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A hilarious, darkly comic graphic retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet in radically condensed prose by legendary Swedish children's author Lindgren and illustrator Hsglund. Bold and brilliant, irreverent and humane, this is the perfect irreverent gift for Shakespeare readers of all ages.ages.

The 100th Anniversary Edition of Virginia Woolf's timely, overlooked second novel-a remarkable story of two women navigating the possibilities opened up by the struggle for women's suffrage-introduced for Restless Classics by bestselling author of Fates and Furies Lauren Groff and illustrated by graphic artist Kristen Radtke.

Restless Classics presents the ninetieth anniversary edition of an undersung gem of the Harlem Renaissance: Nella Larsen's Passing, a captivating and prescient exploration of identity, sexuality, self-invention, class, and race set amidst the pealing boisterousness of the Jazz Age.When childhood friends Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry cross paths at a whites-only restaurant, it's been decades since they last met. Married to a bigoted white man who has no idea that she is African American, Clare has fully embraced her ability to "pass" as a white woman. Irene, also light-skinned and living in Harlem, is shocked by Clare's rejection of her heritage, though she too passes when it suits her needs. This encounter sparks an intense relationship between the two women who, as acclaimed critic and novelist Darryl Pinckney writes in his insightful introduction, reflect Larsen's own experience of being "between black and white, and culturally at home nowhere."In a culture intent on setting boundaries, Clare and Irene refuse to adhere to expectations of gender, race, or class, culminating in a tragic clash of identities, as their relationship swings between emotional hostility and intense attraction.

From Alejandro Jodorowsky—the legendary director of The Holy Mountain, spiritual guru behind Psychomagic and The Way of Tarot, and author of Where the Bird Sings Best—comes another autobiographical tour-de-force: a mythopoetic portrait of the artist as a young man in Chile in the tumultuous 1930s.In Where the Bird Sings Best, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s visionary autobiographical novel that NPR compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude and called “a genius’s surreal vision brought to life,” we followed Jodorowsky’s predecessors as they fled to Chile amid a fantastical array of circuses, Tarot, Catholic and Jewish mysticism, sexual extravagance, political violence, and the ghost of a wise rabbi serving as advisor. Now, in The Son of Black Thursday, Jodorowsky himself takes the stage as we’re introduced to the unforgettable cast of his early years in Chile in the 1930s. We follow his father, Jaime, who’s obsessed with assassinating the dictator he ends up serving; his mother, Sarah, a giantess who never speaks but communicates through operatic singing; his grandparents, Ukrainian Jewish exiles fleeing persecution in the Ukraine; his twin sister, who is made to suckle a mannequin until she is ten in order to silence her delirious speeches; among other creatures of every description as they struggle against the misery and oppression of the copper mines of the Chilean desert. As he’s done across media from film to comics to mystic philosophy to fiction, Jodorowsky once again demonstrates his boundless capacity for creating a universe of wonder, horror, humor, magic, and cosmic truth beyond our wildest imaginings. The Son of Black Thursday is a gripping novel from one of our most treasured masters.

The Restless Classics edition of Chekhov: Stories for Our Time presents a must-have collection by the great Russian author who captured humanity in all its complexity, and reintroduces Chekhov as a funny, playful, deeply human, and thoroughly modern writer.The great 19th-century Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov wrote nearly one thousand stories, a body of work that is unmatched in its alchemy of sensitivity, wisdom, precision, verve, soulfulness, and economy. Chekhov’s sensibility was radically human and thoroughly modern: write not how you think things should be, but rather as they are. Universally recognized as one of the greatest short story writers of all time, he revolutionized the form and had a profound influence on his successors from Flannery O’Connor to Alice Munro. As the celebrated Russian-immigrant author Boris Fishman writes in his bold, incisive, and delightfully counterintuitive introduction to this Restless Classics collection, Chekhov is funny, optimistic, ceaselessly curious, and undogmatic—a significant break from the bleak and morally rigid tradition of his contemporaries Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Unlike those peers born to privilege, Chekhov was raised in the peasantry and worked as a doctor. In his writing, he portrays the complexity of human beings as changeable and contingent, neither saints nor sinners—an approach intimately linked with his work as a clinician and humanitarian. Chekhov’s humanity, just as much as his mastery of the writing craft, is potent medicine in times that seem so divided by ideology and antipathy for groups seen as “other.” The first new selection of his work in over a decade, the Restless Classics edition of Chekhov: Stories for Our Time pairs beloved favorites with lesser known gems, all stunningly illustrated by Matt McCann: a perfect introduction for novices and a must-have for Chekhov devotees.

The Man Booker International–winning author of Broken April and The Siege, Albania’s most renowned novelist, and perennial Nobel Prize contender Ismail Kadare explores three giants of world literature—Aeschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare—through the lens of resisting totalitarianism. In isolationist Albania, which suffered under a Communist dictatorship for nearly half a century, classic global literature reached Ismail Kadare across centuries and borders—and set him free. The struggles of Hamlet, Dante, and Aeschylus’s tragic figures gave him an understanding of totalitarianism that shaped his novels. In these incisive critical essays informed by personal experience, Kadare provides powerful evidence that great literature is the enemy of dictatorship and imbues these timeless stories with powerful new meaning. With eloquent prose and the narrative drive of a great mystery novel, Kadare renews our readings of the classics and lends them a distinctly Albanian tint. Like Mark Twain’s Mississippi River, Márquez’s Macondo, and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Kadare’s Albania emerges as a microcosm of civilization; here, blood vengeance in mountain communities reaches the dramatic heights of Hamlet’s dilemma, funereal rites take on the air of Greek tragedy, and political repression gives life the feel of Dante’s nine circles of Hell. Like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Essays on World Literature casts reading itself as a daring act of resistance to artistic suppression. Kadare’s insights into the Western canon secure his own place within it.

¿Cognizant of his impending death, Piglia, the Argentine titan of letters who died of A.L.S. in January, prepared his 327 notebooks for publication in a trilogy¿. Splendidly crafted and interspliced with essays and stories, this beguiling work is to a diary as Piglia is to ¿Emilio Renzi¿: a lifelong alter ego, a highly self-conscious shadow volume that brings to bear all of Pigliäs prowess as it illuminates his process of critical reading and the inevitable tensions between art and life.¿ ¿Mara Faye Lethem, The New York Times Book ReviewA giant of contemporary Latin American literature, Argentine novelist Ricardo Pigliäs secret magnum opus was a compilation of 327 notebooks that he composed over nearly six decades, in which he imagined himself as his literary alter ego, Emilio Renzi. A world-weary detective, Renzi stars in many of his creator's works, much like Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman. But the Renzi of these diaries is something more complex¿a multilayered reconstruction of the self that is teased out over intricate, illuminating pages.As Piglia/Renzi develops as a reader and writer, falls in love, and tussles with his tyrannical father, we get eye-opening perspectives on Latin Americäs tumultuous twentieth century. Obsessed with literary giants¿from Borges and Cortázar (both of whom he knew), to Kafka and Camus¿The Diaries comprise a celebration of reading as a vital, existential activity.When Piglia learned he had a fatal illness in 2011, he raced to complete his mysterious masterwork as rumors about the book intensified among his many fans. First released in Spanish as a trilogy to tremendous applause, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi cements Pigliäs place in the global canon.

Translated by Megan McDowell. A debut about the demented final project of a brilliant mathematician. An allegory of the clash between European and Latin American history.

Restless Classics presents The Souls of Black Folk: W. E. B. Du Bois¿s seminal work of sociology, with searing insights into our complex, corrosive relationship with race and the African-American consciousness. Reconsidered for the era of Obama, Trump, and Black Lives Matter, the new edition includes an incisive introduction from rising cultural critic Vann R. Newkirk II and stunning illustrations by the artist Steve Prince. Published in 1903, exactly forty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, W.E.B. Du Bois¿s The Souls of Black Folk fell into the hands of an American nation that had still not yet found ¿peace from its sins.¿ With such deep disappointment among African-Americans still awaiting full emancipation, Du Bois believed that the moderate and conciliatory efforts of civil-rights leader Booker T. Washington could only go so far. Taking to the page, Du Bois produced a resounding declaration on the rights of the American man and laid out an agenda that was at the time radical but has since proven prophetic. In fourteen chapters that move fluidly between historical and sociological essays, song and poetry, personal recollection and fiction, The Souls of Black Folk frames ¿the color line¿ as the central problem of the twentieth century and tries to answer the question, ¿Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?¿ Striking in his psychological precision as well as his political foresight, Du Bois advanced ithe influential ideas of ¿double-consciousness¿¿an inner conflict created by the seemingly irreconcilable ¿black¿ and ¿American¿ identities¿and ¿the veil,¿ through which African-Americans must see a spectrum of economic, social, and political opportunities entirely differently from their white counterparts¿.Now, over fifty years after Du Bois¿s death and the Civil Rights Act, we need this seminal work more urgently than ever. Long overdue for reconsideration, it is the latest installment of Restless Classics, featuring illustrations by master printmaker Steve Prince and a new introduction by Atlantic staff writer Vann R. Newkirk II.

In this deadly-funny debut novel by renowned Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres, five macho friends in Rio’s Copacabana reflect on their hedonistic glory days—now supplanted by the indignities of aging—in what turn out to be their final moments.With uncanny insight into the less virtuous corners of the male psyche, Fernanda Torres brings us five friends who once milked the high life of Rio’s Bossa Nova age and are now left with memories—parties, marriages, divorces, fixations, inhibitions, bad decisions—and the grim realities of getting old. Álvaro lives alone and bemoans the evils of his ex-wife. Sílvio can’t give up the excesses of sex and drugs. Ribeiro is a vain, Viagra-abusing beach bum. Neto is the square, a faithful husband until the end. Ciro is the Don Juan envied by all—but the first to die. Cutting in on these swan songs are the testimonies of those the men seduced, cheated, loved, and abandoned: their wives and children. Edgy, funny, and wise, The End is a candid tropical tragicomedy and an epitaph for a lost generation of machos. 

Restless Classics presents the Three-Hundredth Anniversary Edition of Robinson Crusoe, the classic Caribbean adventure story and foundational English novel, with new illustrations and an introduction by Jamaica Kincaid that contextualizes the book for our globalized, postcolonial era.When Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, many of the readers who quickly became obsessed with the adventure story were convinced that it was a true-life travelogue written by its protagonist. Three centuries later, the book remains a classic of the adventure genre and is widely considered the first great English novel. The book also has much to teach us, in retrospect, about the entrenched attitudes of colonizers toward the colonized, and it stands at the beginning of a long tradition of colonial literature and representation that still resounds today. Now with a new introduction by Jamaica Kincaid and vivid illustrations by the Mexican artist Eko, the Restless Classics edition of Robinson Crusoe invites readers to reconsider this tale of a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being ultimately rescued.

Newly introduced by leading Quixote scholar Ilan Stavans, this 400th Anniversary edition of Don Quixote of La Mancha¿called the most popular book in history after the Bible and the first modern novel¿inaugurates Restless Classics: interactive encounters with great books and inspired teachers. Each Restless Classic is beautifully designed with original artwork, a new introduction for the trade audience, and a video teaching series and live online book club discussions led by passionate experts. Described as ¿the novel that invented modernity,¿ Miguel de Cervantes¿s Don Quixote of La Mancha has become since its publication in Spain in two parts¿the first in 1605, the second in 1615¿a machine of meaning, endlessly adapted into ballet, theater, dance, film, music, and television, not to mention a veritable tourist industry. Lionel Trilling argued that ¿all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.¿ Mark Twain was a passionate fan. Flaubert modeled Madame Bovary after it. Dostoyevsky reimagined its protagonist in The Idiot. And Borges, in his story about Pierre Menard, looked at it as the gravitational center of Hispanic civilization. Milan Kundera fittingly summarized this unstoppable devotion when he said that ¿Cervantes teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.¿ Of course, Don Quixote has its detractors, too. Nabokov, for instance, maintained it was one of the cruelest narratives ever. Still, after 400 years, the book remains with us, winding improbably through history like the famous errant knight and his companion, Sancho Panza. The commemorative Restless Classics edition, published on the four-hundredth anniversary of its full release, features John Ormsby¿s canonical English translation, illustrations by award-winning Mexican artist Eko, and an insightful, thought-provoking introduction by Ilan Stavans, one of the foremost public intellectuals today. Don Quixote, Stavans writes, is ¿not only a novel but a manual of life. Yoüll find in it anything you need, from lessons on how to speak and eat and love to an exhortation of a disciplined, focused life, an argument against censorship, and a call to make lasting friends, which, in Cervantes¿s words, is `what makes bearable our long journey from birth to death¿.¿ The volume includes access to an interactive series of video lectures by Stavans, available online at restlessbooks.com/quixote. The videos serve as map to this restless classic, which speaks more eloquently than ever to our perennial desire to sacrifice for a dream in order to see its true worth.

¿Ruth Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist priest, sets herself the task of staring at her face in a mirror for three full, uninterrupted hours; her ruminations ripple out from personal and familial memories to wise and honest meditations on families and aging, race and the body.¿ ¿Minneapolis Star TribuneWhat did your face look like before your parents were born? In The Face: A Time Code, bestselling author and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki recounts, in moment-to-moment detail, a profound encounter with memory and the mirror. According to ancient Zen tradition, ¿your face before your parents were born¿ is your true face. Who are you? What is your true self? What is your identity before or beyond the dualistic distinctions, like father/mother and good/evil, that define us?With these questions in mind, Ozeki challenges herself to spend three hours gazing into her own reflection, recording her thoughts, and noticing every possible detail. Those solitary hours open up a lifetime's worth of meditations on race, aging, family, death, the body, self doubt, and, finally, acceptance. In this lyrical short memoir, Ozeki calls on her experience of growing up in the wake of World War II as a half-Japanese, half-Caucasian American; of having a public face as an author; of studying the intricate art of the Japanese Noh mask; of being ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest; and of her own and her parents¿ aging, to paint a rich and utterly unique portrait of a life as told through a face.Alternately philosophical, funny, personal, political, and poetic, the short memoirs in The Face series offer unique perspectives from some of our favorite writers. Find out more at www.restlessbooks.com/the-face.

¿A Planet for Rent is the English-language debut of Yoss, one of Cuba's most lauded writers of science fiction. Translated by David Frye, these linked stories craft a picture of a dystopian future: Aliens called xenoids have invaded planet Earth, and people are looking to flee the economically and socially bankrupt remains of human civilization. Yoss' smart and entertaining novel tackles themes like prostitution, immigration and political corruption. Ultimately, it serves as an empathetic yet impassioned metaphor for modern-day Cuba, where the struggle for power has complicated every facet of society¿ ¿NPR, Best Books of 2015Out of the modern-day dystopia of Cuba comes an instant classic from the island¿s most celebrated science fiction author: a raucous tale of a future in which a failing Earth is at the mercy of powerful capitalist alien colonizers.In A Planet for Rent, Yoss critiques life under Castro in the `90s by drawing parallels with a possible Earth of the not-so-distant future. Wracked by economic and environmental problems, the desperate planet is rescued, for better or worse, by alien colonizers, who remake the planet as a tourist destination. Ruled over by a brutal interstellar bureaucracy, dispossessed humans seek better lives via the few routes available¿working for the colonial police; eking out a living as black marketeers, drug dealers, or artists; prostituting themselves to exploitative extraterrestrial visitors¿or they face the cold void of space in rickety illegal ships.This inventive book marks the English-language debut of an astonishingly brave and imaginative Latin American voice.