Amateurs
10 best books like Amateurs (Donald Barthelme): The Wonderful O, The Spot, Some Experiences of an Irish R.M., Worstward Ho, Asphodel, Nightmares of an Ether Drinker, Pricksongs and Descants, Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn, Partial List of People to Bleach
| Author | James Thurber |
| ISBN | 0440405793 |
This book was one of my favorites when I was about eight, and I read it innumerable times. I can still remember many passages verbatim. In case you don't know it, here is a brief summary of the plot. Two disreputable pirates, Black and Littlejack, arrive at the island of Ooroo. They have reason to believe...
| Author | David Means |
| ISBN | 0865479127 |
The Spot is an old blacksmith shed in which three men tweeze apart the intricacies of a botched bank robbery.
The Spot is a park on the Hudson River, where two lovers sense their affair is about to come to an end.
The Spot is at the bottom of Niagara Falls, where the body of a young girl floats...
| Author | Edith Anna Oenone Somerville |
| ISBN | 1879941406 |
Absolutely hilarious. The British judge, Major Yeates the RM (for Royal Magistrate), arrives in rain, soon offered a horse by his savvy landlord who's already overcharging: "…a stout grey animal. I recognised with despair that I was about to be compelled to buy a horse. Jolting to my entrance gate...
| Author | Samuel Beckett |
| ISBN | 0394532309 |
Beckett's second last prose text, Worstward Ho, is a novella written in 1983, shortly after the largely autobiographical Company and an ironic theological speculation, both previously published as the first two parts of a late trilogy of short novels. The concentration of language and precision...
"DESTROY," H.D. had pencilled across the title page of this autobiographical novel. Although the manuscript survived, it has remained unpublished since its completion in the 1920s. Regarded by many as one of the major poets of the modernist period, H.D. created in Asphodel a remarkable and readable...
| Author | Jean Lorrain |
| ISBN | 1872621651 |
Contents:
-Introduction by Brian Stableford
-Early Stories: The Egregore/ Funeral Oration/ The Locked Room/ Magic Lantern/ The Glass of Blood/ Beyond/ Glaucous Eyes
-Sensations: One of Them/An Undesirable Residence/ A Troubled Night/ A Posthumous Protest/ An Uncanny Crime/...
| Author | Robert Coover |
| ISBN | 0802136672 |
Pricksongs & Descants, originally published in 1969, is a virtuoso performance that established its author - already a William Faulkner Award winner for his first novel - as a writer of enduring power and unquestionable brilliance, a promise he has fulfilled over a stellar career. It also began...
| Author | Paul Gallico |
| ISBN | 1558820213 |
Mrs Harris is a salt-of-the-earth London charlady who cheerfully cleans the houses of the rich. One day, when tidying Lady Dant's wardrobe, she comes across the most beautiful thing she has ever seen in her life - a Dior dress. In all the years of her drab and humble existence, she's never seen anything...
| Author | Harvey Swados |
| ISBN | 1590170849 |
There was a time when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca, when I could no more have wanted to live any place else than I could have conceived of myself as a daddy, disciplining my boy and dandling my daughter.
So begins "Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn", which gives...
| Author | Gary Lutz |
| ISBN | 1892061317 |
unlike the poetry-prose amalgams of someone like renee gladman, who is arguably equally as painstaking with her sentences, lutz writes a kind of extreme non-poetic prose. while gladman can approach the sentence with habits associated with contemporary poetry--e.g. ashbery-like slippages between...
| Author | Ben Marcus |
| ISBN | 1564781968 |
In The Age of Wire and String, hailed by Robert Coover as "the most audacious literary debut in decades," Ben Marcus welds together a new reality from the scrapheap of the past. Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles, and the weather are some of the recycled elements in Marcus's first collection—part fiction,...
| Author | Elizabeth Bowen |
| ISBN | 1400031052 |
In A World of Love, an uneasy group of relations are living under one roof at Montefort, a decaying manor in the Irish countryside. When twenty-year-old Jane finds in the attic a packet of love letters written years ago by Guy, her mother’s one-time fiance who died in World War I, the discovery has explosive...
| Author | James Plunkett |
| ISBN | 0815969090 |
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| Author | Padgett Powell |
| ISBN | 0805071229 |
Willie Stargell, prodigious hitter of home runs and occasional philosopher, once considered that every baseball game begins with the home plate umpire reaching an arm over the shoulder of a squatting catcher, pointing toward the pitcher, and ordering, in a melodic voice, "PLAAAAAAAAY BALL!" "He...
Once a Week Won't Kill You, J.D. Salinger
عنوان: هفتهای یه بار آدمو نمیکشه و داستانهای دیگر؛ نویسنده: جروم دیوید (جی.دی.) سالینجر؛ مترجم: امید نیک فرجام؛ لیلا نصیریها؛ تهران،...
| Author | Robert Aickman |
| ISBN | 1681371898 |
Cross Henry James with M.R. James and you might end up with a writer like Robert Aickman, though his self-described “strange stories” remain confoundingly and uniquely his own. Aickman’s superbly written tales terrify not with standard thrills and gore but through a radical overturning of...
| Author | John Barth |
| ISBN | 0553242768 |
Its first-person protagonist, Jacob Horner, suffers from nihilistic paralysis: an inability to choose a course of action. As part of a schedule of unorthodox therapies, Horner's nameless Doctor has him take a teaching job at a local teachers college. There Horner befriends the super-rational existentialist...
| Author | John Banville |
| ISBN | 1567920969 |
A historian, trying to finish a long-overdue book on Isaac Newton, rents a cottage not far by train from Dublin for the summer. All he needs, he thinks, is a few weeks of concentrated work. Why, he must unravel, did Newton break down in 1693? What possessed him to write that strange letter to his friend John...
Avoiding Cosmic Fake News
Every community of human beings has its own way of thinking about things, its rules for connecting words and experiences. These rules constitute the community’s epistemology. Epistemology determines who to believe, what is valid and true, and ‘what counts’...
| Author | Walter Benjamin |
| ISBN | 1784783048 |
A beautiful collection of the legendary thinker’s short stories
The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street...
| Author | Tobias Wolff |
| ISBN | 0747531536 |
This is one of the first books I remember buying. I last read it maybe 10 years ago. At some point I added it on Goodreads and rated it 4. For the life of me I cannot tell why I would do such a thing, rate it 4 I mean. Whatever the reason I am fixing it now. Tobias Wolff is one of the best writers writing short stories...
| Author | Donald Harington |
| ISBN | 0151001642 |
This is the life story of the colorful physician of Harington’s acclaimed Stay More novels, Doc Swain: how he becomes a physician without benefit of medical school education, how he winds up as a high-school teacher of hygiene and enamored of a pretty student, how his love for her ultimately leads...
| Author | Richard Brautigan |
| ISBN | 0671220659 |
The story takes place in San Francisco in the early 1970s. The title character is a papier mache bird that shares the front room of an apartment with a collection of bowling trophies that some time earlier were stolen from the home of the Logan brothers. The human tenants of this apartment are John and Pat,...
