OK, today...
Memoranda - Jeffrey Ford *Second of the trilogy by Jeffrey Ford, one of the best contemporary authors in the field. Pretty much everything Ford touches turns to gold in the form of multiple awards including Theodore Sturgeon award, multiple World Fantasy Awards, Edgar Allan Poe, International Horror Guild, Nebula and Hugo awards. Th influence of Kafka is fairly clear. Blurb: In the Well-Built City, the Master, Drachton Below, rules with total power and his justice is partially determined by Physiognomy, the pseudo-science of judging a person by his physical features. More than just an alternate history or Earth, the world of the Well-Built City is Ford at his finest, with bizarre creatures, trees, foods, drinks, customs—nothing is mundane in the writings of Ford. From the hallucinations of the drug, Beauty, to the destruction of buildings from a headache, the reader will find nothing like he has ever read before.
The Beyond - Jeffrey Ford *Final of the trilogy. Blurb: Jeffrey Ford's World Fantasy Award-winner The Physiognomy introduces Cley, master of a twisted and terming science in a nightmare city. In the brilliantly audacious Memoranda, the reformed physiognomist embarked on a surreal quest through the mind of the monster who imagined the dark metropolis. Now comes the third and final leg of Cley's bizarre life journey.
Crack'd Pot Trail - Steven Erikson *Fourth of the Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novellas.
Hellstorm's Hive - Frank Herbert *Latest in the SF Masterwork series. Blurb: America is a police state and it is about to be threatened by the most hellish enemy in the world: insects.When the Agency discovered that Dr Hellstroms Project 40 was a cover for a secret laboratory, a special team of agents was immediately dispatched to discover its true purpose and its weaknesses - it could not be allowed to continue. What they discovered was a nightmare more horrific and hideous than even their paranoid government minds could devise.
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett *Classic crime fiction, part physiological novel showing Hammett's literary prowess. Blurb: This 1929 novel features the nameless detective employed by the Continental Detective Agency, and hence called the "Continental Op." The novel's plot combines four short stories that are not tightly linked. As the Op says, "Plans are all right sometimes. And sometimes just stirring things up is all right." The "stir-it-up" approach prevails in Hammett's first novel, which emphasizes brilliant scenes, a traditional first-person narrator, dialogue that is funny, and action that is highly stylized, rather than plausible plotting or characterization.
The Moon and the Bonfires - Cesare Pavese *NYRB edn. of the late great post-war Italian novelist Pavese's last and arguably greatest novel. Blurb: The nameless narrator of The Moon and the Bonfires, Cesare Pavese’s final masterpiece, returns to Italy from California after the Second World War. He has done well in America, but success hasn’t taken the edge off his memories of childhood, when he was an orphan living at the mercy of a bitterly poor farmer. He wants to learn what happened in his native village over the long, terrible years of Fascism; perhaps, he even thinks, he will settle down. And yet as he uncovers a secret and savage history from the war—a tale of betrayal and reprisal, sex and death—he finds that the past still haunts the present. The Moon and the Bonfires is a novel of intense lyricism and tragic import, a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature that has been unavailable to American readers for close to fifty years. Here it appears in a vigorous new English version by R. W. Flint, whose earlier translations of Pavese’s fiction were acclaimed by Leslie Fiedler as “absolutely lucid and completely incantatory.”