The New York Review of Books

Alfred Hayes is one of the secret masters of the twentieth century novel, a journalist and scriptwriter and poet who possessed an immaculate ear and who wrote with razorsharp intelligence about passion and its payback.My Face for the World to See is set in Hollywood, where the tonic for anonymity is fame and you're only as real as your image....

A Schoolboy&'s Diary brings together more than seventy of Robert Walser&'s strange and wonderful stories, most never before available in English. Opening with a sequence from Walser&'s first book, &';Fritz Kocher&'s Essays,&' the complete classroom assignments of a fictional boy who has met a tragically early death, this selection ranges...

1930-something: a professional hunter is passing through an unnamed Central European country that is in the thrall of a vicious dictator. The hunter wonders whether he can penetrate undetected into the dictator&'s private compound. He does. He has the potential target in his sites and is wondering whether to pull the trigger when security catches...

The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the...

This is an intoxicating tale of love and wonder, mothers and daughters, spiritual values and the grim legacy of slavery on the French Antillean island of Guadeloupe. Here long-suffering Telumee tells her life story and tells us about the proud line of Lougandor women she continues to draw strength from. Time flows unevenly during the long hot blue...

Deceptionthe lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell othersis the subject of this, Tove Jansson's most unnerving and unpredictable novel. Here Jansson takes a darker look at the subjects that animate the best of her work, from her sensitive tale of island life,The Summer Book, to her famous Moomin stories: solitude and community, art and...