In February, during the Book Fair, my first novel was published. It merited two reviews, one in the May-June issue of El Caimán Barbudo, and the other in La Gaceta of July-August. The first was wary: the second frankly cryptic. I will cite one typical excerpt. "Nosotros los impotentes is, then, genesis and epiphany. The discursive continuum flows without stumbling, meandering from the initial spell to a sudden surprise, and at the end of the eternal adventure of reading, to the...

To you, my friend Spartan, Sofia said to Sandra, reminding her of snowbound icy Moscow where she was trained as a StalinistFidelistaSpartan in long lines at thirty below zero with ever-enraged watchmen and the smell of booze but with professors who were scholarly and stifflyaffectionate, with nice fat wives who only ever smiled after knowing you for a long time because they don't trust anyone, and Sandra had come from Cuba so trusting and Spartan to begin with, having spent two years...

Beneath the shade of a tamarind tree in bloom My father was smoking under the tamarind tree while the women skinned the animals and peeled the cassava. Poor thing. I see him getting a breath of fresh air under the tree, a tree overshadowing the whole yard with its eight-meter-thick trunk and the small tamarinds flowering on its branches, its frond cooling and shading the property, its dense, brilliant green foliage marking its territory from twenty-five meters high, the extent of its...

I At ten o'clock on a fine sunny morning I went out for a stroll and, as luck would have it, ran into Marina in front of the big department stores in the city center. My friend was wearing a magnificent gray dress I'd bought for her from a band of gypsy women during a trip to Tashkent. It was probably the finest item in her wardrobe and suited her marvelously. I would never have dreamed that it actually was made in Tashkent. But I was the one to discover the real label beneath a...

"Herr Rudolf! Wait a minute." The caretaker's old wife straightened up, dropped her rag into her bucket, and limped over to the stairs. Herr Rudolf stopped and removed his tasseled hat. The snow on his shoes was melting. As a man with both a social conscience and a vague and confused attitude to professional cleaning ladies, the puddle forming around his feet made him feel very ill at ease. "Good day, Frau Simmes." Herr Rudolf tried to smile. "Good day." The caretaker's wife...

Patrik Ouředník's forthcoming novel imagines one of the most striking phenomena of the nineteenth century: the founding of "free" settlements in North and South America by Europeans aspiring to a "brighter tomorrow." These literally hundreds of utopian experiments had one trait in common-the rejection of both social and political revolution as advocated by communists, as well as by socialist and social Catholic reformers. The book, to be published in the fall in Prague and...

The day had advanced resolutely into evening. He returned to his hotel, anticipating an early departure in the morning; once in his room, he stretched out on the bed. Outside, blackest night. He rose to drink from the faucet. Unable to imagine falling back to sleep, he took a seat on the floor beside the bed, switched on the lamp, took out his wallet, and drew from it his plane ticket and Nawal's photograph. Laughable as it seemed to him, he found her image had become more...

"German Dolls" takes Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) to Berlin. It is a text about memories--false and inaccurate, as memories always are--and how they interfere with the places we inhabit, the places we best know by getting lost in them (in the sense of choosing to vanish into them). Pessoa grew up in Durban and wrote his first poems in English. Apart from two trips from Portugal to South Africa, he rarely traveled, and so far as I know was never in Berlin. But his invention...

Hameed, who had yet to learn the nickname by which he would be known for the rest of his life, entered the house, which emitted a fresh country scent. With his foot, as usual, he shoved open the heavy door, which was fashioned of walnut and decorated with large, broad-headed nails. Only at night was it closed by a bolt with protruding teeth. Verdigris had spread across this till its edges looked bright green. He climbed a few steps, making his way to the two small rooms over the entryway...

I gather up my courage and decide to throw a "reception day" in the tradition of most wealthy, middle-class women who are proud of their lineage and upbringing, or, who are, like me, enamored with singing and with going to the movies. These women choose a weekday at the end of each month for such a day, and their friends show up dressed to the Nines, and sit around chatting, drinking coffee, and eating candied almonds and chocolate. My husband, however, did not like visits; he saw them as...

Kelena threw back the sleeve of her kerker and bared one stringy, dried-out breast, which drooped like an empty leather bag. She ordered an extra pair of braziers, so that there was enough light. The men obeyed her without question, spreading out a well-scrubbed leather rug, while Orvo sharpened the shaman-woman's knives with great concentration. Kelena went up to the patient. Her face was long and thin. Tattoo lines disappeared into deep wrinkles like footpaths in the tundra...

After months of controversy, the new hair tax was approved. The Hamster Lovers' Guild was said to be the driving force behind the reform. The Guild had always found it objectionable that the tax levied on mammals was the same for a hamster as for a German shepherd. They proposed that the tax be recalculated in accordance with an animal's surface area. The tax agency accepted this compromise, but then chose to avoid the term "surface area," which might have been construed as...

The old man was standing cautiously behind the table on which he displayed the treasures of the passage's bookshop: used English paperbacks, bound photocopies, ancient and incomplete collections of newspapers. He might have been seventy, maybe more. Above his balding head dangled a sign that said "Au Singe Vert, passage de l'Eden." I opened books at random, leafing through the pages without reading, careful not to tear the brittle paper. "Do you have a map of Saigon, I mean from...

Darka saw her in the trolley, the sweaty, June-soaked trolley, brimming with people and their smells: sweet, almost corpselike, female, heavy, equestrian, yet oddly palatable, and even stimulating, sexual, distinctly male. Suddenly all the smells switched off, leaving only a girlish profile on the sunny side of the car, angular as a Braque: abrupt, soaring cheekbones, a fine pug nose, mulatto lips, and a sharp, childlike fist of a chin—a capricious, fragile geometry which occasionally...

As was often the case between the man and the woman, they'd spent the morning hours in delicious intimacy, accentuated by their bodies seeming to fortuitously brush against one another, furtive flirtations in the guise of apparently frivolous jokes. Everything went wrong as the afternoon drew to a close when Elisabeth, returning from having run the many errands the newspaper generally required of her, found Zam busy writing a fax and incontestably in the state that she disliked the...

Parul calculated that it had been around six months since the man had disappeared. Some said he had drowned at sea, some that he had gone to Dhaka for work. Parul didn't care where the hell he went, but why did he leave without telling her? Would she have stopped him if he had told her? Would she have started crying? No, she would have done neither. She would have allowed whoever wanted to leave, leave. If there was any pain in her heart, it would have been her own. Why did the man run...

German master W. G. Sebald climbs to a ruined Corsican cemetery and meditates on death and remembrance. Translator's Note: Campo Santo, from which this chapter is taken, is a collection of prose pieces and essays never before published in book form, though most have appeared in journals. "Campo Santo" itself was found among Max Sebald's papers after his death by his German publisher Michael Krüger, who gave a reading of it at a W. G. Sebald Memorial Day in London on 31...

I don't know why I was upset when my husband reached for the stick, grasping it and starting to twist it around. I gave him a warning look, but Ahmad is extremely proficient at avoiding my warning looks. Pretending to address my words to my father, although my goal was to nip this initiative in the bud, I said, "You must have brought that back as a souvenir of your trip. How much did you pay for it?" My father replied matter-of-factly, "The equivalent in Malaysian currency of twenty...

The White Fly (2000) is the first Arabic detective novel translated into English. Set in contemporary Tangier, Morocco, the narrative follows Detective Laafrit as he investigates the case of four dead bodies that have washed up on the city's beaches. While the victims initially appear to be harraga-or illegal immigrants-who regularly drown in the Straits of Gibraltar trying to reach Spain in small fishing boats, Laafrit quickly discovers that one of them has been brutally shot dead....

The whole city gave up on sleep that night. Explosions sealed up ears and filled the city sky, turning the anticipated weekend into a nightmare. Then Monday came and the shelling calmed, so I goaded my body out of the apartment and down to the empty street. I headed in the direction of the office, not because I was expected there, but to pretend that there was still life not far beyond my reach. As I drove through deserted streets, I felt as though I was descending into a vast cavern...