Full AspenCat Catalog

"In Killing Commendatore, a thirty-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a previously unseen painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman...

"Yurika is a freelancer in the Tokyo underworld. She poses as a prostitute, carefully targeting potential Johns, selecting powerful and high-profile men. When she is alone with them, she drugs them and takes incriminating photos to sell for blackmail purposes. She knows very little about the organization she's working for, and is perfectly satisfied with the arrangement, as long as it means she doesn't have to reveal anything about her identity, either....

"A luxury yacht crashes into a Rykjavike pier. But the boat is empty; no one is on board. What has happened to the crew? And what has happened to the family who were very much present when the yacht left Lisbon? What should Thóra Gudmundsdóttir, the series sleuth, make of the rumors that the vessel was cursed? She is spooked even more when she boards the yacht and thinks she sees one of the missing children. Where is Karitas, the glamorous young...

A man is making a leather mask with an iron spike fixed in the middle of the forehead. Meanwhile, a school reunion has left Inspector Erlendur's colleague Sigurdur Óli unhappy with life in the police force. While Iceland is enjoying an economic boom, Oli's relationship is on the rocks and soon even his position in the department is compromised. When a favor for a friend goes wrong and a woman dies before his eyes, Oli has a murder investigation on...

Hitomi, the inexperienced young woman who works the register at Mr. Nakano's thrift shop, has fallen for her coworker, the oddly reserved Takeo. Unsure of how to attract his attention, she seeks advice from her employer's sister Masayo, whose sentimental entanglements make her a somewhat unconventional guide. But thanks in part to Masayo, Hitomi will come to realize that love, desire, and intimacy require acceptance not only of idiosyncrasies but...

""A kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room."-Jonathan Lethem. An aging writer, disillusioned with the state of literary culture, attempts to disappear in the most cosmically dramatic manner: traveling to the Hadron Collider, merging with the God particle, and transforming into an omnipresent deity -- a meta-writer -- capable of rewriting reality. With biting humor and a...

Hatched at the same time, the chick is successful at imitating the duck until the latter goes for a swim.

Computer hacker realizes the world is a hoax, an elaborate deception spun by all-powerful machines of artificial intelligence that control us. In an anti-utopian future, the real world as we know it is nothing more than a computer construct created by an all-powerful artificial intelligence. A small group of humans has found a way out of the construct and are now fighting for the future of the human race.

"When thirty-four-year-old Ms. Shibata gets a new job in Tokyo to escape sexual harassment at her old one, she finds that, as the only woman at her new workplace-a company that manufactures cardboard tubes-she is expected to do all the menial tasks. One day she announces that she can't clear away her colleagues' dirty cups-because she's pregnant and the smell nauseates her. The only thing is . . . Ms. Shibata is not pregnant. Pregnant Ms. Shibata...

In a near future, an alien race has hit the Earth in an unbeatable assault. Major William Cage has never seen a day of combat, but is dropped into a suicide mission and killed within minutes. Cage now finds himself thrown into a time loop-forcing him to live out the same day over and over, fighting and dying each time. With each "life", Cage learns more fighting skills, so that when he and warrior Rita Vrataski take the fight to the aliens, they are...