J.R. Ackerley offers a retrospective account of his sixteen-year companionship with his German shepherd.

The journey that Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on in 1933?to cross Europe on foot with an emergency allowance of one pound a day?proved so rich in experiences that when much later he sat down to describe them, they overflowed into more than one volume. Undertaken as the storms of war gathered, and providing a background for the events that were beginning to unfold in Central Europe, Leigh Fermor?s still-unfinished account of his journey has established...

Out of a magical, talking piece of wood, the lonely woodcarver Geppetto carves himself a son-a mischievous puppet he names Pinocchio. Ignorant of right and wrong, Pinocchio runs away from Geppetto, and embarks on a series of increasingly fantastic misadventures, until he learns that he can become a real boy by doing good deeds. The Adventures of Pinocchio is a classic children's story and has been adapted many times since it was originally published...

"Journalist, party girl, bookworm, muse, artist: by the time she'd hit thirty, Eve Babitz had been all of these things. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing Duchamp over a chessboard and as one of Ed Ruscha's Five 1965 Girlfriends, it turns out that Babitz was a writer with stories of her own. In Eve's Hollywood she gives us indelible snapshots of southern California's haute bohemians, of surpassingly lovely high school ingenues ("people with brains...

"The last novel by one of Germany's most important postwar writers, All for Nothing was published in Germany in 2006, just before Walter Kempowski's death. It describes with matter-of-fact clarity and acuity, and a roving point of view, the atmosphere in East Prussia during the winter of 1944-1945 as the German forces are in retreat and the Red Army approaches. The von Globig family's manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into a state of disrepair....

"Dissipatio HG is a surrealistic fantasy novel where humankind disappears leaving its cities behind; only the narrator remains, and he wanders between Italy and Switzerland, contemplating the empty cities"--

"Little Snow Landscape and Other Stories opens in 1905 with an encomium by the twenty-six- year-old Swiss author Robert Walser (1878-1956) to his Heimat and concludes in 1933 with a meditation on his childhood in Biel, the town of his birth, published inthe last of his four years in the cantonal mental hospital in Waldau outside Bern. Between these two poles, the book maps Walser's outer and inner wanderings in various narrative modes, including essaylets,...

"Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsummer, a young woman named Takiko departs on foot for the hospital to give birth to a baby boy. Her pregnancy, the result of a casual affair with a married man, is a source of sorrow and shame to her abusive parents. ForTakiko, however, it is a cause for reverie. Her baby, she imagines, will be hers and hers alone, a challenge but also an instrument for her long-wished-for independence. Takiko's first year as a mother...