Bücher der Reihe Vintage International

When a breach birth leaves Paulo severely disabled, his father, the articulate, unsentimental Professor Frigerio, struggles to come to terms with his son’s condition. Face to face with his own limitations, Frigerio confronts the strange way society around him handles Paolo’s handicaps and observes his surprising gifts. In spare, deeply affecting episodes, the professor of language explores the nuanced boundaries between “normal” and “disabled” worlds.A remarkable memoir of fathering, winner of the 2001 Strega Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary honor, Born Twice is noted Italian author Guiseppe Pontiggia’s American debut. Sometimes meditative, often humorous, and always probing, Pontiggia’s haunting characters linger and resound long after the book is done.

Shakespeare called Othello "an extravagant and wheeling stranger/Of here and every where." In this exciting anthology, Caryl Phillips has collected writings by thirty-nine extravagant strangers: British writers who were born outside of Britain and see it with clear and critical eyes. These eloquent and incisive voices prove that English literature, far from being pure or homogenous, has in fact been shaped and influenced by outsiders for over two hundred years. Here are slave writers, such as Ignatius Sancho, an eightieth century African who became a friend to Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne; writers born in the colonies such as Thackeray, Kipling, and Orwell; "subject writers," such as C.L.R. James and V.S. Naipaul; foreign émigrés, such as Joseph Conrad and Kazuo Ishiguro; and postcolonial observers of the British scene, such as Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, and Anita Desai. With the eloquent and often inspiring collection, Phillips proves, if proof be needed, that the greatest literature is often born out of irreconcilable tensions between a writer and his or her society.

An intriguing, fabulously bizarre debut collection of short stories by prize-winning German writer Ingo Schulze, author of Simple Stories.These thirty-three macabre, often comical short pieces revolve around moments of odd bliss-moments seized by characters who have found ways to conquer the bleakness of everyday life in the chaotic world of post-communist Russia. Peopled by Mafia gunmen, desperate young prostitutes, bewildered foreign businessmen, and even a trio of hungry devils, the stories are by turns tragic and bleakly funny. From a sly retelling of the legend of St. Nicholas featuring a rich American named Nick, to a lavish gourmet feast in which the young female cook ends up as the main dish, these stories are above all playful and even surreal-and many of them are masterful tributes to Russian writers from Gogol to Nabokov.Translated by John E. Woods.