Japanese, Chinese, Korean & Other Literature Books

In the tenth century, Japan was both physically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world. The Pillow Book recaptures this lost world with the diary of a young court lady. Sei Shōnagon was a contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote the...

'My name is Eva, which means "life", according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy,...

A powerful love story set in the class-conscious Tsarist Russia of the early 19th century. It embraces every level of that society – serf, provincial, aristocrat – in verse which is by turns beautiful, witty, wickedly perceptive and always readable.   It...

Still the benchmark of Russian literature 175 years after its first publication—now in a marvelous new translation PUSHKIN’S INCOMPARABLE POEM has at its center a young Russian dandy much like Pushkin in his attitudes and habits. Eugene Onegin, bored...

With an Introduction by Lionel Kelly, University of Reading. Translated by C.J. Hogarth. Fathers and Sons is one of the greatest nineteenth century Russian novels, and has long been acclaimed as Turgenev's finest work. It is a political novel set in a...

In this masterpiece of historical fiction by the Nobel Prize-winning Yugoslavian author, a stone bridge in a small Bosnian town bears silent witness to three centuries of conflict.The town of Visegrad was long caught between the warring Ottoman and...

*A New York Times Editors' Choice* Pick*A Most Anticipated Read in LitHub, CrimeReads, Thrillist, and Popsugar**A Boston Globe Thriller to Read on Your Summer Vacation*The kinetic story of a sixty-five-year-old female assassin who faces an unexpected...

Available in English for the first time, Simone de Beauvoir's incandescent autobiographical novel paints an enthralling portrait of a formative female friendship in interwar Paris.   With an introduction from Deborah Levy 'Life without her would be...

From “one of the most distinguished writers of modern Italy” (New York Review of Books), a classic novel of society in the midst of a war.This powerful novel is set against the background of Italy from 1939 to 1944, from the anxious months...

(Available after 3-20 days)A brilliant translation of one of the most important novels of the twentiety century, revealing a tale that is as full of energy and power as it was when it was first written.Written in 1914, The Trial is the terrifying tale of...

In this sprawling, award-winning novel, celebrated Chinese writer Liu Xinwu cordially invites you to an epic, riotous, and moving neighborhood feast. On a December morning in 1982, the courtyard of a Beijing siheyuan—a lively quadrangle of homes—begins...

Now in English for the first time!Set in ancient China, in a world where kung fu is magic, kingdoms vie for power and the battle to become the ultimate kung fu master unfolds, an unlikely hero is born… in the first book in the epic Legends of the Condor...

(Available after March 30th, 2023)"A brilliant, quietly tumultuous book and a welcome revival of an author too little known in the anglophone world."—Toby Lichtig, The Wall Street Journal"Forbidden Notebook promises a new cohort of readers, appetites...

Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by John R. Williams. Goethe's Faust is a classic of European literature. Based on the fable of the man who traded his soul for superhuman powers and knowledge, it became the life's work of Germany's greatest...

It is the fifteenth century and war looms. The people of Albania have refused to negotiate with the Ottoman Empire and they know their fate is sealed. As they take refuge in a fortress in the mountains, the army arrives and prepares to lay siege to the...

A magical, mystical novella about the art and power of storytelling, this is Italo Calvino's miniature masterpiece.A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then in a tavern. Having mysteriously lost their powers of speech, they must tell...

Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix is dying.A priest, a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a poet, in his feverish delirium the crucial events of his past swell around him.From glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German writer Ernst...

Simón López Trujillo’s ‘mind-blowing’ (Gabriela Cabezón Cámara) debut takes readers into a dry and degraded, fire-prone landscape where humanity has encroached a step too far into the natural world, and a...

Winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger in France and the Premio de la Critica in Spain Conversation-starting and prize-winning international fiction: an extraordinary meditation on violence, conspiracy and the many complex afterlives of the...

An archaeologist travels to a distant planet to spend time among a mysterious community, a people who live in temperature-controlled domes, worship a deity called Dog, and repeat an elliptical phrase from which they draw their name: mulai, the tree...