A collection of short fiction presents ten stories that capture important moments in the course of a life and in the lives intertwined with it, in a volume that ranges from the 1930s to the 1980s.

This story tells about the Irish lives of the local people, about the formidable American genius who commandeered their island as his own, and about the young journeyman writer who discovered there the range of his own imagination.

Italy's great chronicler of the macabre and of growing up geeky. Longbefore the latest vogue for autofiction, Michele Mari, one of Italy's mostbeloved authors, cast his mind back to the days of his own childhood, and found it crawling with monsters. Raisedon comic books and science fiction, the young Mari constructed an alternate universe for himself untouched by uncomprehending grownups or sadistic peers. Compared to the horrors of real life, Long...

[This book] chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under-- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche...

A Year In The Merde is the story of Paul West, a 27-year-old Brit who is brought to Paris by a French company to open a chain of British "tea rooms." He soon becomes immersed in the contradictions of French culture: the French are not all cheese-eating surrender monkeys, though they do eat a lot of smelly cheese; they are still in shock at being stupid enough to sell Louisiana, thus losing the chance to make French the global language, while going...

A rollicking, inventive adaptation of the notoriously unfilmable British comic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman, written by Laurence Sterne. Shandy's warped tales reveal far more than any conventional autobiography.

Poet Glyn Maxwell wakes up in a mysterious village one autumn day. He has no idea how he got there; is he dead? In a coma? Dreaming?-- but he has a strange feeling there's a class to teach. And isn't that the poet Keats wandering down the lane? Why not ask him to give a reading, do a Q and A, hit the pub with the students afterwards? Soon the whole of the autumn term stretches ahead, with Byron, Yeats and Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, the Brownings,...