collection, Come to Me, and her fiction has appeared in "The New Yorker, Story, Antaeus, " and other magazines, and in The Best American Short Stories""and""Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards." "In her new collection, she enhances her reputation as a true artist of the form.

Here are characters confronted with tragedy, perplexed by emotions, and challenged to endure whatever modern life may have in store. A loving mother accompanies her daughter in her journey to become a man, and discovers a new, hopeful love. A stepmother and stepson meet again after fifteen years and a devastating mistake, and rediscover their familial affection for each other. And in "The Story," a widow bent on seducing another woman's husband constructs and deconstructs her story until she has "made the best and happiest ending" possible "in this world."

In this Conradian masterpiece of American innocence and evil set in the fictional Central American country of Boca Grande, two American women face the harsh realities, political and personal, of living on the edge in a land with an uncertain future. Writing with her signature telegraphic swiftness, the author creates a terrifying commentary on an age of conscienceless authority.

Nobel Laureate S.Y. Agnon is considered the towering figure of modern Hebrew literature. With this collection of stories, reissued in paperback and expanded to include additional Agnon classics, the English-speaking audience has, at long last, access to the rich and brilliantly multifaceted fictional world of one of the greatest writers of the last century. This broad selection of Agnon's fiction introduces the full sweep of the writer's panoramic vision as chonicler of the lost world of Eastern European Jewry and the emerging society of modern Israel. New Reader's Preface by Jonathan Rosen.

Emmett has a wife and two children, a cat, and a duck, and he wants to know what life is about. Every day he gets up before dawn, makes a cup of coffee in the dark, lights a fire with one wooden match, and thinks.

What Emmett thinks about is the subject of this wise and closely observed novel, which covers vast distances while moving no farther than Emmett’s hearth and home. Nicholson Baker’s extraordinary ability to describe and celebrate life in all its rich ordinariness has never been so beautifully achieved.

Baker won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. He now returns to fiction with this lovely book, reminiscent of the early novels—Room Temperature and The Mezzanine—that established his reputation.

From the acclaimed Giller Prize Finalist and Governor General’s Award Winner: a delightfully funny and charming second novel about Canada’s smallest town.

Life in Winnipeg didn’t go as planned for Knute and her daughter. But living back in Algren with her parents and working for the longtime mayor, Hosea Funk, has its own challenges: Knute finds herself mixed up with Hosea’s attempts to achieve his dream of meeting the Prime Minister — even if that

means keeping the town’s population at an even 1500. Bringing to life small-town Canada and all its larger-than-life characters, A Boy of Good Breeding is a big-hearted, hilarious novel about finding out where you belong.

After university and Sandhurst, Charles Thoroughgood has now joined the Assault Commados and is on a four-month tour of duty in Armagh and Belfast. The thankless task facing him and his men — to patrol the tension-filled streets through weeks of boredom punctuated by bursts of horror — takes them through times of tragedy, madness, laughter and terror.

Alan Judd tells Thoroughgood’s tale with verve, compassion and humour. The result is an exceptionally fine novel which blends bitter human incident with army farce.

An author (a version of Vila-Matas himself) presents a short history of a secret society, the Shandies, who are obsessed with the concept of portable literature. The society is entirely imagined, but in this rollicking, intellectually playful book, its members include writers and artists like Marcel Duchamp, Aleister Crowley, Witold Gombrowicz, Federico Garcia Lorca, Man Ray, and Georgia O Keefe. The Shandies meet secretly in apartments, hotels, and cafes all over Europe to discuss what great literature really is: brief, not too serious, penetrating the depths of the mysterious. We witness the Shandies having adventures in stationary submarines, underground caverns, African backwaters, and the cultural capitals of Europe."

On 3 December 1976, just weeks before the general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions, seven gunmen from West Kingston stormed his house with machine guns blazing. Marley survived and went on to perform at the free concert, but the next day he left the country, and didn’t return for two years. Not a lot was recorded about the fate of the seven gunmen, but much has been said, whispered and sung about in the streets of West Kingston, with information surfacing at odd times, only to sink into rumour and misinformation.

Inspired by this near-mythic event, A Brief History of Seven Killings takes the form of an imagined oral biography, told by ghosts, witnesses, killers, members of parliament, drug dealers, conmen, beauty queens, FBI and CIA agents, reporters, journalists, and even Keith Richards' drug dealer. Marlon James’s bold undertaking traverses strange landscapes and shady characters, as motivations are examined — and questions asked — in this compelling novel of monumental scope and ambition.

Sabina Murray’s first book since she won the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Caprices seduces with its dark delight in her taboo subject.

When we meet Katherine, the winning—and rather disturbing—twenty-three-year-old narrator, she has just left Italy and arrived in New York City, but what has propelled her there is a mystery. She soon strikes up an affair with a middle-aged Russian émigré novelist she meets on the subway, and almost immediately moves into his apartment. Katherine’s occasional allusions to a frighteningly eccentric mother and tyrannical father suggest a somberness at the center of her otherwise flippant and sardonic demeanor. Soon restless, she begins journeying from literary New York to rural Maine and Mexico City, trailed, everywhere she goes, by a string of murders. As the ritualistic killings begin to pile up, Katherine takes to meditating on cannibalism in literature, art, and history, and examining subjects as diverse as the Donner Party, the fall of Dante’s Count Ugolino, and the true story behind Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa.” The story races toward a hair-raising conclusion, while Katherine and the reader close in on the reasons for both her and her mother’s fascination with aberrant, violent behavior.

This is a novel of ideas and a brilliantly subtle commentary on twenty-first-century consumerism and Western culture’s obsession with new frontiers. Told in highly intelligent prose “with echoes of both Poe and Patrick McGrath” (Book Forum), A Carnivore’s Inquiry is a sly, unsettling exploration of the questionable appetites that lurk beneath the veneer of North American civilization.

Intrigue and subterfuge combine with bad luck and good in this darkly comic debut about love, betrayal, tyranny, family, and a conspiracy trying its damnedest to happen.

Ali Shigri, Pakistan Air Force pilot and Silent Drill Commander of the Fury Squadron, is on a mission to avenge his father's suspicious death, which the government calls a suicide. Ali's target is none other than General Zia ul-Haq, dictator of Pakistan. Enlisting a rag-tag group of conspirators, including his cologne-bathed roommate, a hash-smoking American lieutenant, and a mango-besotted crow, Ali sets his elaborate plan in motion. There's only one problem: the line of would-be Zia assassins is longer than he could have possibly known.

Ce roman réunit au début tous les clichés du polar. De nos jours, dans une grande ville plutôt glauque et violente, «malade de ses cracks boursiers, de ses délocalisations sauvages, des affrontements sociaux et ethniques qui la harcèlent, des guérilleras urbaines qui se multiplient?», un homme et une femme mènent une enquête autour du meurtre de Jennifer Brennen.

L'homme, Nathan (40 ans), est un flic ordinaire marié à Chris. Il est en pleine déprime. Sa femme vient de le quitter pour rejoindre la maison communautaire de Wolf (professeur d'économie politique à Berlin) et de ses amis, tous des militants anti-mondialistes très actifs, branchés sexe et bio. Wolf, homosexuel notoire, est donc l'amant de Chris. Cependant, Nathan installe chez lui Paula Consuelo-Acari (28 ans), un top-model très en vue qu'il s'abstient de «baiser» car sa libido le porte toujours vers sa femme Chris.

Marie-Jo, la coéquipière de Nathan, 32 ans, est une grosse fille aux yeux verts, qui se bourre d'amphétamines et qui pèse autour de 90 à 100 kilos. Elle partage son existence avec Franck, écrivain et professeur de «creative writing» à l'université. Au retour de ses longues courses à pied, Marie-Jo se laisse prendre violemment par Ramon, un petit mâle de vingt-cinq ans son voisin d'en dessous qui couche également avec Franck son mari. Nathan et Marie-Jo couchent aussi régulièrement ensemble au cours de l'enquête qu'ils poursuivent. A l'issue de leurs investigations, on comprend que la victime Jennifer Brennen, retrouvée étranglée, les dents fracassées, adhérait à la mouvance anti-mondialiste afin de se venger de son père, un redoutable homme d'affaire maffieux et criminel. Brennen le père sera d'ailleurs liquidé à la fin du roman par Nathan. Pour vivre, Jennifer déguisée en infirmière faisait la pute dans un hôpital. Elle a également joué dans quelques films pornos amateurs. Nathan et Marie-Jo sont sans cesse rattrapés par leurs problèmes psychologiques, sentimentaux, sexuels et professionnels. L'imbroglio est complet.

Après avoir investi le roman porno (Vers chez les blancs), Philippe Djian s'introduit cette fois dans l'univers du polar, ou plus exactement feint de s'y introduire. Dans les plis du récit, qui est plus qu'un pur exercice de style, il propose toutes sortes de digressions, de notations, de variantes comme la démonstration de sa liberté face à tous les genres. Il néglige les figures imposées au polar car l'enquête n'aboutira jamais. Certes le paysage est délétère et violent, les relations entre les êtres sont distendues, crapuleuses, perverses et sadiques et il n'y a donc ni fin, ni conclusion, ni morale.

“A Chance to Get Even” is a story about a poker game. A friendly game-or at least that's how it starts out. I played in a friendly game for years, and still take a hand now and then, but the evenings I spent at the card table never turned out like this.

And that's probably just as well.

Tammas is 20, a loner and a compulsive gambler. Unable to hold a job for long, his life revolves around Glasgow bars, living with his sister and brother-in-law, betting shops, and casinos. Sometimes Tammas wins, more often he loses. But gambling gives him as good a chance as any of discovering what he seeks from life since society offers no prospect of a more fulfilling alternative.

Four people, each in search of some real value in life, drive from Mexico City to Veracruz for Semana Santa — Holy Week.