Mark Polizzotti

A Nobel Prize-winning author, in this follow-up to his acclaimed semi-autobiographical novella Suspended Sentences, continues the story of Jean Bosmans, now in his early 20s, as he becomes aware of a set of disturbing coincidences that set him on a collision course with the past.

Nine-year-old Helen is confused by the disappearance of her Jewish friend during the German occupation of Paris.

"A writer's notebook becomes the key that unlocks memories of a love formed and lost in 1960s Paris. In the aftermath of Algeria's war of independence, Paris was a city rife with suspicion and barely suppressed violence. Amid this tension, Jean, a young writer adrift, met and fell for Dannie, an enigmatic woman fleeing a troubled past. A half century later, with his old black notebook as a guide, he retraces this fateful period in his life, recounting...

"From the award-winning author of The Order of the Day, a powerful account of the German Peasants' War (1524-25) that shows striking parallels to class conflicts of our time. In the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation launched an attack on privilege and the Catholic Church, but it rapidly became an established, bourgeois authority itself. Rural laborers and the urban poor, who were still being promised equality in heaven, began to question...

In a mythical African land, some shipwrecked and uniquely talented passengers stage a grand gala to entertain themselves and their captor, the great chieftain Talou. In performance after bizarre performance-starring, among others, a zither-playing worm, a marksman who can peel an egg at fifty yards, a railway car that rolls on calves' lungs, and fabulous machines that paint, weave, and compose music-Raymond Roussel demonstrates why it is that André...

"February 20, 1933: on an unremarkable day during a harsh Berlin winter, a meeting of twenty-four German captains of industry and senior Nazi dignitaries is being held in secret in the plush lounges of the Reichstag. They are there to "stump up" funding for the accession to power of the National Socialist Party and its fearsome Chancellor. This inaugural scene sets the tone of consent which will lead to the worst possible repercussions. March 12,...

"As a boarding school student in the early 1960s, Patrick Modiano lived among the troubled teenage sons of wealthy but self-involved parents. In this mesmerizing novel, Modiano weaves together a series of exquisitely crafted stories about such jettisoned boys at the exclusive Valvert School on the outskirts of Paris: abandoned children of privilege, left to create new family ties among themselves. Misfits and heroes, sports champions and good-hearted...