First published as a feuilleton in a left-wing newspaper in 1850, The Salt Smugglers provides a political satire of the waning days of France’s short-lived Second Republic. With nods to Diderot and Sterne, this shaggy-dog story deals less with contraband salt smugglers than with the subversive power of fiction to transgress legal and esthetic boundaries. By writing what he claimed was a purely documentary account of his picaresque adventures in search of an elusive book recording the true history of a certain seventeenth-century swashbuckler, Nerval sought to deride the press censors of the day who forbade the serial publication of novels in newspapers – and in the process he provocatively deconstructed existing distinctions between fact and fiction. Never before translated into English and still unavailable as a separately published volume in French, The Salt Smugglers is a pre-postmodern gem of experimental prose. Richard Sieburth’s vibrant translation and illuminating afterword remind us why Gérard de Nerval’s blend of sly irony and acerbic social criticism proved so inspiring to authors as various as Baudelaire, Proust, and Leiris.

First published as a sprawling feuilleton in the newspaper Le National in 1850, The Salt Smugglers was political and topical. With nods to Diderot and Sterne, this protean, digressive satire deals less with contraband salt and more with questions of subversion, transgression, censorship and marginality. Never-before-translated into English and never published as a free-standing volume, The Salt Smugglers is an unearthed pre-postmodern gem.

Peter Bush, winner of the Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation, brings to English this most prolific and influential of Catalan writers. Dripping with a panache that can turn in a comic instant to the most conciliatory humility, Josep Pla's foray into the land and sea most familiar to him will plunge readers head-first into its mysterious (and often tasty!) depths. Here are adventures and shipwrecks, raspy storytellers and the fishy meals that sustain them. After describing the process of beating an octopus with branches to soften up its flesh, Pla writes, "These are dishes that must be seen as a last resort." Pla inflects the mundane with the hidden rhythms of power sculpting culture, so that a hot supper is never just food--it embodies economic precarity and environmental erosion along with its own peculiar flavor. A lifetime of reporting on current events gave Pla the necessary skills to describe the world in all its gritty, funny, invigorating detail.

When trust fund baby-turned-waitress Allie and her friends accidentally open a Door to Hell in the basement of Sally's Diner, they don't realize the havoc it will wreak on their Brooklyn neighborhood. Of course, the upside to murder-happy demons coming through the Door all the time is that Allie gets her own sexy and mysterious demon hunter: the dark-eyed, leather-clad, Stetson-wearing Ryan. Ryan teaches Allie everything he knows about fighting the creatures of the underworld—but refuses to give in to the sexual tension that simmers between them. Allie has almost given up on taking her relationship with Ryan to the next level when there's a surge in demonic activity... and the Door disappears. Now Allie and Ryan have to travel through Hell, literally, to try to stop Hell from taking over the Earth. They may not survive the trip, but Allie is about to discover something very important: Mortal peril is a total turn-on.

"Steer clear of that ship," warns the mysterious gentleman who shares a coach with John and his father. "Death she'll bring you," says the man. "It's the way of a ship that was christened with blood." This is an ominous introduction to the schooner John is about to be entrusted with for a voyage to London. But he's too charmed by the pretty Dragon to heed the advice. The ship looks clever and quick, and John can hardly wait to sail her. She was a smugglers' vessel once, but now she's his Dragon, and she'll proudly carry wool for honest trade. But soon John will be forced to consider the gentleman's warning. And to wonder what he really knows about his bonny crew.

Introducted and annotated by the prize-winning translator Richard Sieburth, this bilingual selection from Scève's Délie are love poems for the intellectual.

"A cellar door creaking open in the middle of the night, or a hand slipping quickly into a trench coat – the most compelling transactions are surely those we never see. Smuggling can conjure images of adventure and rebellion in popular culture, but as this fascinating book shows, it has also had a profound effect on the geopolitics of the world. Shining a light onto seven centuries of dark history, it illuminates a world of intrigue and fortune, hinged on furtive desires and those who have been willing to fulfil them. World-changing contraband has ranged from silk, spices and silver in the Age of Exploration to gold, opium, tea and rubber in times of empire, as well as drugs, people and blood diamonds today. Guns and art have always been smuggled, as have the most dangerous of all contraband – ideas. Central to this story are the (not always) legitimate forces of the Dutch and British East India Companies, the luminaries of the Spanish Empire, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Nazis, Soviet trophy brigades and the CIA, all of whom, at one point or another, have made smuggling part of their business. In addition, Simon Harvey traces out the smaller-time smugglers, the micro-economies of everyday goods, precious objects and people, drawing these stories together into a map of a subterranean world criss-crossed by smugglers’ paths. All told, this is the story of an unrelenting drive of markets to subvert the law, and of the invisible seams that have sewn the globe together."--Book jacket flap.