When Daru Shezad is fired from his banking job he falls from the ranks of Pakistan's cell-phone-toting elite into a life of drugs and crime. But when a heist goes awry, Daru finds himself on trial for a murder he may or may not have committed. A portrait of contemporary Pakistan featuring an adulterous romance between two ultra-rich jet setters. He is a banker and she is the wife of his best friend, and she is escaping the constraints of marriage...

The short fiction of Colum McCann documents a dizzying cast of characters in exile, loss, love, and displacement. There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who emigrates to the tranquil coast of Western Ireland, the Irishwoman who journeys through America in search of silence and solitude. But what is found in these stories, and discovered by these characters, is the astonishing...

"When a dead woman is discovered in Abu Al Roos, one of Mecca's many alleys, no one will claim the body because they are ashamed by her nakedness. As we follow Detective Nassir's investigation of the case, the secret life of the holy city of Mecca is revealed. Tackling powerful issues with beautiful and evocative writing, Raja Alem reveals a city--and a civilization--at once beholden to brutal customs, and reckoning (uneasily) with new traditions....

A young girl who loves fancy things helps her family to be fancy for one special night.

Offers a candid portrait of the Italian people in a collection of pieces describing events and topics that highlight life in contemporary Italy.

Covers eight months in Berlin, from September 1928 to May Day, 1929, meticulously documenting the hopes and struggles of its inhabitants as their future is darkened by a growing shadow.

"When Alizée Benoit, a young American painter working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), vanishes in New York City in 1940, no one knows what happened to her. Not her Jewish family living in German-occupied France. Not her arts patron and political compatriot, Eleanor Roosevelt. Not her close-knit group of friends and fellow WPA painters, including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner. And, some seventy years later, not her great-niece,...

Single-page strips build and build as Chippendale takes on social media narcissism, governmental propaganda, racism, and a culture of violence, skewering the malice of the right and the hypocrisies of the left. A bomb explodes in a coffee shop: the incident is played out over and over again from the perspective of each table in the shop, revisiting moments from ten and twenty years before. We see the inevitable as the characters bicker or celebrate,...

"Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow has deservedly been celebrated as one of America's greatest writers. For more than sixty years he stretched our minds, our imaginations, and our hearts with his exhilarating perceptions of life. Here, collected in one volume and chosen by the author himself, are favorites such as 'What kind of day did you have?,' 'Leaving the yellow house,' and a previously uncollected piece, 'By the St. Lawrence.' With his larger-than-life...

"When etiquette coach Ms. Picklepop teeters off her stool and spills a bucket of paint, a creature emerges. Not a scary one, or an evil one, or anything of the sort. Instead, what comes alive is ... BLURP! She'll have to carry on with her lesson, despite Blurp's many, messy distractions. But paint splotches and burps aren't all that disrupt Ms. Picklepop's decorous class. Perhaps through an unlikely friendship, Ms. Picklepop will learn a thing or...