Reading the World

Publisher Comments
Originally published to wide critical acclaim in France, where it elicited comparisons to Art Spiegelman's Maus, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's wise, funny, and heartbreaking memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black... (read more)

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Bahauddin, Rumi's father, was not only a major force in the development of Islamic spirituality, but also deeply influential in his son's life. This delightful and provocative collection reveals the depth of thirteenth-century Sufi mystical wisdom and... (read more)

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To this haunting novel of wasted love, Kawabata brings the brushstroke suggestiveness and astonishing grasp of motive that earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature. As he chronicles the affair between a wealthy dilettante and the mountain geisha who... (read more)

From Powells.com
Haruki Murakami is generally considered the greatest Japanese writer of his generation, but at times he seems more in tune with the culture of the West than of his native country. Throughout his work, the food, music, movies, and literature... (read more)

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A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to... (read more)

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One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall... (read more)

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Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get... (read more)

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The master work by the 1988 Nobel Prize winner in literature, this stunning book, which introduces the engrossing saga of a Muslim family in Cairo during Egypt's occupation by British forces in the early 1990s, is "a majestic and capacious accomplishment"... (read more)

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Since it was first published in English, in 1946, Albert Camus's extraordinary first novel, The Stranger (L'Etranger), has had a profound impact on millions of American readers. Through this story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a... (read more)

Publisher Comments
Here, in an astonishing debut by a gifted storyteller, is the magnificent saga of proud and passionate men and women and the turbulent times through which they suffer and triumph. They are the Truebas. And theirs is a world you will not want to leave... (read more)

Powells.com Staff Pick
One of the most inventive books in recent decades, Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler has a nearly animate quality (or barely inanimate quality); its succession of unwinding mysteries suggests what it might be like to find oneself in a... (read more)

Powells.com Staff Pick
In 1938, Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges suffered a severe head wound that left him near death and unable to speak. Though he made a complete recovery, the experience appears to have tapped into the author's deepest creative reservoirs, for... (read more)