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This is the story of Gurion Maccabee, age 10: a lover, a fighter, a scholar, and a truly spectacular talker. Gurion has been expelled from 3 Jewish schools for acts of violence and messianic tendencies. He ends up in a special lockdown program for the most hopeless cases at Aptakisic Junior High. But in just 4 days Gurion's search for righteousness sparks a violent, unstoppable rebellion. Driven equally by moral fervour and teenage exuberance, The Instructions is hilarious, troubling, empathetic, monumental, breakneck, romantic and unforgettable.

Escaping the ghetto 11-year-old Hugo is left by his mother in the local brothel, where Mariana, one of the prostitutes, has agreed to hide him. Mariana is a bitterly unhappy woman who hates what she has done to her life, and night after night Hugo sits in her closet and listens uncomprehendingly as she rages at the Nazi soldiers who come and go. Quickly the two become fiercely protective of each other and, as her life spirals downwards, Mariana reaches out for consolation to the adoring boy who is on the cusp of manhood.

In some respects this is just another book about growing up. We all have to do it and none of find it easy. Growing up in a small town in America is bad enough but growing up in one of the most beautiful spots in America probably accentuates how ugly the rest of life can get. In these interlinked short stories we get to see one boy's struggles as he tries to understand the world about him and why he isn't always attracted to the beautiful things in his life.

In the latest installment of Lethe in Spain, the Director calls the Senora's apartment with an unfavorable piece of news. Lethe returns to his room where he longingly looks over the edge of the balcony and tries to imagine his future in Spain.

WW2 is about to start but life for a young boy in a small town in Albania is still a game. Yet, as the town falls to the Italians, the Greeks, then the Nazis, the boy grows up. Falling in love with unattainable women, seduced by magic and literature and finally forced to flee, his existence changes from marvellous, terrifying and extraordinary into a primitive world where the severed arm of a British airman becomes a talisman and girls vanish-possibly killed by their own fathers. Forging the unexpected and terrible link between childish playfulness and a horrifying political future, Kadare has created a story with a depth and brilliance characteristic of the master story-teller.

"Dear friend, I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and didn't try to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have. Please don't try to figure out who she is because then you might figure out who I am, and I really don't want you to do that. I will call people by different names or generic names because I don't want you to find me. I didn't enclose a return address for the same reason. I mean nothing bad by this. Honest. I just need to know that someone out there listens and understands and doesn't try to sleep with people even if they could have. I need to know that these people exist." - The Perks of Being a Wallflower. The film is out soon.

Podcast fiction delivers chapter eight, Mammon's House part two. A descent into the unknown.