Washoe County Library System

"Widely regarded as Sadegh Hedayat's masterpiece, the Blind Owl is the most important work of literature to come out of Iran in the past century. On the surface this work seems to be a tale of doomed love, but with the turning of each page basic facts become obscure and the reader soon realizes this book is much more than a love story. Although the Blind Owl has been compared to the works of the Kafka, Rilke and Poe, this work defies categorization....

Beast plunges you into the world of Edward Buckmaster, a man alone on an empty moor in the west of England. What he has left behind we dont yet know. What he faces is an existential battle with himself, the elements, and something he begins to see in the margins of his vision: some creature that is tracking him, the pursuit of which will become an obsession. This short, shocking, and exhilarating novel is a vivid exploration of isolation, courage,...

A tale spanning the years between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the end of World War I features characters who are caught up in such events as the labor troubles of Colorado, the Mexican revolution, and the Hollywood silent-movie era. As the uncertainty of the future surrounds a group of individuals in the years following the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, they struggle to pursue their dreams and overcome the tragedies of war, death, and failure....

"Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the...

"Delhi, the near future: a former journalist goes in search of answers after she finds herself stripped of identity and citizenship and thrust into a vast conspiracy involving secret detention centers, government sanctioned murders, online rage, nationalist violence, and a figure of shifting identifies known as the "New Delhi Monkey Man." Bhopal, 1984: an assassin hunts a whistleblower through a central Indian city that will shortly be the site of...

In his startling, witty, and inexhaustibly inventive first novel?first published in 1986 and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback?the author of Vox and The Fermata uses a one-story escalator ride as the occasion for a dazzling reappraisal of everyday objects and rituals. From the humble milk carton to the act of tying ones shoes, The Mezzanine at once defamiliarizes the familiar world and endows it with loopy and euphoric poetry. Nicholson Bakers...