These two novellas by the inimitable Tanizaki were among his favourites.
The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi recounts the dark sexual obsessions of a sixteenth-century warlord, accidentally initiated in his youth into the morbid rites attendant upon battle. Based on invented documents that overlap with historical reality, the story unfolds a masterly balance of irony and melodrama, elegance and brutality.
Arrowroot also touches on the pursuit of legend, but in a very different mode. Cast in the uniquely Japanese form of the ‘essay novel’, the narrative blends the stories of two friends on an expedition into the mountains south of Kyoto, one of them following the traces of a medieval myth, the other in search of a more recent, private past.
‘After 20 years of writing novels in a fairly orthodox style, Tanizaki fused two interests - traditional Japanese storytelling and experimental narrative – into a unique style’ New York
A woman's weekend away in the Austrian mountains takes an inexplicable and sinister turn - and becomes a fight for survival.
A woman takes a holiday in the Austrian mountains, spending a few days with her cousin and his wife in their hunting lodge. When the couple fails to return from a walk, the woman sets off to look for them. But her journey reaches a sinister and inexplicable dead end. She discovers only a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped alone behind the mysterious wall she begins the arduous work of survival.
This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one's name, and simultaneously a disturbing dissection of the place of human beings in the natural world.
She’s living a perfect life – so why does Laurence feel so torn?
Weekends in the country, weekdays in Paris – Laurence’s life features all the trappings of 1960s French bourgeoisie. She has money, a handsome husband, two daughters and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though her mind writes copy while she’s at home, and dreams of domesticity in the office.
All her life she has strived to meet the expectations of others. But when her 10-year-old daughter, Catherine, starts to vocalise her despair about the unfairness of the world, Laurence must finally grapple with a life that prizes image over truth.
Slim but powerful, this is a classic story of womanhood and its oppressors, parents and their children, and the quest for personal truth – by the iconic feminist Simone de Beauvoir.
A genre-defining-and redefining-collection of fiction's boldest, most rebellious, and most prescient genre, featuring a smorgasbord of stories from across the globe
In The Big Book of Cyberpunk, award-winning anthologist Jared Shurin brings together over a hundred stories from more than twenty-five different countries. Here are tales that both establish and subvert the classic Cyberpunk tropes and aesthetic – from gritty, near-future noir to pulse-pounding action. Urban rebels undermine their monolithic corporate overlords, daring heists are conducted through back alleys and the darkest parts of the online world, and dangerous new technology, cybernetic enhancements, scheming AIs, corporate mercenaries, improbable weapons and roguish hackers all collide into rich, thrilling entertainment. Set across two volumes, these are stories that examine the near-now, extrapolating the most provocative trends into fascinating and plausible futures.
We live in an increasingly Cyberpunk world, packed with complex technologies and globalised social trends. It is a world so bizarre that even the futurists couldn’t explain it – though many authors in this book have come closer than most. As both an introduction to the genre and the perfect compendium for the lifelong fan, The Big Book of Cyberpunk Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 offer more than a hundred ways to understand where we are, and where we’re going – or simply the opportunity to venture down dazzling, neon-slicked streets.
Reissued to mark the centenary of Patricia Highsmith and the upcoming BBC adaption, Ripley, these beautiful new editions mark Highsmith's entry into Vintage Classics
'The No.1 Greatest Crime Writer' The Times
'Ripley, amoral, hedonistic and charming, is a genuinely original creation' Daily Telegraph
'He is using you for what you are worth'
Tom Ripley wants money, success, and the good life - and he's willing to kill for it.Struggling to stay one step ahead of his creditors, and the law, Ripley leaps at the chance to start afresh on a free trip to Europe. But when his new-found happiness is threatened, his response is as swift as it is shocking.
This is the first in Highsmith's classic series featuring the character of Tom Ripley. The Talented Mr Ripley also inspired the Academy Award-winning film starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law.
Reissued to mark the centenary of Patricia Highsmith and the upcoming BBC adaption, Ripley, these beautiful new editions mark Highsmith's entry into Vintage Classics
'Marvellously, insanely readable... Highsmith has done it again' The Times
"There's no such thing as a perfect murder... That's just a parlor game, trying to dream one up."
Tom Ripley is enjoying his wealthy lifestyle in France, until an associate asks him to kill someone again. But Ripley detests murder, unless it is absolutely necessary. Someone else should do the dirty work for them - yes, someone with no criminal record could earn a very generous fee for doing a couple of simple murders.
Ripley's Game is the third book in Highsmith's Ripley series, and was made into a film starring John Malkovich.
Reissued to mark the centenary of Patricia Highsmith and the upcoming BBC adaption, Ripley, these beautiful new editions mark Highsmith's entry into Vintage Classics
"You're always good on ideas, Tom..."
An American art collector is claiming that the expensive masterpiece he bought is a fake. He wants to meet with the artist - but Tom Ripley knows that artist no longer exits.
Ripley needs to hide his role in the fraud, and keep his colleague's mouth shut. But not everyone's nerves are as steady as his, especially when it comes to murder.
The second in Highsmith's Ripley series, Ripley Under Ground is set six years after the events of The Talented Mr Ripley.
'Patricia Highsmith is unrivalled' Daily Telegraph
Isherwood's short, poignant novel is a tender and wistful love story
Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, A Single Man is the story of George, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover, Jim. With devastating clarity and humour, Isherwood shows George's determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life as well as the soul's ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation.
'A virtuoso piece of work...courageous...powerful' Sunday Times
'This mix of humour and stoicism in the face of pent-up grief is essential Isherwood' Guardian
A tale of youth and warped masculinity, this is the suspenseful, lyrical and page-turning Japanese classic.
A band of thirteen-year-old boys reject the stupidity of the adult world. They decide it is illusory, hypocritical and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call ‘objectivity’. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship’s officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first, but it is not long before they conclude that he is, in fact, soft and romantic. They regard this disillusionment as an act of betrayal on his part – and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.
‘Mishima’s greatest novel, and one of the greatest of the past century’ The Times
TRANSLATED BY JOHN NATHAN
Discover the dark and decadent novella that inspired Cabaret.
Set in the 1930s, Goodbye to Berlin evokes the glamour and sleaze, excess and repression of Berlin society. Isherwood shows the lives of people under threat from the rise of the Nazis: a wealthy Jewish heiress, Natalia Landauer, a gay couple, Peter and Otto, and an English upper-class waif, the divinely self-indulgent Sally Bowles.
'Brilliant sketches of a society in decay' George Orwell
'Isherwood is a master of the emotionally cathartic moment, funny and perspicacious' Evening Standard
Toru Okada's cat has disappeared.
His wife is growing more distant every day.
Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has recently been receiving.
As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out. He embarks on a bizarre journey, guided by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.
Sonoko Kakiuchi is a cultured Osaka lady in an uninspiring marriage. When she decides to take an art class in town she meets the extraordinary Mitsuko, a woman as beautiful and charismatic as she is cunning. They begin a passionate affair and Sonoko soon finds herself infatuated by Mitsuko, and ensnared in a web of sex, humiliation and deceit.
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