"A classic of Japanese literature" (Chicago Sun-Times) and the first novel in the masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, set in 1912 Tokyo, featuring an aspiring lawyer who believes he has met the successive reincarnations of his childhood friend. It is 1912 in Tokyo, and the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders—rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political power. Shigekuni Honda, an aspiring lawyer and his childhood friend, Kiyoaki Matsugae, are the sons of two such families. As they come of age amidst the growing tensions between old and new, Kiyoaki is plagued by his simultaneous love for and loathing of the spirited young woman Ayakura Satoko. But Kiyoaki’s true feelings only become apparent when her sudden engagement to a royal prince shows him the magnitude of his passion—and leads to a love affair both doomed and inevitable.
With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, The Stranger—Camus's masterpiece—gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach. With an Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie; translated by Matthew Ward. Behind the subterfuge, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. “The Stranger is a strikingly modern text and Matthew Ward’s translation will enable readers to appreciate why Camus’s stoical anti-hero and devious narrator remains one of the key expressions of a postwar Western malaise, and one of the cleverest exponents of a literature of ambiguity.” –from the Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie First published in 1946; now in translation by Matthew Ward.
Don t worry, a voice whispers. You really only need one. Phineas Poe, disgraced cop turned psychiatric case, turned murder suspect, turned reluctant kidney donor, gives $200 to a beautiful woman in a red dress, a scar at the edge of her mouth and a body like a knife. He then wakes up in a bath of melting ice, blood on his fingers and staples in his sides. Now she haunts his dreams and his days. She s got his kidney on ice and her teeth in his heart. Finding her means throwing himself into a drug-blurred underworld. Falling in love with her means fighting to avoid becoming her accomplice as well as her victim. Fast, corrosive wit, glittering, razor-sharp images, a cast of comic and sinister characters, part love story, part mystery, part hallucination, Kiss Me, Judas is a startling novel of modern noir. A surreal nightmare full of the hard-boiled nourish spirit of Raymond Chandler. San Francisco Chronicle"
