Amélie Nothomb

Vint le moment où la souffrance des autres ne leur suffit plus : il leur en fallut le spectacle.

"The Japanese believe that until the age of three, children, whether Japanese or not, are gods, each one an okosama, or "lord child." On their third birthday they fall from grace and join the rest of the human race. In Amelie Nothomb's new novel, The Character of Rain, we learn that divinity is a difficult thing from which to recover, particularly if, like the child in this story, you have spent the first two and a half years of life in a nearly vegetative state."--BOOK JACKET.

""I lived everything during these three years: heroism, glory, treachery, love, indifference, suffering, humiliation. It was China, I was seven years old."". "So announces the narrator of Loving Sabotage, Amelie Nothomb's novel about a young girl who seems already stripped of illusions. The daughter of diplomats posted to Peking for three years in the mid-seventies, she charges about the grim confines of the gated government housing ghetto of San Li Tun on her "horse" (bicycle). In a tireless battle against boredom, she concocts a fantasy life as rich as her surroundings are bleak. During one of her tours of duty as a pathfinder in a war that has broken out in the ghetto between the children of various nations - a hilarious microcosm of "adult" world politics - she encounters a young Italian girl, Elena: beautiful, aloof, disdainful of silly games. Our heroine is instantly infatuated, and comes to realize the only fight worthy of her energies is shattering Elena's indifference."--BOOK JACKET.

In The Stranger Next Door, Alrene Stein explores how a small community with a declining industrial economy became the site of a bitter battle over gay rights. Fearing job loss and a feeling of being left behind, one Oregon town’s working-class residents allied with religious conservatives to deny the civil liberties of queer men and women. In a book that combines strong on-the-ground research and lucid analysis with a novelist’s imaginative sympathy, Stein’s exploration of how fear and uncertainty can cause citizens to shift blame onto “strangers” provides insight into the challenges the country faces in the age of Trump.

"Primera reimpresión, 2003"--Title page verso. Includes activities for readers.

After an unhappy love affair leaves him emotionally numb, a man becomes a hired killer, only to have his new life start unraveling when he reads the diary of a girl he was hired to kill, instead of turning it over to his employers. Could learning this dead girl's secrets lead to his redemption?

132 pages ; 21 cm

"To have an extraordinary life, Lucette believes, one must have and extraordinary name. Horrified by the pedestrian names her husband chooses for their unborn child (Tanguy if it's a boy, Joelle if it's a girl), Lucette does the only honorable thing to save her baby from such an unexceptional destiny - she kills her spouse. While in prison, Lucette gives birth to a daughter to whom she bequeaths the portentous name of an obscure saint, Plectrude, before hanging herself." "From her beginnings, Plectrude seems fated for a life like no other. Raised by an indulgent and adoring aunt, she is a dreamy child who is discovered to have enormous gifts as a dancer. Accepted at Paris's most prestigious ballet school, Plectrude devotes herself to artistic perfection, giving dance her heart and soul - and ultimately her body. As her world shatters as easily as her bones, she learns to survive in the only way she knows how - by committing an act of deadly self-preservation her mother would have understood best."--BOOK JACKET.