TWO NOVELLAS by Allan Ishmael Young THE HEAD ROCK CHALLENGE Lord, how I hate these people, kept running through his mind. Life seems to smite him at every turn. His personal as well as his professional life, are constantly full of insurmountable problems. His inherent dislike of family members and potential friends slowly turns to hate. When eventually he comes to believe that he has found ways to conquer his difficulties, he makes his flight from the area in his own way. THE CROSSROADS STORE This place has become my own personal Eden, he thought. He would tell you right up front that he is a sterile engineer. He's not an engineer that works on sterile projects, and he is not a super clean man. It means he cannot father children, can't get anybody pregnant. When the mumps "fell on him," as the old folks say, it settled in his testicles. It became both a blessing and a curse, starting with his first visit to "The Crossroads Store" when he met her.

Hauntingly beautiful fiction about two women, solitude, art, and transformation. In "A Knot of Tears", a woman's locked-up life is transformed by a parrot who tells tales; "Rusina, Not Quite in Love" offers a strange and lovely retelling of the story of "Beauty and the Beast".

Two Novellas by YAE comprises two works by Youssouf Amine Elalamy, also known as YAE, translated from French into English for the first time. A Moroccan in New York tells the tale of a young man seeking to make sense of two cultures which seemingly could not be more opposite, yet, are on many levels, so much the same. Autobiographical, YAE's story is the compilation of the musings of a young man on a Fulbright grant in New York in the early 1990s. In particular, the work reveals multiple misconceptions and misunderstandings Americans have about Moroccans and, other foreigners. Sea Drinkers is a compelling story that reveals the hurdles faced by Moroccan emigrants who illegally try to cross the slim stretch of water in small boats between Morocco and Spain. The hundreds who attempt the dangerous crossing every year are known as the harraga, which in Arabic means 'the burners.' The Moroccans who embark must literally 'burn' the bridges of their lives (their identity papers and passports), in order to clandestinely infiltrate into the countries across the water. These characters tell the tales of those who become stateless and who, more often than not, die untimely deaths in the waters between two continents (a distance of less than fifteen miles).

The first ever story collection from the inimitable Lionel Shriver 'Genius' Stylist 'Phenomenal' Observer 'Brilliant' The Times

A Katha Trailblazer volume, this collection brings together three works of Ambai that explore the issue of female fertility. C S Lakshmi, who writes under the pen name Ambai, strikingly approaches the issue to unveil how women are oppressed and suppressed in the guise of love.

A magnificently stark book—within the smallness of one poor, muddled, provincial life, Natalia Ginzburg finds enormous pain and loss An almost unbearably intimate novella, The Road to the City concentrates on a young woman barely awake to life, who fumbles through her days: she is fickle yet kind, greedy yet abashed, stupidly ambitious yet loving too—she is a mass of confusion. She’s in a bleak space, lit with the hard clarity of a Pasolini film. Her family is no help: her father is largely absent; her mother is miserable; her sister’s unhappily promiscuous; her brothers are in a separate masculine world. Only her cousin Nini seems to see her. She falls into disgrace and then “marries up,” but without any joy, blind to what was beautiful right before her own eyes. The Road to the City was Ginzburg’s very first work, originally published under a pseudonym. “I think it might be her best book,” her translator Gini Alhadeff remarked: “And apparently she thought so, too, at the end of her life, when assembling a complete anthology of her work for Mondadori.

Hauntingly beautiful fiction about two women, solitude, art, and transformation. For years, Gioia Timpanelli has held audiences rapt with her retellings of ancient tales, often appearing with Robert Bly, James Hillman, Joseph Campbell, and Gary Snyder. Here, in fiction full of warmth and resonances--characters we can't help but recognize, prose and imagery that play on the strings of the soul--Timpanelli draws on her deep knowledge of these old stories and their wisdoms to create a new and refreshing kind of storytelling, with hints of both Italo Calvino and Angela Carter. In "A Knot of Tears," a woman's locked-up life is transformed by a parrot who tells tales; her story becomes a subtle and surprising meditation on the necessity of being true to oneself and others. In "Rusina, Not Quite in Love," a strange and lovely retelling of the story of the Beauty and the Beast, a young woman escapes family and society--especially the grasp of her superficial and beastly sisters--to find consolation and beauty in nature and its muse. In each case, women of very different backgrounds--one aristocratic, one impoverished--find solitary spaces from which they can emerge as artists and shapers of their own destinies. With a sense of character unusual in contemporary fiction (not mere personality, but moral character) and a gentle, lyric touch, Timpanelli blends the seeming simplicity of folktale with a richly textured understanding of human nature. With great integrity and affection for language, her work teaches about love and solitude, honesty and art.