Chimera

Author	Tommaso Landolfi
ISBN	0811200809

Much admired in Europe, Landolfi has been called "the Italian Kafka"; he is often linked with the Surrealists, and in the intellectual quality of his fantasy there are certain affinities with Borges; but beyond these superficial comparisons, his is a truly unique—and fascinating—art. It is...

Author	Larry Heinemann
ISBN	1400076838

Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues Paco almost two days later, he is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body. He winds up back...

Author	J.F. Powers
ISBN	0940322234

Winner of The 1963 National Book Award for Fiction.

The hero of J.F. Powers's comic masterpiece is Father Urban, a man of the cloth who is also a man of the world. Charming, with an expansive vision of the spiritual life and a high tolerance for moral ambiguity, Urban enjoys a national reputation...

Author	John O'Hara
ISBN	0394448146

Ten North Frederick by John O’Hara

There is here, in the biography of Joe Chapin, nothing that could not have been seen or heard by the people whose lives were touched by Joe Chapin’s life. Whatever he thought, whatever he felt has always been expressed to or through someone else, and the...

Author	John Casey
ISBN	0375702687

Winner of the 1989 National Book Award

A classic tale of a man, a boat, and a storm, Spartina is the lyrical and compassionate story of Dick Pierce, a commercial fisherman along the shores of Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay. A kind, sensitive, family man, he is also prone to irascible outbursts...

Author	Isaac Bashevis Singer
ISBN	0374516243

It's been nearly 30 years since I last looked at this excellent collection of short stories, but some of them still visit my thoughts regularly. My favorite is the guy who seduces his neighbor by turning up in her bedroom one night and saying that he's a demon from Hell. It's pitch black, and she's not sure...

Author	Wright Morris
ISBN	0451027612

Winner of the National Book Award

"Wright Morris seems to me the most important novelist of the American middle generation. Through a large body of work —which, unaccountably, has yet to receive the wide attention it deserves— Mr. Morris has adhered to standards which we have come to identify...

Author	Mary Lee Settle
ISBN	1570030979

In a novel that begins with accidental death and ends with deliberate murder, Mary Lee Settle tells the story of an eclectic collection of American and European expatriates who take refuge in an ancient Turkish city and, once there, wreak havoc on the Aegean paradise. At first the characters appear...

Author

Conrad Richter

From the time of its first publication in 1960, Conrad Richter's The Waters of Kronos sparked lively debate about the extent to which its story of a belated return to childhood scenes mirrored key events of Richter's own life. As was well known at the time, Richter had spent several years in the Southwest,...

Author

Thomas Williams

In 1975 the National Book Award Fiction Prize was awarded to two writers: Robert Stone and Thomas Williams. Yet only Stone's Dog Soldiers is still remembered today. That oversight is startling when considering the literary impact of The Hair of Harold Roux. A dazzlingly crafted novel-within-a-novel...

Author	Norman Mailer
ISBN	0674005902

An essential guide to the life and work of one of America's most controversial writers, Advertisements for Myself is a comprehensive collection of the best of Norman Mailer's essays, stories, interviews and journalism from the Forties and Fifties, linked by anarchic and riotous autobiographical...

Author	Rudolph Wurlitzer
ISBN	1852424230

Originally published by Random House in 1969, Nog became a universally revered cult novel and a symbol of the countercultural movement.In Rudolph Wurlitzer's signature hypnotic and haunting voice, Nog tells the tale of a man adrift in the American West, armed with nothing more than his own three pencil-thin...

Author	Peter Handke
ISBN	0374508240

This play is the story of an autistic adolescent who finds himself at a complete existential loss on the stage, with but a single sentence to call his own. Drilled by prompters who use terrifyingly funny logical and alogical language-sequences, Kaspar learns to speak "normally" and eventually becomes...

Author

Peter Taylor

In this collection of short fiction, one of the heralded masters of the form examines the lives of men and women in the 1930s and '40s South—a region and a time he knew well. Living in a well-ordered world that's beginning to lose its equilibrium, Taylor's fascinating characters struggle to come to...

Author	William H. Gass
ISBN	0465026257

In this sequel to Fiction & the Figures of Life, one of America's most brilliant and eclectic minds examines literature, culture, writers (their lives and works), and the nature and uses of language and the written word. Included are discussions of Valéry, Henry Miller, Sartre, Freud, Faulkner,...

Author	Thornton Wilder
ISBN	0060088915

Thornton Wilder’s renowned 1967 National Book Award–winning novel features a foreword by John Updike and an afterword by Tappan Wilder, who draws on such unique sources as Wilder’s unpublished letters, handwritten annotations in the margins of the book, and other illuminating documentary...

Author	William Gaddis
ISBN	0684800527

With the publication of the "Recognitions" in 1955, William Gaddis was hailed as the American heir to James Joyce. His two subsequent novels, "J R" (winner of the National Book Award) and "Carpenter's Gothic," have secured his position among America's foremost contemporary writers. Now "A Frolic...

Author	Janet Sternburg
ISBN	0393320553

A collection of essays and talks (even an extended poem from Ursula Le Guin) by women on writing. It covers what, why and how they write and what the obstacles are. The contributions are variable in quality, but they are all worth reading. Contributors include Margaret Attwood, Joan Didion, Erica Jong,...

Author	John Hawkes
ISBN	0811200612

"Need I insist that the only enemy of the mature marriage is monogamy? That anything less than sexual multiplicity . . . is naive? That our sexual selves are merely idylers in a vast wood?" Thus the central theme of John Hawkes's widely acclaimed novel The Blood Oranges is boldly asserted by its narrator,...

Author	Chikamatsu Monzaemon
ISBN	0231111010

Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725) wrote some 130 plays, chiefly for the puppet theater, many of which are still performed today by puppet operators and Kabuki actors. Chikamatsu is thought to have written the first major tragedies about the common man. This edition of four of his most important plays...

Author	Bernard Malamud
ISBN	0374525862

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Bernard Malamud's first book of short stories, The Magic Barrel, has been recognized as a classic from the time it was published in 1959. The stories are set in New York and in Italy (where Malamud's alter ego, the struggling New York Jewish painter,...

Author	Saul Bellow
ISBN	0142437832

“An enduring testament and prophecy.” –Chicago Sun-Times

Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a “registrar of madness,” a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with...

Author	Max Apple
ISBN	0140103104

Orange. There's an orange at the head of our state ; perhaps more an orang=u=tan, no offense to our Darwinian cousins.

If you must know however the title story is not so much of Rump as of Howard Johnson and his hotels/restaurants and not so much that as his road buddy and her cryogenic plans and...