I am the author of Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside and a former artist-in-residence at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai. After graduating from college, I took a “good” job but soon came to realize it wasn't for me. I quit after less than a week and ended up moving to China, where I spent four years teaching English, working for a consumer electronics company, and writing fiction. I currently teach at a school in Oakland, California.
In many ways unprecedented, the work of W.G. Sebald not only reimagined what literature was capable of but also went on to influence an entire generation of writers, including several others on this list. In this novel, Sebald’s last, the title character details his search for facts surrounding the circumstances of his youth, when he was shipped from Germany to Britain before the onset of World War II. Meditative and haunting, the writing itself is a form of search, blending fact with fiction to create something utterly compelling.
This tenth anniversary edition of W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece includes a new Introduction by acclaimed critic James Wood. Austerlitz is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he…
This is literally a book about walking around a foreign city (New York), going “farther and farther afield each time,” and viewing things through an outsider’s eyes. Beneath the surface, however, it is something much more: the need (and failure) to confront unaddressed trauma, whether that be personal or communal. Quite fittingly, post-9/11 Manhattan serves as the backdrop for much of the story, as Julius, the protagonist, muses on various topics ranging from social theory to art and literature. In the end, it’s up to readers to dig beneath this guise of intellectualism to find out what’s really there.
The bestselling debut novel from a writer heralded as the twenty-first-century W. G. Sebald.
A haunting novel about national identity, race, liberty, loss and surrender, Open City follows a young Nigerian doctor as he wanders aimlessly along the streets of Manhattan. For Julius the walks are a release from the tight regulations of work, from the emotional fallout of a failed relationship, from lives past and present on either side of the Atlantic.
Isolated amid crowds of bustling strangers, Julius criss-crosses not just physical landscapes but social boundaries too, encountering people whose otherness sheds light on his own remarkable journey…
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
Many stories set abroad focus heavily on themes of identity, which makes sense, as characters who choose to leave home seldom feel a strong connection to where they’re from, and life in an unfamiliar environment allows for a clearer, less distracted examination of the self. This debut is no exception, poignantly mining the conflict of shame and desire at the heart of a gay American teaching in Bulgaria, where homosexuality has yet to gain acceptance, mirroring the unresolved rejections of his childhood.
Startlingly erotic and immensely powerful, Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You tells an unforgettable story about the ways our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love.
Winner of the Debut of the Year Award at the British Book Awards. Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize.
'A searching and compassionate meditation on the slipperiness of desire . . . as beautiful and vivid as poetry' - Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life
On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia's National Palace…
There’s being lost in life, then there’s drunkenly lying about your mother’s death in order to elicit sympathy from a potential love interest. Having bluffed his way into a fellowship in Spain, Adam Gordon, the highly privileged, highly incompetent narrator of this book, spends most of his days getting high and wrestling with the connection between experience and art, questioning his own legitimacy at every turn. Not a lot happens, but that’s kind of the point: the absence of adversity in Gordon’s life is what makes him so insecure and is perhaps saying something on the topic of American decline.
Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam's "research" becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are?…
Selected by Deesha Philyaw as winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, Lake Song is set in the fictional town of Kinder Falls in New York’s Finger Lakes region. This novel in stories spans decades to plumb the complexities, violence, and compassion of small-town life as the…
For better or worse, living in a foreign country often forces a reassessment of the way the world works, both at home and abroad. Race and authenticity are at the center of this novel, wrapped around a love story, exposing the hollowness of certain assumptions while taking a more critical view of Western and African society. Despite this, Adichie’s writing never comes off as sneering or condescending, like the Americanah of the title: self-important Nigerians returning home from overseas.
Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience - classics which will endure for generations to come.
How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria. Self-assured Ifemelu heads for America. But quiet, thoughtful Obinze finds post-9/11 America closed to him, and plunges into a dangerous undocumented life in London.
Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria,…
In the years following his graduation from college, Cole Chen has been back and forth between the U.S. and China, struggling to navigate his transition into adulthood. Estranged from his parents, he returns to Hunan province to work for his friends, while also attempting to write a memoir based on his experiences. During the course of this year abroad, he meets a young woman (under initially dubious circumstances), whom he dates briefly, before returning to live with his brother in California, where he is forced to confront a dark reality from his past.
An anti-coming-of-age story that examines themes of escapism and toxic masculinity.
This is the fourth book in the Joplin/Halloran forensic mystery series, which features Hollis Joplin, a death investigator, and Tom Halloran, an Atlanta attorney.
It's August of 2018, shortly after the Republican National Convention has nominated Donald Trump as its presidential candidate. Racial and political tensions are rising, and so…
In the tumultuous world of ancient Israel, Ahinoam—a fierce and unconventional Kenite woman—flees her family farm with her dagger-wielding father to join the ragtag band of misfits led by the shepherd-turned-warrior David ben Jesse.
As King Saul's treasonous accusations echo through the land, Ahinoam's conviction that David's anointing makes him…
