The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas recalls the celebration of Christmas with his family and the feelings it evoked in him as a child.

"While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman awakens one morning to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. With a cat, a dog, and a cow as her sole companions, she learns how to survive and cope with her loneliness. Allegorical yet deeply personal and absorbing, The Wall is at once a critique of modern civilization, a nuanced and loving portrait of a relationship between a woman...

"Set in and around the Mexican city of Veracruz, This Is Not Miami delivers a series of devastating stories-spiraling from real events-that bleed together reportage and the author's rich and rigorous imagination. These narrative nonfiction pieces probe deeply into the motivations of murderers and misfits, into their desires and circumstances, forcing us to understand them-and even empathize-despite our wish to simply label them monsters. As in her...

"Few novels in our time have received the extraordinary praise accorded Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. Originally published in 1936, it is recognized as one of the works that has changed the climate of the written word. It is the story of Robin Vote and those she destroys-her husband the 'Baron, ' their child Guido, and the two women, Nora and Jenny, who love her; the whole illumined by the fantastic monologues of the renegade doctor, Matthew O'Connor,...

"Our Riches celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto 'by the young, for the young', discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties...

Forty short stories and essays have been selected as representative of the Argentine writer's metaphysical narratives.

"Oreo, a biracial Black girl from Philadelphia, searches for her Jewish father in New York City, navigating the labyrinth of sound studios, brothels, and subway tunnels of Manhattan in a journey of self-discovery." --

A tour de force of black humor, composed of short biographies of imaginary pan-American authors, providing sketch character portraits that are often pathetically funny, sometimes surprisingly moving, and on occasion, authentically chilling.

"Who doesn't love haiku? It is not only America's most popular cultural import from Japan but also our most popular poetic form: instantly recognizable, more mobile than a sonnet, and loved for its simplicity and compression, as well as for its ease of composition. Haiku is an ancient literary form seemingly made for the Twittersphere--Jack Kerouac and Langston Hughes wrote them, Ezra Pound and the Imagists were inspired by them, first-grade students...