Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Yuji Oniki

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Washington

Drawn in 1971 and 1972, these stories expand Yoshihiro Tatsumi's prolific artist's vocabulary for characters contextualised by themes of depravity and disorientation in twentieth-century Japan. Some of the tales focus on the devastation the country felt as a result of World War II: in one story a man devotes twenty years to preserving the memory of those killed at Hiroshima, only to discover a horrible misconception at the heart of his tribute. Yet, while American influence does play a role in the disturbing and bizarre stories contained within this volume, as always it is Tatsumi's characters that bear his hallmark, muddling through isolated despair and fleeting pleasure to live out their darkly nuanced lives.

Good-Bye

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Eto Mori

A Novel

A beloved and bestselling classic in Japan, this groundbreaking tale of a dead soul who gets a second chance is perfect for readers of The Midnight Library.

"Congratulations, you've won the lottery!" shouts the angel Prapura to a formless soul. The soul hasn't been kicked out of the cycle of rebirth just yet--he's been given a second chance. He must recall the biggest mistake of his past life while on 'homestay' in the body of fourteen-year-old Makoto Kobayashi, who has just committed suicide. It looks like Makoto doesn't have a single friend, and his family don't seem to care about him at all. But as the soul begins to live Makoto's life on his own terms, he grows closer to the family and the people around him, and sees their true colors more clearly, shedding light on Makoto's misunderstandings.

Since its initial release over twenty years ago, Colorful has become a part of the literary canon, not only in Japan--where it has sold over a million copies--but around the world, having been translated into several different languages. Now, Eto Mori's beloved classic is finally available in English.

Colorful

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Nikos Kazantzakis

First published in 1946, "Zorba the Greek," is, on one hand, the story of a Greek working man named Zorba, a passionate lover of life, the unnamed narrator who he accompanies to Crete to work in a lignite mine, and the men and women of the town where they settle. On the other hand it is the story of God and man, The Devil and the Saints; the struggle of men to find their souls and purpose in life and it is about love, courage and faith.

Zorba the Greek

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Su Tong

"A riveting melodrama...Page by page, the novel stuns us with a sequence of hallucinatory, disturbing inventions...Balzac and Zola would have recognized a kindred spirit in Su Tong."-Kirkus Reviews.

Rice

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Louis de Bernieres

The idyllic world of the Greek island of Cephallonia is forever changed by the inexorable changes of World War II, as the inhabitants struggle to cope with the Axis invasion and occupation

Corelli's Mandolin

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Adeline Yen Mah

The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter

The daughter of a wealthy Hong Kong businessman describes her very difficult childhood and the psychological abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepmother

Falling Leaves

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Dai Sijie

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, two boys are sent to the country for reeducation, where their lives take an unexpected turn when they meet the beautiful daughter of a local tailor and stumble upon a forbidden stash of Western literature.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

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Markus Zusak

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.

The Book Thief

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Lan Samantha Chang

A firstgeneration immigrant from China marries an exiled musician whose unfulfilled desires nearly destroy their children, in the title story in a collection of tales about the trials and tribulations of Asian Americans. Reprint.

Hunger

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Yukio Mishima

In After the Banquet, Mishima draws a portrait of a marriage in which lofty principles clash fatally with appetite and ambition. For years Kazu has run her fashionable restaurant with a combination of charm and shrewdness. But when the middle-aged entrepreneur falls in love with one of her clients, an aristocratic retired politician, she renounces her business in order to become his wife. In time, however, Kazu decides to resurrect her husband's political career. She embarks on a series of compromises and evasions that will force her to choose between her marriage and the demands of her irrepressible vitality.
 
"Kazu is the biggest and the most profound thing Mishima has done so far in an already distinguished career."--The New Yorker

After the Banquet

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Lucia Berlin

Selected Stories

One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015
One of Jezebel's Favorite Books of 2016
A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin.

With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians.

Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place.

"Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves." -Lydia Davis

A Manual for Cleaning Women

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Orhan Pamuk

After years of lonely political exile, Turkish poet Ka returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral and learns about a series of suicides among pious girls forbidden to wear headscarves.

Snow

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Kenzaburo Oe

David L. Swain

Toshi Yonezawa

Hiroshima Notes is a powerful statement on the Hiroshima bombing and its terrible legacy by the 1994 Nobel laureate for literature. Oe's account of the lives of the many victims of Hiroshima and the valiant efforts of those who cared for them, both immediately after the atomic blast and in the years that follow, reveals the horrific extent of the devastation. It is a heartrending portrait of a ravaged city -- the "human face" in the midst of nuclear destruction.

Hiroshima Notes

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Thomas Mann

And Seven Other Stories

Mann's bestselling work of fiction now appears in a trade paperback format with a striking new jacket. Sales of the classic have totaled over 800,000 copies and average 42,000 copies a year.

Death in Venice

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Joy Kogawa

'A moving vision of an affront to democratic principles... A tour de force, a deeply felt novel, brilliantly poetic in its sensibility' - New York Times

Obasan

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Koushun Takami

A group of ninth-grade students are confined to a small isolated island where they must fight each other for three days until only one survivor remains, as part of the ultimate in reality television.

Battle Royale: The Novel

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Daniyal Mueenuddin

Winner of the Story Prize
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Finalist for the National Book Award
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction


Passing from the mannered drawing rooms of Pakistan's cities to the harsh mud villages beyond, Daniyal Mueenuddin's linked stories describe the interwoven lives of an aging feudal landowner, his servants and managers, and his extended family, industrialists who have lost touch with the land. Refined, sensuous, by turns humorous, elegiac, and tragic, Mueenuddin evokes the complexities of the Pakistani feudal order as it is undermined and transformed.

In Other Rooms Other Wonders

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Natsume Sôseki

Aiko Ito

Graeme Wilson

Though the total book is held together by the continuing theme of a nameless cat's observations on upper middle-class Japanese society of the Meiji era, its essence is in the humor and the sardonic truth of these various observations.

I Am a Cat

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Kenji Nakagami

Eve Zimmerman

And Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto

Portrayal of a community scarred by poverty & racism.

The Cape

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Elif Shafak

Shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year by Bookpage, NPR, Washington Post, and The Economist

A moving novel on the power of friendship in our darkest times, from internationally renowned writer and speaker Elif Shafak.

In the pulsating moments after she has been murdered and left in a dumpster outside Istanbul, Tequila Leila enters a state of heightened awareness. Her heart has stopped beating but her brain is still active-for 10 minutes 38 seconds. While the Turkish sun rises and her friends sleep soundly nearby, she remembers her life-and the lives of others, outcasts like her.

Tequila Leila's memories bring us back to her childhood in the provinces, a highly oppressive milieu with religion and traditions, shaped by a polygamous family with two mothers and an increasingly authoritarian father. Escaping to Istanbul, Leila makes her way into the sordid industry of sex trafficking, finding a home in the city's historic Street of Brothels. This is a dark, violent world, but Leila is tough and open to beauty, light, and the essential bonds of friendship.

In Tequila Leila's death, the secrets and wonders of modern Istanbul come to life, painted vividly by the captivating tales of how Leila came to know and be loved by her friends. As her epic journey to the afterlife comes to an end, it is her chosen family who brings her story to a buoyant and breathtaking conclusion.

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

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Banana Yoshimoto

Ann Sherif

A collection of short stories demonstrates the author's Japanese postmodernism--a blend of the traditional with the latest in popular culture

Lizard

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Ryü Murakami

From the author of Audition, a wickedly satirical and wildly funny tale of an intergenerational battle of the sexes. In his most irreverent novel yet, Ryu Murakami creates a rivalry of epic proportions between six aimless youths and six tough-as-nails women who battle for control of a Tokyo neighborhood. At the outset, the young men seem louche but harmless, their activities limited to drinking, snacking, peering at a naked neighbor through a window, and performing karaoke. The six "aunties" are fiercely independent career women. When one of the boys executes a lethal ambush of one of the women, chaos ensues. The women band together to find the killer and exact revenge. In turn, the boys buckle down, study physics, and plot to take out their nemeses in a single blast. Who knew that a deadly "gang war" could be such fun? Murakami builds the conflict into a hilarious, spot-on satire of modern culture and the tensions between the sexes and generations.

Popular Hits of the Showa Era

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Jung Chang

Three Daughters of China

A new edition of one of the best-selling and best-loved books of recent years, with a new introduction by the author. A tumultuous history of China's 20th century, from sword-bearing warlords to Chairman Mao, from the Manchu Empire to the Cultural Revolution.

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Yoshihiro Tatsumi; Yuji Oniki