"Le Grand Meaulnes exprime d'une façon unique les amitiés absolues de l'enfance, les rêves fous de l'adolescence, la passion amoureuse et le passage à l'âge d'homme. Ce premier - et unique - roman est bien, comme Alain-Fournier le voulait, "un roman d'aventures et de découvertes.""-- "The Great Meaulnes expresses in a unique way of the absolute friendships of the childhood, the crazy dreams of the adolescence, the love passion and the transition...

"Twenty-year-old Taguchi Hiro has spent the last two years of his life living as a hikikomori--a shut-in who never leaves his room and has no human interaction--in his parents' home in Tokyo. As Hiro tentatively decides to reenter the world, he spends his days observing life around him from a park bench. Gradually he makes friends with Ohara Tetsu, a middle-aged salaryman who has lost his job but can't bring himself to tell his wife, and shows up...

Thomas, the child-protagonist of The Issa Valley, is subject to both the contradictons of nature in this severe northern setting and the sometimes enchanting, sometimes brutal timbre of village life. There are deep pine and spruce forests, the grouse and the deer, and the hunter's gun. There is Magdalena, the beautiful mistress of the village priest, whose suicide unleashes her ghost to haunt the parish. There are also the loving grandparents with...

"The Reluctant Healer tells the story of a young attorney who is torn between mounting evidence that he has the spiritual ability to heal others and his life-long skepticism of alternative views. Will Alexander is cautious and conventional. But when he meets Erica, a beautiful, intense energy healer, he becomes troubled not only by her unorthodox endeavors but also by the limitations of his own existence. Amidst this turmoil, Will is startled to discover...

"Redburn charts the coming-of-age of Wellingborough Redburn, a young innocent who embarks on a crossing to Liverpool together with a roguish crew. Once in Liverpool, Redburn encounters the squalid conditions of the city and meets Harry Bolton, a bereft and damaged soul, who takes him on a tour of London that includes a scene of rococo decadence unlike anything else in Melville's fiction."--Jacket.

"Internationally acclaimed Haruki Murakami's debut short novels-- nearly thirty years out of print-- newly retranslated and in one English-language volume for the first time, with a new introduction by the author. These first major works of fiction by Haruki Murakami center on two young men-- an unnamed narrator and his friend and former roommate, the Rat. These novellas, powerful, sometimes surreal stories of loneliness, obsession, and eroticism,...

"A little bit of Bildungsroman and a whole lot of Princeton make for a ramshackle fifth novel from Wolff, who shines brightest in his nonfiction (The Duke of Deception, Black Sun). A great opening, though: a teen-ager is pulled from sleep by his mother, who's brandishing a Colt .45; should she shoot herself or the kid's father, caught in flagrante? Her son shrugs; he has a chem test in the morning, Eighteen months later, Dad is dead (a lush's death,...

"Mythmaker, master storyteller, and a writer powerfully attuned to the land and history of his native New Mexico, Rudolfo Anaya is one of the undisputed fathers of Chicano literature. Writing in an era when Latino voices were marginalized and just beginning to be read and acknowledged, Anaya broke new ground with Bless Me, Ultima (1972), a mythic novel that captures the richness and complexity of history, community, and place in the American Southwest....

"Scorpio Rising" starts with an enigmatic first line, "I'm going to run the home movie again. Unlike the Egyptian mummy, I ain't pressed for time." A young man is visiting his dusty Texas home town, standing over the grave sites of his grandparents and other relatives. Another clue to the plot comes next, "In a corner of the cemetery, no marker at head or foot, raked out flat and overrun with agarita and scrub cedar and mountain laurel alongside the...

Kunimitsu Tezuka and Sadharu Inui battle in the intra-squad games for a spot in the starting lineup. Meanwhile, Coach Banda of Yamabuki Junior High offers team captain Kunmitsu a chance to play overseas as an exchange student.