The ways in which Americans respond to foreign cultures through the story of three American travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa in the aftermath of World War II.

Recognized throughout the world for his brilliance as a novelist and playwright, Yukio Mishima is also noted as a master of the short story in his native Japan. Here nine of his finest stories, selected by Mishima himself, represent his extraordinary ability to depict a wide variety of human beings in moments of significance. Often his characters are modern Japanese who turn out to be not so liberated from the past as they had thought.

In the five stories included in this collection - "The Wall," "The Room," "Erostratus," "Intimacy" and "The Childhood of a Leader"--The French master of Existentialism displays his powers of narrative and psychological insight in the stories of a modern Erostratus who is compelled to murder, a psychotic who communicates his hallucinations to his formerly-sane spouse, an unfaithful wife still bound to her impotent husband, a boy's metamorphosis into...

"Momo has been one of the ever-changing ragbag of whores’ children at Madame Rosa’s boarding house in Paris ever since he can remember. But when the check that pays for his keep no longer arrives and as Madame Rosa becomes too ill to climb the stairs to their apartment, he determines to support her any way he can. This sensitive, slightly macabre love story between Momo and Madame Rosa has a supporting cast of transvestites, pimps, and witch doctors...

If you associate Henry James with nothing but fussy, mannered drawing-room dramas, the novel The Sacred Fount will come as a pleasant surprise. During the course of what should be a relaxing weekend getaway in the country, the narrator begins to sense that something is amiss. The first clue comes in a series of ever-so-slight shifts in the personalities and behaviors of his fellow guests. Is it all in his head, or has he stumbled across

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A sequel to A Coney Island of the Mind (written forty years after the original in what the author has called "a poetry seizure" that lasted more than a year), A Far Rockaway of the Heart is a sequence of one hundred and one related poems with recurrent themes. The author also thinks of it as a kind of caustic critique of modern poetry, including confrontations with or parodies of major figures in the literary avant-garde before the arrival of the...