Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.  A novel that expands to fill volumes in the reader’s mind, Oracle Night is a beautifully constructed meditation on time, love, storytelling, and the imagination by "one of the great writers of our time" (San Francisco Chronicle). Paul Auster's recent novels, The Book of Illusions and Timbuktu, were national bestsellers, as was I Thought My Father Was God, the NPR National Story Project anthology, which he edited. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationary shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of the blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality. Why does his wife suddenly break down in tears in the backseat of a taxi just hours after Sidney begins writing in the notebook? Why does M. R. Chang, the owner of the stationary shop, precipitously shut down his business the next day? What are the connections between a 1938 Warsaw telephone directory and a lost novel in which the hero can predict the future? At what point does animosity explode into violence? To what degree is forgiveness the ultimate expression of love? Paul Auster's mesmerizing eleventh novel reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book—only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. At once a meditation on the nature of time and a journey through the labyrinth of one man's imagination, Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster's reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today. "Compulsively readable yet wonderfully complex."—Eric Grunwald, The Boston Globe"Every bit as sad and spooky as [Auster's] New York Trilogy—and perhaps more intricate . . . [This book] plumbs persistent Austerian themes: identity, reinvention, betrayal, disappearance, chance, and the possibility that a supernatural heart quivers beneath the everyday surface of life . . . As in the New York Trilogy, he subverts our expectations of what a mystery story should be, and the reading experience is far richer for it."—Philip Connors, Newsday"Over the course of many books, Auster has burnished . . . ambivalence to a sheen by crossing metatextual strategies with the conventions of the noir thriller—Chandler meets Borges . . . Oracle Night is situated squarely on the Austerian matrix of narrative and reality—i.e., in a writer's notebook . . . [The novel] reads, indeed, like a dream or gloss on all the Auster novels that have come before, with its disorientation, its interlocking webs of seekers and sought, its blur of the invented and the artifact . . . Auster generously tips his hand here. He suggests that the terror of not being heard lies at the heart of writing, and that the artistic impulse generally might be summed up as: Somebody say something; 1 a.m., 2 a.m.—just keep talking. That a man who has produced more than 25 books is willing to convey the visceral ping of that terror is evidence not only of his talent but of his grace."—Stacey D'Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review"A writer recovering from a mysterious life-threatening illness begins to write in a notebook that has, it seems, the supernatural power to draw him into the very story he is writing. And the story, as it happens, is a reworking of Dashiell Hammett's idea about a man who, after nearly dying, flees a comfortable family life. That nothing is what it seems is standard-issue Auster metaphysics, and the narrator here seems familiar: too-literary, Brooklyn-based, decent, if a trifle self-serious. What saves Auster's story from ponderousness is the sheer verve with which he follows his narrator through the labyrinthine plot. He barely has characters, or none more substantial than you'd find in a 1930s murder mystery, but he shines as a fabulist and tale-teller, putting a high-modernist gloss on noir by leaving his tales within tales within tales unfinished."—The New Yorker "Paul Auster has taken the inherent self-consciousness of a novelist narrator to such painstakingly layered extremes that the strategy seems anything but lazy. In remarkably few pages, Mr. Auster builds up a marvellously thick ply of wallpapers, and it is delectable to peel away the little rose pattern to reveal the stripes underneath . . . The lucid Mr. Auster is a natural story-teller, with a seemingly inexhaustible trove of yarns at his disposal. All of the stories within stories are compelling in their own right . . . This neat, sweet volume is a joy to read. The prose is clean and translucent. Considering the number of spin-off plots that Mr. Auster manages to insert in asides or footnotes, readers get more than their money's worth in plain good story-telling."—The Economist"One morning in September 1982, a struggling novelist recovering from a near-fatal illness purchases, on impulse, a blue notebook from a new store in his Brooklyn neighborhood. So begins Auster's artful, ingenious 12th novel, which is both a darkly suspenseful domestic drama and a moving meditation on chance and loss . . . Bizarrely fascinating . . . His stories have a dreamlike, hallucinatory logic."—Publishers Weekly

Review

"Body toll notwithstanding, How They Were Found is anything but bleak. For one thing, there's the prose: generous, urgent, rhythmic." --The Believer

"Bell knows how to keep his world in check, his every word balanced against another, delicately, like a system of weights."
--The Rumpus

"Bell has built a national reputation completely outside the support system of New York publishing, on the strength of his stories and novellas. He is that rare sort of writer the reader would recognize even if published anonymously." --HTMLGiant

"The characters are doomed. The stories are bleak. Yet they are written so beautifully that they become something else: an exuberant example of the power of language to transport and transform." --Shelf Unbound

"Bell, here, at the start of his career, displays the kind of intelligence, self-awareness, and care with regard to his prose that suggests he may become a major talent." --Jeff Vandermeer

"Reminscent of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Winter War in Tibet in its calm examination and unsettling embodiment of mental and physical extremes, How They Were Found is a dreamer's chronicle of the loss and partial recovery of a world given over to the wrecking ball. Fierce, unflinching, funny, How They Were Found is just the book we need right now, Matt Bell just the writer."
—Laird Hunt, author of Ray of the Star

"How They Were Found offers a world with shifting rules, described with a lovely and deceptive simplicity. This guide shows you thirteen different types of wilderness, and you can spend all day exploring before you realize you are lost."
—Amelia Gray, author of Museum of the Weird and AM/PM

"You're a robot if the stories in Matt Bell's debut collection don't exhilarate, frighten, and unalterably change you. His wild manipulation of form and genre makes the bulk of contemporary fiction feel bloodless and inert in comparison, but it is Bell's recurring arrival at something sturdy and true about human behavior that makes the stories in How They Were Found so rewarding and resonant."
—Matthew Derby, author of Super Flat Times: Stories

Product Description

In his debut collection How They Were Found, Matt Bell draws from a wide range of genres to create stories that are both formally innovative and imaginatively rich. In one, a 19th-century minister follows ghostly instructions to build a mechanical messiah. In another, a tyrannical army commander watches his apocalyptic command slip away as the memories of his men begin to fade and fail. Elsewhere, murders are indexed, new worlds are mapped, fairy tales are fractured and retold and then fractured again. Throughout these thirteen stories, Bell's careful prose burrows at the foundations of his characters' lives until they topple over, then painstakingly pores over the wreckage for what rubbled humanity might yet remain to be found.

Contains the story "Dredge," selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2010.

Zwei Schulfreunde, zwölfjährig und vaterlos, stehen im Mittelpunkt dieser Geschichte aus der frühen Nachkriegszeit. Heinrich und Martin wachsen ohne Väter auf, denn diese sind nicht aus dem Krieg zurückgekehrt. Ihre Lebensumstände sind grundverschieden, und doch teilen sie prägende Erfahrungen.Heinrich wächst in ärmlichen Verhältnissen auf und muss früh Verantwortung übernehmen. Seine Mutter lebt in wechselnden »Onkel-Ehen«, worunter Heinrich sehr leidet. Martins Mutter dagegen ist die vermögende Witwe eines anerkannten Dichters, materielle Sorgen kennen die beiden nicht. Doch fühlt sich Martin oft alleingelassen und ahnt, dass seine Mutter trotz des Wohlstands Mangel leidet.Einfühlsam und genau beschreibt Böll den Alltag der beiden Freunde aus wechselnder Perspektive und richtet dabei sein Augenmerk auch auf die Nöte der beginnenden Pubertät. Mit den Schicksalen der Söhne und ihrer Mütter zeichnet er ein Bild der Kriegsgeneration und der frühen Nachkriegszeit, das exemplarische Geltung hat.Bei der Erstveröffentlichung hieß es in der »Deutschen Zeitung«, dem Roman gehe es »um traditionelle Bindungen, deren Verfall selbst die Mütter nicht mehr aufhalten können. Gegen das nervöse Glitzern des neuen Wohlstands erhebt sich das dunkle Gefühl, daß die Welt ebenso fragwürdig sei wie zuvor. Böll gehört zu den wenigen Schriftstellern, die hinter dem vordergründigen Lächeln dieser Epoche von Unruhe um den Menschen bewegt sind.« Informieren Sie sich auch über das größte editorische Unternehmen in der Geschichte des Verlags Kiepenheuer & Witsch: Heinrich Böll, Werke 1 - 27 Kölner Ausgabe

From Publishers Weekly

Although Cherryh is the author of many novels, the introduction to this collection of short fiction provides her with a rare opportunity to speak directly to the reader. What we get from this former history teacher is a lecture that equates her light, romantic SF with the truth of history and myth. After this pretentious opening, the stories themselves seem even more meager. Several of them, she admits, were initially rejected or discarded and sat in the drawer for years. Her short novel "Companions" is unnecessarily elongated, but tells an interesting story of an explorer who may be facing a new life form that mysteriously fails to register on mechanical sensors. The best entry, "A Thief in Korianth," is an early, much superior version of the author's 1985 novel Angel with the Sword. This will be of greatest interest to fans of Cherryh's novels.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Fine, poignant and subtly humorous stories. . . . [Bullfighting] is probably the finest collection of Irish short stories since James Joyce’s Dubliners. The delicacy of emotion is here, the spare but elegant writing, the heartbreak and humour. . . . There’s laugher and sadness, provided by a writer at his peak, teasing meaning out of the ordinary with exquisite skill and delicacy.”
—John Doyle, The Globe and Mail  

“Bullfighting offers a series of rare and beautiful mid-life meditations. . . . With its chatty, in-the-pub style . . . you feel as though you are eavesdropping on each of these men’s forbidden thoughts and fears.”
—Daily Express

“With the sparest materials Doyle snaps entire lives into sharp focus in a handful of pages, which is short fiction doing what short fiction does best.”
—The Times
 
“Shedding tears, eliciting laughs and revitalising the mundanity of everyday existence has long been Roddy Doyle’s finest suit. He delivers it [in Bullfighting] in spades.”
—The List
 
“These stories pack a considerable cumulative punch, a resounding wake-up call to anyone who feels time running by too fast or the loss of meaning in their everyday lives and relationships. . . . The stories are much more powerful read together than on their own. . . . [They] have plenty of Doyle’s irreverent humour and language, too.”
—Irish Independent

About the Author

Roddy Doyle is the author of seven acclaimed novels and Rory and Ita, a memoir about his parents. He won the Booker Prize in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

Product Description

A bomb hooked to a banker’s back, a one-eyed busted-out former cop, hooker/biker bars on Airline Highway in New Orleans, drugs in the French Quarter, a 300-pound female bartender, an ex-con whose main goal in life is to have more expensive shoes than anyone else, a drug czar named Fidel Castro (a cousin of the more famous one in Cuba), money laundering schemes, and a criminal genius, who enjoys pulling his victim’s fingernails out with pliers and who did everything right in what should have been the perfect crime save for one tiny mistake—all assembled and put into motion by an author who was a real-life criminal and ex-con and was advised that if he didn’t publish this book but instead used it to create the perfect crime he’d make a lot more… This is what you get (and more) in Les Edgerton’s The Perfect Crime.

“I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing that, only then does he take up novel writing.” —William Faulkner Winner of the National Book AwardForty-two stories make up this magisterial collection by the writer who stands at the pinnacle of modern American fiction. Compressing an epic expanse of vision into hard and wounding narratives, Faulkner’s stories evoke the intimate textures of place, the deep strata of history and legend, and all the fear, brutality, and tenderness of the human condition. These tales are set not only in Yoknapatawpha County, but in Beverly Hills and in France during World War I. They are populated by such characters as the Faulknerian archetypes Flem Snopes and Quentin Compson, as well as by ordinary men and women who emerge so sharply and indelibly in these pages that they dwarf the protagonists of most novels.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Running for her life, Teri Slaughter flees New York City and takes refuge in a San Antonio convent, masquerading as her own sister. But when hot and hunky homicide detective, Angel Garcia tries to protect her from the killers, he proves to be a threat to her heart. To protect the nuns, Teri uses herself as bait, leading the killers on a wild chase. Will Angel catch up in time?

' . . . absurd situations and mounting chaos keep things moving and plenty of fun.' LOCUSTess Noncoire, successful fantasy writer and Celestial Blade Warrior, has made a deal with the Powers That Be, trading her own dreams for the future for the safely of those nearest and dearest to her. Having survived this unprecedented experience, Tess-along with her imp Scrap-is determined to hunt down a demonic intruder from another dimension, the Norglein, who seems bent on bespelling and seducing young women, leaving them pregnant, and them waiting for the proper time to steal their babies away for his own purposes.Injured in her first encounter with the Norglein, Tess will be forced to turn to the two men she swore she'd have nothing more to do with, as well as several unexpected allies. But whether she can stop the Norglein and rescue his offspring form the fate he has planned for them is very much in doubt. And if she has to face the Powers That Be a second time, getting out alive will be the least of Tess' worries . . .'Fans of Anne McCaffrey and Marion Zimmer Bradley are most likely to enjoy this slightly screwball fantasy adventure.'- Publishers Weekly

Got Vampires? Ghosts? Monsters? We Can help!Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives, is your one-stop-shop for Urban Fantasy’s finest anthology of the supernatural. 14 sleuths are gathered together for the first time in all-original tales of unusual cases which require services that go far beyond mere deduction! Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives brings together popular characters from many Urban Fantasy paranormal investigative series, for your enjoyment. Meet the Detectives: Danny Hendrickson - from Laura Anne Gilman's Cosa Nostradamus series. Kate Connor - from Julie Kenner’s Demon Hunting Soccer Mom series. John Taylor - from Simon R. Green’s Nightside series. Jill Kismet - from Lilith Saintcrow’s Jill Kismet series. Jessi Hardin - from Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville series. Quincey Morris - from Justin Gustainis’ Morris/Chastain Investigations series. Marla Mason - from T. A. Pratt's Marla Mason series. Tony Foster - from Tanya Huff’s Smoke and Shadows series. Dawn Madison - from Chris Marie Green’s Vampire Babylon series. Pete Caldecott - from Caitlin Kittredge’s Black London series. Tony Giodone - from C. T. Adams and Cathy Clamp’s Tales of the Sazi series. Jezebel - from Jackie Kessler’s Hell on Earth series. Piers Knight - from C. J. Henderson’s Brooklyn Knight series. Cassiel - from Rachel Caine’s Outcast Season series. Demons may lurk, werewolves may prowl, vampires may ride the wind. These are things that go bump in the night, but we are the ones who bump back!