Recommendations based on "Mao II"

International Bestseller • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction“Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond.” — PeopleIn The Unbearable Lightness of Being, acclaimed author Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples, a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing, and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.This magnificent novel, now available in a beautifully designed Harper Perennial Deluxe Edition with French flaps and deckle edged paper, is a story of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, and encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.

The prizewinning, complete and unabridged translation—“the best English-language version we are likely to see for a long time, if ever” (The Guardian)—of a work of unclassifiable genius: the crowning achievement of Portugal’s modern masterEdited, Translated, and with an Introduction by Richard Zenith, the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Pessoa: A BiographyWinner of the Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Prize for Portuguese TranslationA Penguin ClassicFernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology, and horoscope. When he died in 1935, Pessoa left behind a trunk filled with unfinished and unpublished writings, among which were the remarkable pages that make up his posthumous masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, an astonishing work that, in George Steiner's words, "gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce's Dublin or Kafka's Prague."Published for the first time some fifty years after his death, this unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs comprises the "autobiography" of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa's alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, part descriptive narrative, captivatingly translated by Richard Zenith, The Book of Disquiet is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century.“Pessoa is a genius.” —André Aciman

In Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction outing, an examination of the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life through an insightful, unsparing argument that proves the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination but instead are found in reality."There is a signature motif discernible in both works of philosophical pessimism and supernatural horror. It may be stated thus: Behind the scenes of life lurks something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world."His fiction is known to be some of the most terrifying in the genre of supernatural horror, but Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction book may be even scarier. Drawing on philosophy, literature, neuroscience, and other fields of study, Ligotti takes the penetrating lens of his imagination and turns it on his audience, causing them to grapple with the brutal reality that they are living a meaningless nightmare, and anyone who feels otherwise is simply acting out an optimistic fallacy. At once a guidebook to pessimistic thought and a relentless critique of humanity's employment of self-deception to cope with the pervasive suffering of their existence, The Conspiracy against the Human Race may just convince readers that there is more than a measure of truth in the despairing yet unexpectedly liberating negativity that is widely considered a hallmark of Ligotti's work.

For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called “the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century” collected in a single volume“An event, and cause for celebration.”—The New York TimesA Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paperFor some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story—from his 1935 debut with A Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeare’s Memory—Jorge Luis Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, he took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books.Bringing together for the first time in English all of Borges’s magical stories, and all of them newly rendered into English in brilliant translations by Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume compendium for all who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master’s work for all who have yet to discover this singular genius.For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Futurological Congress is the fourth satirical science fiction novel in the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy series from Kafka Prize–winning author Stanislaw Lem.“Nobody can really know the future. But few could imagine it better than Lem.”—Paris ReviewBringing his twin gifts of scientific speculation and scathing satire to bear on that hapless planet, Earth, Lem sends his unlucky cosmonaut, Ijon Tichy, to the Eighth Futurological Congress. Caught up in local revolution, Tichy is shot and so critically wounded that he is flashfrozen to await a future cure—a future whose strangeness exceeds anything the congress conjectured.Translated by Michael Kandel.“A vision of Earth’s future where the authorities dose the population with ‘psychemicals’ to make life in a desperately over-populated world worth living.”—Boston Globe

Self-destruction and human suffering are the central themes in this novel about man and war

An unparalleled work of historical conjecture, ranging imaginatively over huge tracts of the American popular consciousness, Don DeLillo's Libra contains an introduction by the author in Penguin Modern Classics. In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of JFK will galvanize the nation against Communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped. Don DeLillo (b.1936) was born and raised in New York City. Americana (1971), his first novel, announced the arrival of a major literary talent, and the novels that followed confirmed his reputation as one of the most distinctive and compelling voices in late-twentieth-century American fiction. DeLillo's comic gifts come to the fore in White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award, Underworld (1997), hailed by Martin Amis as 'the ascension of a great writer', Cosmopolis (2003), adapted into a film by David Cronenberg, due to be released later this year, and Falling Man (2007), a novel about the aftereffects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. If you enjoyed Libra, you might like DeLillo's Americana, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Don DeLillo's apocalyptic imagination takes on the assassination of John F. Kennedy... Breathtaking' Newsday

Kurt Vonnegut has surpassed even his own giddy heights of hilariously bitter irony in Bluebeard. It is a novel so funny and yet so terribly serious that you will read it - then reconsider your own life.

“Dorsey’s brilliantly, profanely funny 11th novel…zips along like P.G. Wodehouse’s best work.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch Tim Dorsey’s outrageously zany, gleefully violent, and uproariously funny Nuclear Jellyfish marks the triumphant return of lovable, thrill-killing Florida historian and tireless civic booster Serge A. Storms. The bestselling author of Atomic Lobster, Triggerfish Twist, and Florida Roadkill, Dorsey can match Carl Hiaasen punch-for-punch when it comes to fictionally depicting Sunshine State madness—and he’s taken his rightful place alongside Christopher Moore in the pantheon of top American humorists. Nuclear Jellyfish is a veritable WMD of radioactive hilarity—as Denver’s Rocky Mountain News so aptly puts it, “It doesn’t get any better.”

As seen on the SERIAL podcast, season 2, episode 1 ("Dustwun")!Open this wordless book and zoom from a farm to a ship to a city street to a desert island. But if you think you know where you are, guess again. For nothing is ever as it seems in Istvan Banyai's sleek, mysterious landscapes of pictures within pictures, which will tease and delight readers of all ages. "This book has the fascinating appeal of such works of visual trickery as the Waldo and Magic Eye books."—Kirkus Reviews"Ingenious."—The Horn Book