Hylas has come to the island of Tykanos to build an aqueduct. He is not interested in the island’s main attraction: the pleasure houses where polished courtesans both female and male offer tea and elegant conversation. Until he finds himself renting a room in one of the tea houses and meeting his neighbour, the courtesan Zo. Over breakfasts in Zo’s garden, the two men strike up a friendship that transforms the isolation of their lives. But Hylas’s aqueduct project is threatened by bureaucratic delays, and Zo needs to secure a rich patron to help support his failing house. Just when they have begun to hope that they have found a home together, will the world force them apart?

A constellation of short stories illustrate the intersecting lives of women on various peripheries of society in and around Bogotá, Colombia. In six subtly connected stories, Variations on the Body explores the obsessions, desires, and idiosyncrasies of women and girls from different strata of Colombian society. A former FARC guerilla fighter adjusts to urban life and faces the new violence of an editor co-opting her experiences. A woman adrift in the city she left as a child looks for someone to care for, even if it has to be by force, while another documents a flea infestation with a catalog of the marks on her flesh. A little girl copes with her anxiety about the adult world by exacting revenge on her nanny, who she thinks belongs to her. Combining humor, heartbreak, and unexpected violence, Ospina constructs a keen reflection on the body as a simultaneous vehicle of connection and alienation in vibrant, gleaming prose.

Ursula K. Le Guin's richly-imagined vision of a post-apocalyptic California, in a newly expanded version prepared shortly before her death This fourth volume in the Library of America’s definitive Ursula K. Le Guin edition presents her most ambitious novel and finest achievement, a mid-career masterpiece that showcases her unique genius for world building. Framed as an anthropologist’s report on the Kesh, survivors of ecological catastrophe living in a future Napa Valley, Always Coming Home (1985) is an utterly original tapestry of history and myth, fable and poetry, story- telling and song. Prepared in close consultation with the author, this expanded edition features new material added just before her death, including for the first time two “missing” chapters of the Kesh novel Dangerous People. The volume con- cludes with a selection of Le guin’s essays about the novel’s genesis and larger aims, a note on its editorial and publication history, and an updated chronology of Le guin’s life and career. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

This book makes available for the first time a treasure trove of hitherto unpublished documents on Japan in the war years and immediate postwar occupation and recovery. The documents consist of newsletters, newspaper articles, texts of radio broadcasts and letters written by Frank William Coaldrake, a pacifist and priest and the first Australian civilian to enter Japan after the war, with his wife Maida. Frank and Maida formed a team of participant observers in the challenge of a nation confronting its past and trying to find hope in a future while occupied by foreign powers. This is a rare and comprehensive collection of first hand accounts of Japan by two astute observers. The daily struggle against starvation is interspersed with issues such as war atrocities, the atomic bombings, the status of the Imperial Family, the British monarch and labour unions. The text is illustrated with photographs taken by Frank Coaldrake. With an introduction by William H. Coaldrake, son of the authors.