From the author of The Master and Margarita comes this short and tragic masterpiece about drug addiction Young Dr. Bromgard has come to a small country town to assume a new practice. No sooner has he arrived than he receives word that a colleague, Dr. Polyakov, has fallen gravely ill. Before Bromgard can go to his friend’s aid, Polyakov is brought to his practice in the middle of the night with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and, barely conscious, gives Bromgard his journal before dying. What Bromgard uncovers in the entries is Polyakov’s uncontrollable and merciless descent into morphine addiction — his first injection to ease his back pain, the thrill of the drug as it overtakes him, the looming signs of addiction, and the feverish final entries before his death.

Prose and poetry tell the multi-narrative story of one pivotal summer during the lives of four interconnected individuals as they grapple with family conflict, friendship, and individuality, with first love and second chances, with impermanence and spirituality, and with the sweeping awareness of mortality.

A comic novel about the theater world in early Soviet Russia and a “biting attack on censorship” (The Guardian, UK). From the author of The Master and Margarita, this semi-autobiographical satirical novel paints a vibrant portrait of life behind the curtains of the Russian literary and theater arenas in the early decades of the twentieth century. Maxudov is a failed novelist who, after contemplating suicide, adapts his novel into a play that—seemingly at random—is chosen to be produced at the renowned Independent Theatre. As it so often does in theater, chaos ensues—including bloodthirsty battles between the show’s two co-directors (modeled on Stanislavsky, the famed inventor of Method Acting, and his co-director) over control of the production; near-constant drama brewing between the actors; and the playwright’s own growing host of misgivings and insecurities about his place in the theatrical community. With each rehearsal turning more disastrous than the last, it becomes less and less clear whether Maxudov’s play will ever be performed at all… “A masterpiece of black comedy.” —The Irish Times

In 'Never Love a Gambler,' the Irish writer Keith Ridgway flips conventional narrative with unconventional drama. His charcters negotiate their way through love and lust, religious obsession and ghost sightings, crimes and disappearance in stories told with innovative mastery and brightened by fiercely vivid dialogue. Here, Ridgway showcases his brilliance as a bracing and violently funny storyteller.

A novella—half joke and half nightmare— by "Spain's most significant contemporary literary figure" (The New Yorker) Because She Never Asked is a story reminiscent of that reached by the travelers in Patricia Highsmith's Stranger on a Train. The author first writes a piece for the artist Sophie Calle to live out: a young, aspiring, French artist travels to Lisbon and the Azores in pursuit of an older artist whose work she’s in love with. The second part of the story tells what happens between the author and Calle. She eludes, him; he becomes blocked, and suffers physical collapse. “Something strange happened along the way,” Vila-Matas wrote. “Normally, writers try to pass a work of fiction off as being real. But in Because She Never Asked, the opposite occurred: in order to give meaning to the story of my life, I found that I needed to present it as fiction.”