One of the defining texts of twentieth-century Catalan fiction, written by one of its most innovative and cherished writers, Salvador Espriu's Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth is a collection of thirty-four short stories in which the twists and turns of action, character, and place are as winding and sumptuous as the legendary maze of its title. Originally published in 1935 in the midst of great countrywide political and social upheaval, these stories are a mirror, a grotesque mirror, held up to Catalan and Spanish society. Infused with a deep sense of mythic power, blending social realism with lush modernist experiment, Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth is a triumph of style. Perhaps best known for his poetry, Espriu's rich lyricism and highly evocative use of the Catalan language are here brought to life in the poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips's remarkable English language translation of a classic of world literature.

Bringing together works by Salvador Espriu, Juan Goytisolo, Mercè Rodoreda, Esther Tusquets, and Juan Marsa that portray memory as a disorienting narrative enterprise, Colleen Culleton argues that the source of this disorientation is the material reality of life in Barcelona in the immediate post-Civil War years. Barcelona was the object of harsh persecution in the first years of the Franco regime that included the erasure of marks of Catalan identity and cultural history from the urban landscape and made Barcelona a moving target for memory. The literature and film she examines show characters struggling to produce narratives of the remembered past that immediately conflict with the dominant version of Spain's historical narrative formulated to legitimize the Civil War. Culleton suggests the trope of the laberinto, used as an image or device in all five of the works she considers and translated into English as both maze and labyrinth, opens up a space that enables readers to take vulnerability to outside interference into account as an inseparable part of remembrance. While the narratives all have maze-like qualities involving a high level of reader participation and choice, the exigencies of the labyrinth with its unicursal demands for patience, perseverance, and faith always prevail. Thus do the Francoist narrative and social structure in the end resurface and reassert themselves over the narrating character's perspective.

The hilarious second novel from actress and bestselling novelist Alona Kimhi holds up a comically warped mirror to contemporary Israel, as well as the very notion of "chick lit." Inhabiting a dark fairy-tale version of modern life, drawing equal inspiration from Angela Carter and the iconography of the classic horror movie, this is the story of Lily, our proudly overweight and romantically unlucky protagonist, who discovers a wild freedom in part through her friendship with a Russian prostitute, Ninush. This is a world of cellulite-dissolving panties, sex change as an outlet for self-expression, and the final triumph of the titular tigress; where metamorphosis is the rule, and where the waking world has become a funhouse prowled by our wildest desires.

Hailed by Spain's Revista Quimera as one of the top ten Spanish-language novels of the decade, alongside Bolaño's 2666, Vila-Matas's Bartleby & Co., and Marías's Your Face Tomorrow, the many layers of The No World Concerto center around an old screenwriter, holed up in a shabby hotel in order to write a screenplay about his lover, a young piano prodigy who wants in turn to give up music and become a writer, and believes she may be in contact with creatures from another dimension. Shifting effortlessly between realities, The No World Concerto is a delightful and prismatic novel, and the first of A. G. Porta's books to appear in English, finally joining those of his early writing partner Roberto Bolaño.

A masterful debut from a powerfully original poetic voice A poignant and terse vision of New York City unfolds in Rowan Ricardo Phillips's debut book of poetry. A work of rare beauty and lyric grace, The Ground is an entire world, drawn and revealed through contemplation of the post-9/11 landscape. With musicality and precision of thought, Phillips's poems limn the troubadour's journey in an increasingly surreal modern world ("I plugged my poem into a manhole cover/That flamed into the first guitar"). The origin of mankind, the origin of the self, the self's development in the sensuous world, and––in both a literal and figurative sense––the end of all things sing through Phillips's supple and idiosyncratic poems. The poet's subtle formal sophistication—somewhere between flair and restraint—and sense of lyric possibility bring together the hard glint of the contemporary world and the eroded permanence of the archaic one through remixes, underground sessions, Spenserian stanzas, myths and revamped translations. These are poems of fiery intelligence, inescapable music and metaphysical splendor that concern themselves with lived life and the life of the imagination––both equally vivid and true––as they lay the framework for Phillips's meditations on our connection to and estrangement from the natural world.

Award-winning essayist and poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips presents a bracing renewal of civic poetry in Living Weapon. . . . and we’d do this again And again and again, without ever Knowing we were the weapon ourselves, Stronger than steel, story, and hydrogen. — from "Even Homer Nods" A revelation, a shoring up, a transposition: Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s Living Weapon is a love song to the imagination, a new blade of light honed in on our political moment. A winged man plummets from the troposphere; four NYPD officers enter a cellphone store; concrete sidewalks hang overhead. Here, in his third collection of poems, Phillips offers us ruminations on violins and violence, on hatred, on turning forty-three, even on the end of existence itself. Living Weapon reveals to us the limitations of our vocabulary, that our platitudes are not enough for the brutal times in which we find ourselves. But still, our lives go on, and these are poems of survival as much as they are an indictment. Couched in language both wry and ample, Living Weapon is a piercing addition from a “virtuoso poetic voice” (Granta).

A middle-aged couple takes in a prurient young woman picked up from the side of the road; a single mother struggles against the hostile feelings she harbors towards her precocious son; a man has alternative fantasies of domination and submission involving a fellow commuter; a hotel room is booked by an elderly woman in search of a place to end her life. In the fourteen stories that make up A Perfect Disharmony, Sébastien Brebel explores the experiences of isolated women and sexually obsessed men while weaving together digression, daydreams, and an accumulation of detail to create a wholly unique approach to the short story form.