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Fiction and the Figures of Life

10 best books like Fiction and the Figures of Life (William H. Gass): Gogol's Wife and Other Stories, The Coup, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Advertisements for Myself, Nog, Kaspar and Other Plays, The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor, Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930, Falling in Place, The Writer on Her Work

Gogol's Wife and Other Stories
AuthorTommaso Landolfi
ISBN0811200809
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...
The Coup
AuthorJohn Updike
ISBN0449242595
The Coup describes violent events in the imaginary African nation of Kush, a large, landlocked, drought-ridden, sub-Saharan country led by Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû. (“A leader,” writes Colonel Ellelloû, “is one who, out of madness or goodness, takes upon himself the woe of a people....
The Rhetoric of Fiction
AuthorWayne C. Booth
ISBN0226065588
The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and...
Advertisements for Myself
AuthorNorman Mailer
ISBN0674005902
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...
Nog
AuthorRudolph Wurlitzer
ISBN1852424230
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...
Kaspar and Other Plays
AuthorPeter Handke
ISBN0374508240
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...
The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor
AuthorPeter 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...
Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
AuthorEdmund Wilson
ISBN0374529272
Published in 1931, Axel's Castle was Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticism--a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust,...
Falling in Place
AuthorAnn Beattie
Ah, fantastic. Here, finally, is a book that jumps between a number of characters, chapter by chapter, and still gives each his due. Some of these characters will stick with me for a long time, notably the creepy friend, whose name I'm ironically forgetting. Parker. I wasn't forgetting, I was ironically...
The Writer on Her Work
AuthorJanet Sternburg
ISBN0393320553
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,...
The Blood Oranges
AuthorJohn Hawkes
ISBN0811200612
"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,...
The Letters of William Gaddis
AuthorWilliam Gaddis
ISBN1564788040
Now recognized as one of the giants of postwar American fiction, William Gaddis (1922-98) shunned the spotlight during his life, which makes this collection of his letters a revelation. Beginning in 1930 when Gaddis was at boarding-school and ending in September 1998, a few months before his death,...
The Oranging of America and Other Stories
AuthorMax Apple
ISBN0140103104
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...
Rivers and Mountains
AuthorJohn Ashbery
ISBN0912946385
From one of our most important modern poets comes an essential early collection, including the famous long poems "The Skaters" and "Clepsydra"When "Rivers and Mountains" was published in 1966, American poetry was in a state of radical redefinition, with John Ashbery recognized as one of the leading...
I Would Have Saved Them If I Could
AuthorLeonard Michaels
ISBN0374517134
Leonard Michaels (January 2, 1933 - May 10, 2003) was a famed American writer of short stories, novels, and essays. I Would Have Saved Them If I Could was his second collection of short stories, originally published in 1975.

"Leonard Michaels's stories stand alongside those of his best Jewish...
For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction
AuthorAlain Robbe-Grillet
ISBN0810108216
Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the leaders of the new French literary movement of the sixties, has long been regarded as the outstanding writer of the nouveau roman, as well as its major spokesman. For a New Novel reevaluates the techniques, ethos, and limits of contemporary fiction. This is a work of immense...
I, etcetera
AuthorSusan Sontag
ISBN0312420102
In eight stories, this singular collection of short fiction written over the course of ten years explores the terrain of modern urban life. In reflective, telegraphic prose, Susan Sontag confronts the reader with exposed workings of an impassioned intellect in narratives seamed with many of the...
Man in the Holocene
AuthorMax Frisch
ISBN0156569523
Climate Change

Floods, avalanches, landslides, mass extinctions. What are we to make of these randomly destructive events? Do they exist if there is record, no memory of them? And what difference would it make to not know about them? Or to receive no news from the rest of the world at all? Catastrophe...
Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952
AuthorJorge Luis Borges
ISBN0292760027
This remarkable book by one of the great writers of our time includes essays on a proposed universal language, a justification of suicide, a refutation of time, the nature of dreams, and the intricacies of linguistic forms. Borges comments on such literary figures as Pascal, Coleridge, Cervantes,...
Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories
AuthorIsaac Bashevis Singer
ISBN0374530254
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s first collection of stories, Gimpel the Fool, is a landmark work that has attracted international acclaim since it was first published in 1957. In Saul Bellow’s masterly translation, the title story follows the exploits of Gimpel, an ingenuous baker who is universally...
Black Tickets: Stories
AuthorJayne Anne Phillips
ISBN0375727353
Jayne Anne Phillips's reputation-making debut collection paved the way for a new generation of writers. Raved about by reviewers and embraced by the likes of Raymond Carver, Frank Conroy, Annie Dillard, and Nadine Gordimer, Black Tickets now stands as a classic.

With an uncanny ability...
The Little Disturbances of Man
AuthorGrace Paley
ISBN0140075577
Wry and chatty, Grace Paley’s debut collection The Little Disturbances of Man thoughtfully explores the interiority of Jewish women living in New York. In lucid prose Paley fully renders an eclectic mix of immigrant and second-generation voices across these ten lively stories, which portray...
The Paris Review Interviews, I: 16 Celebrated Interviews
AuthorThe Paris Review
ISBN0312361750
How do great writers do it? From James M. Cain's hard-nosed observation that "writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational," to Joan Didion's account of how she composes a book--"I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back...
Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme
AuthorDonald Barthelme
ISBN0679741208
When Donald Barthelme died at the age of 58, he was perhaps the most imitated (if not emulated) practitioner of American literature. Caustic, slyly observant, transgressive, verbally scintillating, Barthelme's essays, stories, and novels redefined a generation of American letters and remain...
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