Showing 85–96 of 5071 resultsSorted by latest
From dragons and unicorns to beings born only in Borges’s labyrinthine mind, this extraordinary compendium blurs the line between scholarship and fantasy. At once encyclopaedia and storybook, it reveals Borges’s genius for turning knowledge into wonder.
Kamran Esfahani, a Persian Jewish dentist from Stockholm dreams of starting afresh in California. To finance his new life, he agrees to spy for Mossad in Iran, working with a clandestine unit tasked with sowing chaos and sabotage inside the country. When he’s captured by Iranian security forces, Kamran is compelled to confess his experiences as a spy, in a testimonial dealing not only with the security of nations, but also with revenge, deceit, and the power of love and forgiveness in a world of lies.
There are rules to first dates: don’t talk about your ex, do ask lots of questions, always meet in a public place. Digby Coombe-Watson didn’t think they applied to him. He had other worries: how to get rid of his great-grandfather’s crumbling property, and whether his family would let him. So he ignored the rules, and invited someone in. Now he’s dead. And he won’t be the last.
Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old, when they were thrown together in a girls’ shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only to meet again later at a diner, a grocery store and then at a protest. Recitatif keeps Twyla’s and Roberta’s races ambiguous – we know that one is white and one is black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage?
In a single afternoon’s walk, Virginia Woolf captures the infinite life of a garden…A couple pause among the flowerbeds, their thoughts drifting apart. A woman’s mind fixes on a small, troubling mark on the wall. A chance meeting becomes an imagined life, rich with longing and regret. In six luminous, experimental stories, Virginia Woolf remakes the short story as a space of transcendence. Moving fluidly between inner lives and outward scenes, Kew Gardens captures moments of consciousness as they shimmer, fracture and pass, revealing the beauty and strangeness of everyday existence.Includes the stories: Kew Gardens, The Mark on the Wall, An Unwritten Novel, Monday or Tuesday, The String Quartet and Blue & GreenBRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days.
Award-winning cartoonist Niki Smith delivers a stunning story set during a summer of change. Filled with gorgeous and expressive illustrations, Midsummer Sisters is a celebration of the beauty of wild horses, as powerful as the unbreakable bond between sisters.
Welcome to Vermilion Sands, the fully automated desert-resort ready to fulfil your most exotic whims. Out over the towering Coral D, sky artists paint the sky with clouds. A musical statue is broken down, but finds new life in unwanted places. A mysterious new resident introduces a new way of making poetry – aided by machine. Drawing together some of the most mesmerising and mind-blowing stories from J.G. Ballard’s ‘Vermillion Sands’ art-infused universe, this short collection is a passport into the genius of science fiction’s most visionary pioneer.
Haunted by memories of a doomed love affair, and living in something of a strange hiatus in Tokyo, the narrator finds himself dreaming of the days he used to wile away playing pinball in J’s Bar. Until one day he embarks on a quest: to find the exact model of pinball machine he played years earlier – the infamous three-flipper Spaceship.
Matilda knows about hunger. She works in one of Sydney’s buzziest restaurants, Bocca, while suppressing her cravings – including for her celebrity chef boss, Colson. Everything in her life is tightly controlled: she allows herself one weekend a month to feast and purge, the rest of the time, she stays perfect. Until her younger half-sister Lara crashes back into town, stirring up the family’s chaotic past and bringing long-buried secrets to the surface that threaten to disrupt Matilda’s carefully compartmentalised life. ‘Lonely mouth’, he repeated. ‘It’s a Japanese expression. It means, like, you feel like you want to eat something, but you don’t know what it is. You’re looking for just the right thing. But maybe there is no right thing. Maybe you don’t need anything at all. But you can’t tell’.
Tucked behind the trees in a quiet neighbourhood in Tokyo, the beloved Marble café offers a cup of warm, healing matcha to all who pass through its doors. Customers flock all week to Café Marble, tucked away behind the cherry trees. But Monday is a special day: the enigmatic owner hosts a tea tasting. The ritual invites its clientele to pause, reconnect with their inner peace, and rediscover the value of simplicity, allowing the bitterness of matcha to soothe their troubles. Following the twelve calendar months, ‘Matcha on Monday’ follows people from all walks of life: a woman who needs to change, a couple facing a crisis, an artist who has lost her purpose, and a young woman struggling to break free from family expectations. As each customer frequents Café Marble’s cosy haven, they start their week with a warm sip of matcha and the joys of everyday human connection.
Trundling through the scenic countryside of Kyoto and Osaka is the Hankyu Line, a burgundy-coloured electric train that has been carrying its commuters to their destinations for decades. Over the course of a single journey in springtime, and the return journey six months later just as the leaves begin to fall: a young man meets the woman who happens to take out the last copy of the library book he was about to borrow; an angry wedding guest dresses in a white gown to upstage the bride; a university student leaves home for the first time; a twenty-something finally grows the courage to walk away from an abusive partner- a widow learns independence, as she and her granddaughter meet their new dog. As the seasons and the landscapes change, passengers jostle and connect, as this gentle timeless train carries each one forward towards the person they intend to become.
A young couple build their lives around the objects they long to own. From furniture to clothes to carefully imagined interiors, their desires shape their sense of who they are – and who they might become. Yet satisfaction always seems just out of reach. Precise and quietly ironic, the story explores the promises of material life – and the emptiness that can follow.
Notifications