Don Quixote (which was a dream)

Author	Gustave Flaubert
ISBN	0811213188

A Simple Heart, also published as A Simple Soul.

In A Simple Heart, the poignant story that inspired Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, Felicite, a French housemaid, approaches a lifetime of servitude with human-scaled but angelic aplomb. No other author has imparted so much beauty and...

Author

J.G. Ballard

On a day in April, just after three o'clock in the afternoon, Robert Maitland's car crashes over the concrete parapet of a high-speed highway onto the island below, where he is injured and, finally, trapped. What begins as an almost ludicrous predicament in Concrete Island soon turns into horror as...

Author

Ocean Vuong

The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed, & remember
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.

To read Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds is to be dazzled by gorgeous lyricism. I picked this up as part of my exploration of contemporary poetry I have...

Author	Hye-Young Pyun
ISBN	1628727802

A Bestseller in Korea, a Psychological Thriller about Loneliness and the Dark Truths We Try to Bury

In this tense, gripping novel by a rising star of Korean literature, Ogi has woken from a coma after causing a devastating car accident that took his wife’s life and left him paralyzed and badly...

Author	Kelly Link
ISBN	1931520003

This first collection by award-winning author Kelly Link takes fairy tales and cautionary tales, dictators and extraterrestrials, amnesiacs and honeymooners, revenants and readers alike, on a voyage into new, strange, and wonderful territory. The girl detective must go to the underworld to solve...

Author	William S. Burroughs
ISBN	0140050035

By the time I hit 21 my impressions of William S. Burroughs included:

1. Al Jorgensen was a fan. I remember a picture of the two together.
2. Heroin.
3. Short guy with a hat.
4. Burroughs killing his wife while trying to shoot an apple off her head.

I’m not sure from where...

Author	Dennis Cooper
ISBN	0802133673

As is typical for me, I'm more pulled in by longer-form storytelling, so the winding, desperate opener here, "The Herd", was the highlight. Even moreso than Cooper's first novel, Safe, a generous inclusion here that still felt a bit like three separate stories tied together in order to trace a common...

Author

Dennis Cooper

Ziggy is the adopted teenaged son of two sexually abusive fathers, from whose obsessive attentions he flees into the weird world of his uncle, an amoral man who makes violent pornography. As scenes of fierce sex and sadistic oppression take place around him, Ziggy falls improbably in love -- with his...

Author

Chris Kraus

Kathy Acker: Rich girl, street punk, scholar, stripper, victim, media-whore ... and cultural icon.

The late Kathy Acker's legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, many of them created by her. Twenty years after her untimely death at age 50, Acker's legend has faded, but her writing...