Recommendations based on "I Spit on Your Graves"

From one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—a collection of stories that represent the art of a modern master who had the gift of making our problematic spiritual life palpable and real. Franz Kafka’s imagination so far outstripped the forms and conventions of the literary tradition he inherited that he was forced to turn that tradition inside out in order to tell his splendid, mysterious tales that are scrupulously naturalistic on the surface and uncanny in their depths.   This edition of his stories includes all his available shorter fiction in a collection edited, arranged, and introduced by Gabriel Josipovici in ways that bring out the writer’s extraordinary range and intensity of vision. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

This selection of non-fictional work from the author of Life, a User's Manual, demonstrates Georges Perec's characteristic lightness of touch, wry humour and accessibility.

'Nobody before Borges had ever attempted this strange and wonderful mixture of arcana, popular literature, national myth, the nature of time and classical themes. Now we can see it in all its intense and disturbing brilliance, certain that we will never see anything like it again' - Justin Cartwright, "Independent on Sunday".

Sum is a stunning exploration of funny and unexpected afterlives that have never been considered—each presented as a vignette that offers a lens through which to see ourselves here and now. In one afterlife, you find that God is the size of a microbe and is unaware of your existence. In another, you work as a background character in other people's dreams. Or you may find that the afterlife contains only those people whom you remember. The stories in Sum are rooted in romance, science, and awe: a mixture of death, hope, computers, immortality, love, biology, and desire that cuts through human nature at new and exciting angles.

The Futurological Congress is the fourth satirical science fiction novel in the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy series from Kafka Prize–winning author Stanislaw Lem.“Nobody can really know the future. But few could imagine it better than Lem.”—Paris ReviewBringing his twin gifts of scientific speculation and scathing satire to bear on that hapless planet, Earth, Lem sends his unlucky cosmonaut, Ijon Tichy, to the Eighth Futurological Congress. Caught up in local revolution, Tichy is shot and so critically wounded that he is flashfrozen to await a future cure—a future whose strangeness exceeds anything the congress conjectured.Translated by Michael Kandel.“A vision of Earth’s future where the authorities dose the population with ‘psychemicals’ to make life in a desperately over-populated world worth living.”—Boston Globe

Here is Richard McGuire's unique graphic novel based on the legendary 1989 comic strip of the same name. Richard McGuire's groundbreaking comic strip Here was published under Art Spiegelman's editorship at RAW in 1989. Built in six pages of interlocking panels, dated by year, it collapsed time and space to tell the story of the corner of a room - and its inhabitants - between the years 500,957,406,073 BC and 2033 AD. The strip remains one of the most influential and widely discussed contributions to the medium, and it has now been developed, expanded and reimagined by the artist into this full-length, full-colour graphic novel - a must for any fan of the genre. 'From now on, McGuire will be known as the author of the novel Here, because it's a work of literature and art unlike any seen or read before. A book like this comes along once a decade, if not a century' Chris Ware, Guardian 'Promises to leapfrog immediately to the front ranks of the graphic-novel genre' New York Times Richard McGuire is a regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine. He has written and illustrated both children's books and experimental comics. His work has appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney's, Le Monde and Libération. He has written and directed two omnibus feature films, designed and manufactured his own line of toys, and is also the founder and bass player of the band Liquid Liquid.

An unparalleled work of historical conjecture, ranging imaginatively over huge tracts of the American popular consciousness, Don DeLillo's Libra contains an introduction by the author in Penguin Modern Classics. In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of JFK will galvanize the nation against Communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped. Don DeLillo (b.1936) was born and raised in New York City. Americana (1971), his first novel, announced the arrival of a major literary talent, and the novels that followed confirmed his reputation as one of the most distinctive and compelling voices in late-twentieth-century American fiction. DeLillo's comic gifts come to the fore in White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award, Underworld (1997), hailed by Martin Amis as 'the ascension of a great writer', Cosmopolis (2003), adapted into a film by David Cronenberg, due to be released later this year, and Falling Man (2007), a novel about the aftereffects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. If you enjoyed Libra, you might like DeLillo's Americana, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Don DeLillo's apocalyptic imagination takes on the assassination of John F. Kennedy... Breathtaking' Newsday

Two tales, The Manor and The Estate, chronicle the lives of three generations of the Jacoby family against the advent of modern civilization in nineteenth-century Poland

Twenty-five of the finest science fiction short stories from one of the genre's greatest writers, Isaac Asimov. Isaac Asimov was the Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America, the founder of robot ethics, and one of the world's most prolific authors of fiction and non-fiction. Asimov's short fiction has been enjoyed by millions for more than half a century. Many of the stories in this collection are classics of the genre, including 'Living Space', which looks at the consequences of the existence of parallel universes and what would happen if life on Earth never developed. Always entertaining and thought provoking, these stories display Asimov's mastery of the short story form. He remains supreme as the thinking person's science fiction writer.

Vineland is hardly anyone’s favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon’s return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity’s Rainbow, it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked Vineland opens up new ways of thinking about Pynchon’s writing and about how we read and how we live in the rough currents of history. Beginning with his early besotted encounters with Vineland, Coviello reads Pynchon’s offbeat novel of sixties insurgents stranded in the Reaganite summer of 1984 as a delirious stoner comedy that is simultaneously a work of heartsick fury and political grief: a portrait of the hard afterlives of failed revolution in a period of stifling reaction. Offering a roving meditation on the uses of criticism and the practice of friendship, the fashioning of publics and counterpublics, the sentence and the police, Coviello argues that Vineland is among the most abundant and far-sighted of late-century American excursions into novelistic possibility. Departing from visions of Pynchon as the arch-postmodernist, erudite and obscure, he discloses an author far more companionable and humane. In Pynchon’s harmonizing of joyousness and outrage, comedy and sorrow, Coviello finds a model for thinking through our catastrophic present.