Impedimenta

A collection of more than fifty stories about witches from around the world. There are tales of banshees, crones and beauties in disguise from China, Siberia, the Caribbean, Armenia, Portugal and Australia. The characters featured include Italy's Witch Bea-Witch, Lilith, Kali, and Twitti Glyn...

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender―by the renowned Yugoslavian writer Dubravka Ugresic―begins in the Berlin Zoo, with the contents of Roland the Walrus's stomach displayed beside his pool (Roland died in August, 1961). These objects―a cigarette lighter, lollipop sticks, a beer-bottle opener, etc.―like the fictional...

A London museum showcases Garamantian treasures for the first time, drawing huge crowds eager to see the Golden Child and Golden Cord. Rumors of a curse on the Golden Child grow when a mysterious murder occurs. As a German expert hints that the artifacts...

There was once a little gardener and his garden meant everything to him. He worked hard, very hard, but he was just too little (or at least he felt he was). In this gentle, beautiful tale, Emily Hughes, the celebrated author of Wild, departs...

When the young millionaire Jacob Blunt shows up at the office of the prestigious Doctor George Matthews, a psychiatrist with a bland and placid life, he will completely change the course of his existence. Suddenly, the respected psychiatrist is swept into a strange, surreal...

Krakow, 1945. Stefan Trzyniecki — the young doctor who survived the psychiatric ward at the Transfiguration Hospital and the extermination camp among the dead — returns to a city devastated by war, covered in rubble and ash, where mutilated facades and empty walls seem...

Walter Tevis — the master of American letters who, like no other, explored the hidden facets of talent, defeat, and redemption in works such as Mockingbird, The Hustler, and The Steps of the Sun — brought to the short story the same narrative precision...

The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes has become a contemporary classic. With over 80,000 readers, this luminous and brutal novel tells the story of Aleksy's final summer with his mother, shaped by pain, illness, and a long-overdue reconciliation. Confronting their past, mother and...

In the small and the insignificant: that is where life hides, that is where it builds its nest. Our narrator suffers from a strange syndrome: he has pathological empathy, he is able to enter the memories of others without permission. Thus, he travels from...

Winter of 1952. Penelope Fitzgerald’s life is crumbling: her husband — brilliant, yet consumed by alcohol — can no longer support the household; debts are mounting, and she, pregnant with her third child, sees almost no way out. Then, an unusual letter arrives: the...

A selection of horror stories that show the darkest side of the plant world. An anthology that brings together names like Roald Dahl, Eudora Welty and H.P. Lovecraft. Bloodthirsty orchids, entire forests that rebel against those who massacred them, mushrooms as beautiful as they...

June 1941. A quiet village in Central Lithuania awakes to the arrival of the Soviet Army. Young Algiukas...s family is given barely ten minutes to pack before being herded onto a crowded freight train bound for the snowy plains of Siberia. Leaving behind the...

Nanda Gray, the daughter of a Catholic convert, is nine when she is sent to the Convent of Five Wounds. Quick-witted, resilient and eager to please, she accepts this closed world where, with all the enthusiasm of the outsider, her desires and passions become...

Fifteen stories in which poisonous flowers, unsettling animals, rural rituals, and overgrown gardens fracture everyday life. Hiroko Oyamada, author of *The Hole*, returns with a magnetic, subtle, and disquieting book: an immersion into the strangest, most beautiful, and most ominous side of Japan. A...

Alex Halberstadt’s quest takes him across the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth, where decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family. In Ukraine, he tracks down his paternal grandfather—most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin. He revisits Lithuania,...

Award-winning and international best-selling novel by Laird Koenig. Thirteen-year-old Rynn is a gifted prodigy who lives in a big old house with her reclusive father...all alone. Or does she? When Rynn's nosy landlady and a lecherous neighbor begin to suspect that this little girl...

Oscillating between disappointment and insecurity, between disenchantment and despair, Ileana struggles to hold on to the idea of seeing her seriously ill mother again, who has left her in the care of her aunts. But her fear grips her, her dreams return pieces of...

What happens when self-love coexists with pain and vanity? How can you live in the mystery and restlessness of not having a story to tell? Maryse Condé answers these questions from the story of three generations of island women united by the force of...

Before our history began, another -- now forgotten -- civilization thrived. The people who roamed Early Earth were much like us: curious, emotional, funny, ambitious, and vulnerable. In this series of illustrated and linked tales, Isabel Greenberg chronicles the explorations of a young man...

Witty and irreverently funny, this novel follows Flora Poste, a young woman with an “expensive, athletic, and lengthy” education who, after being orphaned, moves in with her eccentric relatives, the Starkadders, on a remote farm in the English countryside. Surrounded by strange and brooding...