Darconville’s Cat

Author	William H. Gass
ISBN	1564782131

Thirty years in the making, William Gass's second novel first appeared on the literary scene in 1995, at which time it was promptly hailed as an indisputable masterpiece. The story of a middle aged professor who, upon completion of his massive historical study, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany,...

Author	Gilbert Sorrentino
ISBN	1564780872

Mulligan Stew takes as its subject the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination. As avant-garde novelist Antony Lamont struggles to write a "new wave murder mystery," his frustrating emotional and sexual life wreaks havoc on his work-in-progress. As a result, his narrative (the very...

Author	Robert Coover
ISBN	0802135277

A controversial best-seller in 1977, The Public Burning has since emerged as one of the most influential novels of our time. The first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use living historical figures as characters, the novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the...

Author	John Barth
ISBN	0801855578

"Whether discussing modernism, postmodernism, semiotics, Homer, Cervantes, Borges, blue crabs or osprey nests, Barth demonstrates an enthusiasm for the life of the mind, a joy in thinking (and in expressing those thoughts) that becomes contagious... A reader leaves The Friday Book feeling intellectually...

Author	M.J. Nicholls
ISBN	1291980342

This edition of A Postmodern Belch has been discredited. Pending article 9.6 of the Creative Commons Licence, portions of this work contain improperly brushed syllables taken from a 1978 edition of A Postmodern Belch and inelegantly buffered clauses taken from a 1997 edition of A Postmodern Belch....

Author	Raymond Federman
ISBN	1573660302

As told, or rather retold second-hand, by the narrator, Take It or Leave It relates the hilarious and amorous adventures of a young Frenchman who has been drafted into the U.S. Army and is being shipped Overseas to fight in Korea. The obsessed narrator retells, as best he can, what the young man supposedly...

Author	William T. Vollmann
ISBN	0140110879

In the jungles of South America, on the ice fields of Alaska, the plains of the Midwest, and the streets of San Francisco, a fearsome battle rages. The insects are vying for world domination; the inventors of electricity stand in evil opposition. Bug , a young man, rebels against his own kind and joins...

Author	Joseph McElroy
ISBN	1564780236

Beginning in childbirth and entered like a multiple dwelling in motion, Women and Men embraces and anatomizes the 1970s in New York from experiments in the chaotic relations between the sexes to the flux of the city itself. Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding...

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	Richard Powers
ISBN	0060975008

A Source of Meditative Awe

As soon as I finished reading this novel, I wanted to respond the only way I could that would do justice to my feelings for the book: and that was to admit that I was in a state of wonder and to say that, in Richard Powers’ own words, the novel was "a source of meditative awe".

Although,...

Author	D. Keith Mano
ISBN	1564781933

Welcome to the world of Simon Lynxx and to one of the great overlooked novels of the 1980s. Con-man, filmmaker (currently working on producing "Jesus 2001", what he calls the religious equivalent of The Godfather, best known for his movie "The Clap That Took Over the World"), descendent of a wealthy...

Author	Fernando del Paso
ISBN	8420421081

Todos los excesos caben en Palinuro de México. Maravilla del arte verbal, de las posibilidades actuales de la lengua literaria y de la enorme apertura narrativa rotulada por el boom latinoamericano, esta novela es, definitivamente, un caudal de vida y júbilo que se celebran a sí mismos. Los excesos...

Author	Paul Metcalf
ISBN	0826313000

First published in 1965, this remarkable novel is Paul Metcalf's purging of the burden of his relationship to Herman Melville (his great-grandfather), but it is much broader than that. In the extraordinary style of writing that is now Metcalf's signature, he collages multiple stories. Metcalf explores...

Author	Stanley Elkin
ISBN	1564783057

Ben Flesh is one of the men "who made America look like America, who made America famous." He collects franchises, traveling from state to state, acquiring the brand-name establishments that shape the American landscape. But both the nation and Ben are running out of energy. As blackouts roll through...

Author	Harry Mathews
ISBN	1564781941

This novel begins in a Russian prison camp at a baseball game featuring the defective Baptists versus the Fideists. There is a plot (of sorts), one of revenge surrounding a doctor who, in removing a bone spur from our narrator, manages to amputate a ring and index finger, a significant surgical error...

Author	Marguerite Young
ISBN	0720654858

This novel is one of the most ambitious and remarkable literary achievements of our time. It is a picaresque, psychological novel--a novel of the road, a journey or voyage of the human spirit in its search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare. It is an epic of what might be called the Arabian...

Author	Evan Dara
ISBN	1573660388

It may be the defining irony of our time: just as we are coming to recognize our shared destiny and necessary interdependence, our culture seems to be fracturing along every fault line available to it. The Lost Scrapbook is a novel that passionately captures the contradictory richness of our historical...

Author	Rikki Ducornet
ISBN	0872863557

This startling and brilliantly comic novel tells the stories of two men: a father and his estranged son. Lamprias de Bergerac is a gentle mystic and amateur botanist who spends his middle-aged years in an erotic utopia deep in the Amazonian jungle, collecting specimens of rare orchids and ultimately...

Author	Jacques Roubaud
ISBN	1564783960

Part novel, part autobiography, The Great Fire of London is one of the great literary undertakings of our time. Both exasperating and moving, cherished by its readers, it has its origins in the author's attempt to come to terms with the death of his young wife Alix, whose presence both haunts and gives...