Best Translated Short Stories

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Steinbeck's brilliant short novels Collected here for the first time in a deluxe paperback volume are six of John Steinbeck's most widely read and beloved novels. "Steinbeck shaped a geography of conscience."

A dazzling new collection of short stories--the first major new work of fiction from the beloved, internationally acclaimed, Haruki Murakami since his #1 best-selling Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Like a lost lover, it holds on tight long after the affair is over. “Time and again in these seven stories, Murakami displays his singular genius. The stories in this collection find their power within the confines of common but momentous disturbances that linger on in memory.” — Los Angeles Times “Mesmerizing tales of profound alienation. [He] writes of complex things with his usual beguiling simplicity—the same seeming naivety found in the Beatles songs that are so often his reference points. The stories read like dirges for ‘all the lonely people’ but they are strangely invigorating to read.” — Financial Times “Classic Murakami. [His] voice—cool, poised, witty, characterized by a peculiar blend of whimsy and poignancy, wit and profundity—hasn’t lost its power to unsettle even as it amuses.” — The Boston Globe “A whimsical delight. The seven stories in his fourth story collection present another captivating treasure hunt of familiar Murakami motifs—including cats, jazz, whiskey, certain cigarettes, the moon, baseball, never-named characters, and—of course—the many men without women. Sanity might be overrated, but Murakami is surely not.” — The Christian Science Monitor “Wise stories. Moody and melancholic as [they] can be, some of them offer comparable hope that these men without women might emerge from their long and isolating loneliness, acknowledging the hurt, pain and even rage they feel rather than folding in on themselves and ceasing to fully live.” — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “ Men Without Women has the familiar signposts and well-worn barstools that will reconnect with longtime readers of Murakami: magical realism, Beatles tracks and glasses of whiskey. Yet, except for a few tales, the magic is watered down and it’s reality that is now poured stiff. This collection is a sober, clear-eyed attempt to observe the evasion and confrontation of suffering and loss, and to hope for something better.” —New York Daily News “It’s been a few years since we’ve gotten something new from Japan’s master of magical realism, but this new seven-story collection draws us right back into his signature realm—one of lonely men with wandering imaginations, mysterious cats, and subtle-yet-surreal narratives that reveal the supernatural layer operating beneath our everyday lives.” — W Magazine. “Vintage Murakami. Elegant.” — Kirkus Reviews “Thought-provoking.” — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “Superb.” — SF Weekly “A new Haruki Murakami book is always cause for celebration. These stories are filled with all of the luminous, magical elements that make Murakami's writing so fascinating.” — Bustle “Funny and surreal.” —io9. “A funny, lovely, unmistakably Murakami collection.” — BuzzFeed. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many international honors is the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, whose previous recipients include J. K. Rowling, Isabel Allende, and Salman Rushdie.

Borges enthusiast William Gibson has contributed a new introduction bringing Borges' influence and importance into the twenty-first century. Instead, being a librarian and one of the world's most widely read people, he became the leading practitioner of a densely layered imaginistic writing style that has been imitated throughout this century, but has no peer (although Umberto Eco sometimes comes close, especially in Name of the Rose ).

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An unforgettable cast of small-town characters copes with love and loss in this new work of fiction by #1 bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout. A Washington Post and New York Times Notable Book • One of USA Today ’s top 10 books of the year Recalling Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity, Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother’s happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author’s celebrated New York Times bestseller) returns to visit her siblings after seventeen years of absence. Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout’s place as one of America’s most respected and cherished authors. This is a generous, wry book about everyday lives, and Strout crawls so far inside her characters you feel you inhabit them. “These stories return Strout to the core of what she does more magnanimously than anyone else.” — The Washington Post. This is a generous, wry book about everyday lives, and Strout crawls so far inside her characters you feel you inhabit them. Try reading it without tears, or wonder.” — USA Today (four stars) “Readers who loved My Name Is Lucy Barton . She paints cumulative portraits of the heartache and soul of small-town America by giving each of her characters a turn under her sympathetic spotlight.” —NPR. “These stories return Strout to the core of what she does more magnanimously than anyone else, which is to render quiet portraits of the indignities and disappointments of normal life, and the moments of grace and kindness we are gifted in response. “In this wise and accomplished book, pain and healing exist in perpetual dependence, like feuding siblings.” — The Wall Street Journal. “Neither novel nor linked story collection strikes me as adequate terms to describe this book’s ingenious structure. Strout’s sentence style fits these Midwestern folks and tales: straightforward while also seeming effortlessly lyrical, seeded both with humor and bitterness like many of our days.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Full of searing insight into the darkest corners of the human spirit . With assuredness, compassion and utmost grace, her words and characters remind us that in life anything is actually possible.” — San Francisco Chronicle. “While we recommend everything by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer—like, say her recent book My Name Is Lucy Barton —this novel, which explores life’s complexities through interconnected stores, stands on its own. “If you miss the charmingly eccentric and completely relatable characters from Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout’s best-selling My Name Is Lucy Barton, you’ll be happily reunited with them in Strout’s smart and soulful Anything Is Possible. “Strout pierces the inner worlds of these characters’ most private behaviors, illuminating the emotional conflicts and pure joy of being human, of finding oneself in the search for the American dream.” — NYLON. Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge; the #1 New York Times bestseller My Name Is Lucy Barton;The Burgess Boys, a New York Times bestseller; Abide with Me, a national bestseller and Book Sense pick; and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize.

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. But Mr. Kapasi has problems enough of his own; in addition to his regular job working as an interpreter for a doctor who does not speak his patients' language, he also drives tourists to local sites of interest. In that single line Jhumpa Lahiri sums up a universal experience, one that applies to all who have grown up, left home, fallen in or out of love, and, above all, experienced what it means to be a foreigner, even within one's own family. Frequently finding themselves in Cambridge, Mass., or similar but unnamed Eastern seaboard university towns, Lahiri's characters suffer on an intimate level the dislocation and disruption brought on by India's tumultuous political history. The two things that sustain her, as the little boy she looks after every afternoon notices, are aerograms from homeAwritten by family members who so deeply misunderstand the nature of her life that they envy herAand the fresh fish she buys to remind her of Calcutta. Delusions of grandeur and lament for what she's lostA"such comforts you cannot even dream them"Agive her an odd, Chekhovian charm but ultimately do not convince her bourgeois audience that she is a desirable fixture in their up-and-coming property.

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. But Mr. Kapasi has problems enough of his own; in addition to his regular job working as an interpreter for a doctor who does not speak his patients' language, he also drives tourists to local sites of interest. In that single line Jhumpa Lahiri sums up a universal experience, one that applies to all who have grown up, left home, fallen in or out of love, and, above all, experienced what it means to be a foreigner, even within one's own family. Frequently finding themselves in Cambridge, Mass., or similar but unnamed Eastern seaboard university towns, Lahiri's characters suffer on an intimate level the dislocation and disruption brought on by India's tumultuous political history. The two things that sustain her, as the little boy she looks after every afternoon notices, are aerograms from homeAwritten by family members who so deeply misunderstand the nature of her life that they envy herAand the fresh fish she buys to remind her of Calcutta. Delusions of grandeur and lament for what she's lostA"such comforts you cannot even dream them"Agive her an odd, Chekhovian charm but ultimately do not convince her bourgeois audience that she is a desirable fixture in their up-and-coming property.

Ten years have passed since Diana Hunter, once the youngest spook in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, was captured by the elusive professional assassin known only as “Surgeon.” Now a magazine editor and a consultant for the Vancouver Police Department, Diana has been taunted for years by the shadowy psychopathic genius who continues to elude the grasp of the world’s top police and intelligence services. Praise for the Diana Hunter mystery series:"This book deserves more than the max five stars. I loved the danger, the characters were all people I could relate to and I enjoyed the descriptions, they jumped of the page into my imagination. To get your free copy of Hunted, the prequel to the Diana Hunter mystery series, plus two more books, updates about new releases, exclusive promotions, and other insider information, sign up for the Cozy Mysteries Insider mailing list at: cozymysteries.com/diana.