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Click on any title or cover to find the item in the SWAN Online Catalog.
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His Name Was Death
by Rafael Bernal
Fiction - A bitter drunk forsakes civilization and takes to the Mexican jungle, trapping animals, selling their pelts to buy liquor for colossal benders, and slowly rotting away in his fetid hut. His neighbors, a clan of the Lacodón tribe of Chiapas, however, see something more in him than he does himself (dubbing him Wise Owl): when he falls deathly ill, a shaman named Black Ant saves his life-and, almost by chance, in driving out his fever, she exorcises the demon of alcoholism as well. Slowly recovering, weak in his hammock, our antihero discovers a curious thing about the mosquitoes' buzzing, "which to human ears seemed so irritating and pointless." Perhaps, in fact, constituted a language he might learn-and with the help of a flute and a homemade dictionary-even speak. Slowly, he masters Mosquil, with astonishing consequences... Will he harness the mosquitoes' global might? And will his new powers enable him to take over the world that's rejected him? A book far ahead of its time, His Name Was Death looks down the double-barreled shotgun of ecological disaster and colonial exploitation-and cackles a graveyard laugh.
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Dreaming of You: A Novel in Verse
by Melissa Lozada-Oliva
Fiction - A young Latinx poet grappling with loneliness and heartache decides one day to bring Tejano pop star Selena Quintanilla back to life. The séance kicks off an uncanny trip narrated by a Greek chorus of gossiping spirits as she journeys through a dead celebrity prom, encounters her shadow self, and performs karaoke in hell. In visceral poems embodying millennial angst, paragraph-long conversations overheard at her local coffeeshop, and unhinged Twitter rants, Lozada-Oliva reveals an eerie, sometimes gruesome, yet moving love story.
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The Dry Heart
by Natalia Ginzburg
Fiction - Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement, 'I shot him between the eyes.' Everything in between is a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness, and as the tale proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. In this powerful novella, Natalia Ginzburg's writing is white-hot, fueled by rage, stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality; she transforms an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that might pose the question: Why don't more wives kill their husbands?
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Lapvona
by Ottessa Moshfegh
Fiction - In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh's most exciting leap yet.
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Severance
by Ling Ma
A survivor of an apocalyptic plague maintains a blog about a decimated Manhattan before joining a motley group of survivors to search for a place to rebuild, a goal that is complicated by an unscrupulous group leader.
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Love
by Hanne Ørstavik
When a mother and son go separate ways on a winter’s night in a small village in northern Norway, each of their journeys take different turns with fatal consequences, in a novel that illustrates how distance is found not only between human beings, but also within each individual.
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Signs Preceding the End of the World
by Yuri Herrera
Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the US carrying a pair of secret messages--one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.
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The house of the spirits : a novel
by Isabel Allende
The House of the Spirits brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife, Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba, a beautiful and strong-willed child who will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future.
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The Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolaño
This Herralde Award-winning novel chronicles a strange journey that follows the steps of two Latin American poets, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, as they struggle to escape from an unknown past, in a novel that follows their odyssey as seen through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa.
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The Hour of the Star
by Clarice Lispector
Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Colas, and her rat of a boyfriend. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leave us deep in Lispector territory indeed.
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In the Time of the Butterflies
by Julia Alvarez
A story based on actual events evokes the horror of the Dominican Republic under dictator General Trujillo, as three sisters die in a jeep "accident."
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A General Theory of Oblivion
by José Eduardo Agualusa
Hermit Ludo must cope with the outside world in Angola as it begins to creep into her awareness through the television and glimpses from her window.
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The discomfort of evening : a novel
by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
When her strictly religious family is torn apart by a tragic accident, 10-year-old Jas, along with her siblings, develop a curiosity about death that leads her into disturbing rituals and fantasies. Original. 10,000 first printing.
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
by Ottessa Moshfegh
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.
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Fever dream : a novel
by Samanta Schweblin
A first English translation by an award-winning Spanish author follows the nightmarish experiences of a dying woman and a boy beside her hospital bed, who explore the dynamics of broken souls, toxic relationships and the power and desperation of family.
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The Private Lives of Trees
by Alejandro Zambra
Worried that his wife Veronica will not return home from an art class, Julian imagines his stepdaughter Daniela's future without her mother and tells her an improvisational bedtime story.
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The House on Mango Street
by Sandra Cisneros
For Esperanza, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, life is an endless landscape of concrete and run-down tenements, and she tries to rise above the hopelessness.
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Luster
by Raven Leilani
"Sharp, comic, disruptive, tender, Raven Leilani's debut novel, Luster, sees a young black woman fall into art and someone else's open marriage"
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The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
The narrators and his friends piece together the events that led up to suicides of the Lisbon girls--brainy Therese, fastidious Mary, ascetic Bonnie, libertine Lux, and saintly Cecilia. A first novel.
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The great believers
by Rebecca Makkai
In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.
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The New Me
by Halle Butler
Fiction - Trapped in a thankless temp job, and fixated on all the little ways she might change her life, 30-year-old Millie, who just can’t seem to get it together, finds the possibility of a full-time job bringing things into focus but also being accompanied with a paralyzing realization.
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The Vegetarian
by Kang Han
Deciding to go vegetarian in the wake of violent thoughts, Yeong-hye, a woman from an Asian culture of strict societal mores, is denounced as a subversive as she spirals into extreme rebelliousness that causes her to splinter from her true nature and risk her life.
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Hurricane Season
by Fernanda Melchor
Fiction - The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse - by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals - propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.
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One hundred years of solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
A celebration of the endless variety of life in the mythical village of Macondo chronicles the story of the Buendia family, set against the background of the evolution and eventual decadence of the small South American town.
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Pew
by Catherine Lacey
Offered shelter in a series of homes upon being discovered genderless, racially ambiguous and nonverbal in a Southern church, Pew hears the secrets and confessions of locals before the community’s fear overtakes its generosity.
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Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
A reunion with two childhood friends--Ruth and Tommy--draws Kath and her companions on a nostalgic odyssey into the supposedly idyllic years of their lives at Hailsham, an isolated private school in the serene English countryside, and a dramatic confrontation with the truth about their childhoods and about their lives in the present.
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The Member of the Wedding
by Carson McCullers
Twelve-year-old Frankie, a bored but sensitive young girl entering adolescence, has a difficult time dealing with the fuss over her older brother's wedding.
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Breasts and Eggs
by Mieko Kawakami
Painting a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan, a Japanese writer tells the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppression and their own uncertainties as they search for peace and a future they can finally call their own.
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The bell jar
by Sylvia Plath
Esther Greenwood, a talented and successful writer, finally begins to succumb to madness when the world around her begins to falter.
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A Tale for the Time Being
by Ruth L. Ozeki
A novelist on a remote island in the Pacific is linked to a bullied and depressed Tokyo teenager after discovering a Hello Kitty lunchbox that washed ashore in this new novel from the award-wining, best-selling author of My Year of Meats.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
The handsome appearance of dissolute, young Dorian Gray remains unchanged while the features in his portrait become distorted as his degeneration progresses.
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