Carpenter's Gothic
10 best books like Carpenter's Gothic (William Gaddis): Libra, Underworld, Lost in the Funhouse, Justine, Omensetter's Luck, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories, Falconer, The Cannibal, The Dead Father, Conversations
| Author | Don DeLillo |
| ISBN | 0140156046 |
From the author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and Zero K
In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who...
| Author | Don DeLillo |
| ISBN | 0330369954 |
While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the Cold War and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people...
| Author | John Barth |
| ISBN | 0385240872 |
Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth’s collection of fourteen metafictional short-stories could take the cupcake for the most extreme form of self-reflexive postmodern literature ever written. Frame-Tale is ten words long on a Mobius strip, Night-Sea Journey a ten-pager, an occasionally...
| Author | Lawrence Durrell |
| ISBN | 0140153195 |
The time is the eve of the Second World War. The place is Alexandria, an Egyptian city that once housed the world's greatest library and whose inhabitants are still dedicated to knowledge. But for the obsessed and purblind characters in this mesmerizing first novel of the Alexandria Quartet, the pursuit...
| Author | William H. Gass |
| ISBN | 0141180102 |
Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of...
| Author | William H. Gass |
| ISBN | 0879233745 |
IN THIS SUITE of five short pieces -- one of the unqualified literary masterpieces of the American 1960s -- William Gass finds five beautiful forms in which to explore the signature theme of his fiction: the solitary soul’s poignant, conflicted, and doomed pursuit of love and community. In their...
| Author | John Cheever |
| ISBN | 0679737863 |
Falconer Correctional Facility certainly sounds dreary and no place I’d want to spend any time, but it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as many fictional prisons. In fact, it seems pretty dull. There weren’t any beatings from brutal guards. There’s no racial tension evident. No one gets shivved...
| Author | John Hawkes |
| ISBN | 0811200639 |
"No synopsis conveys the quality of this now famous novel about an hallucinated Germany in collapse after World War II. John Hawkes, in his search for a means to transcend outworn modes of fictional realism, has discovered a highly original technique for objectifying the perennial degradation of...
| Author | Donald Barthelme |
| ISBN | 0374529256 |
The Dead Father is a gargantuan half-dead, half-alive, part mechanical, wise, vain, powerful being who still has hopes for himself--even while he is being dragged by means of a cable toward a mysterious goal. In this extraordinary novel, marked by the imaginative use of language that influenced a...
| Author | César Aira |
| ISBN | 0811221105 |
Daily conversations in outdoor cafes with cultured friends can help make reality a little more real. Unfortunately, however, during one such conversation, one man spots a gold Rolex watch on a TV soap opera's goatherd. This seemingly small absurdity sets off alarms: strange sensations of deception,...
| Author | John Hawkes |
| ISBN | 0811200655 |
An English horse race, the Golden Bowl at Aldington, provides the background for John Hawkes' exciting novel, The Lime Twig, which tells of an ingenious plot to steal and race a horse under a false name. But it would be unfair to the reader to reveal what happens when a gang of professional crooks gets wind...
The Floating Opera and The End of the Road
| Author | John Barth |
| ISBN | 0385240899 |
The Floating Opera and The End Of The Road are John Barth's first two novels. Their relationship to each other is evident not only in their ribald subject matter but in the eccentric characters and bitterly humorous tone of the narratives. Both concern strange, consuming love triangles and...
