""When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing--though...

Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world -- conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. The Namesake brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations....

"Haunting and provocative . . . Rowland's writing is compelling and masterful." -Delia Ephron, author of The Lion Is In Once, there were many transcriptionists at the Record, a behemoth New York City newspaper, but new technology has put most of them out of work. So now Lena, the last transcriptionist, sits alone in a room--a human conduit, silently turning reporters' recorded stories into print--until the day she encounters a story so shocking...

With a surgeons skill, Connell cuts away the middle-class security blanket of uniformity to expose the arrested development underneaththe entropy of time and relationships lead Mrs. Bridge's three children and husband to recede into a remote silence, and she herself drifts further into doubt and confusion. The raised evening newspaper becomes almost a fire screen to deflect any possible spark of conversation. The novel is comprised of vignettes, images,...

Macy Sorensen has decided to settle for marriage to an older man until she bumps into Elliot Petropoulos--her first and most intense love, who eventually broke her heart--sending her reeling into reminiscence and doubt. Macy Sorensen works hard as a new pediatrics resident, plans a wedding to an older, financially secure man, and keeps her heart tucked away. When she runs into Elliot Petropoulos, the first and only love of her life, the careful bubble...

"A novel about an interactive game designer with no face by the singer-songwriter behind the Mountain Goats and the author of Black Sabbath's Master of Reality (33-1/3)"-- Isolated by a disfiguring injury, Sean Phillips crafts imaginary worlds for strangers to play in. From his small apartment in southern California, he orchestrates fantastic adventures where possibilities, both dark and bright, open in the boundaries between the real and the imagined....

An unnerving tale of a narcotics addict unmoored in New York, Tangiers, and ultimately a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone, its formal innovation, formerly taboo subject matter, and tour de force execution have exerted their influence on the work of authors like Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, and William Gibson; on the relationship of art and obscenity; and on the shape of music, film, and media generally. This restored text includes many editorial...

[The author] presents a compelling story of a black man's attempt to escape his past and start anew in Harlem. Cross Damon is a man at odds with society and with himself, a man who hungers for peace but who brings terror and destruction wherever he goes.

A collection of nine short fiction stories about outcasts--both adults and children--who are trying to find their place in mainstream America.