Four Novels: The Square, Moderato Cantabile, 10:30 on a Summer Night, the Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas
10 best books like Four Novels: The Square, Moderato Cantabile, 10:30 on a Summer Night, the Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas (Marguerite Duras): Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol), The Pure and the Impure, Hav, The Inquisitory, Lilith, The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction, The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith, October Suite, The Girl with the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert And the Making of the Modern Art Market, The Duel
| Author | Breanne Fahs |
| ISBN | 1558618481 |
Too drastic, too crazy, too "out there," too early, too late, too damaged, too much—Valerie Solanas has been dismissed but never forgotten. She has become, unwittingly, a figurehead for women's unexpressed rage, and stands at the center of many worlds. She inhabited Andy Warhol's Factory scene,...
Colette herself considered The Pure and the Impure her best book, "the nearest I shall ever come to writing an autobiography." This guided tour of the erotic netherworld with which Colette was so intimately acquainted begins in the darkness and languor of a fashionable opium den. It continues as a series...
| Author | Jan Morris |
| ISBN | 0571229832 |
There are two works here: Last Letters from Hav, first published in 1985, followed by Hav of the Myrmidons, a sequel published twenty years later. I will speak of them separately.
LAST LETTERS FROM HAV:
They say that Hav is not real, that there is no city, no country named Hav. True, travel...
| Author | Robert Pinget |
| ISBN | 1564783278 |
The Inquisitory consists entirely of the interrogation of an old, deaf servant regarding unspecified crimes that may or may not have taken place at his master's French chateau. The servant's replies - which are by turns comic, straightforward, angry, nostalgic, and disingenuous - hint at a variety...
this is, without question, one of the most haunting books that I've ever read. I just thought about it again, and I became unsettled again. I got a literal shiver. This is a fantastic read. It is like Lolita, but the story has a better narrative arc and a more dramatic feeling instead of satirical. This book...
| Author | Kate Chopin |
| ISBN | 1593080018 |
When it first appeared in 1899, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening was greeted with cries of outrage. The novel’s frank portrayal of a woman’s emotional, intellectual, and sexual awakening shocked the sensibilities of the time and destroyed the author’s reputation and career. Many years passed...
| Author | Patricia Highsmith |
| ISBN | 0393327728 |
Best known for her novels (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Strangers on a Train, A Suspension of Mercy, and others) Highsmith is an all-too-frequently forgotten master of the short story. These stories in this volume examine the dark soul of humanity in a deceptively simple voice that draws you in and won't...
| Author | Maxine Clair |
| ISBN | 0375506306 |
"The air cools to crisp, carries sound farther. Last pears ripen and fall, ferment on the ground; the aroma of their wine mixes with the pungency of leaf smoke from nowhere and everywhere. At nightfall, the wing-song shrill of crickets announces that this season has a natural pathos to it, the brief and...
| Author | Lindsay Pollock |
| ISBN | 1586483021 |
In an era when American artists didn't count and women were expected to stay home, Edith Gregor Halpert burst onto the fledgling New York gallery scene, defying all cultural and societal rules. In 1926, Halpert, just twenty-six years old, opened one of the first art galleries in Greenwich Village and...
| Author | Giacomo Casanova |
| ISBN | 1843910322 |
One of the few works written in Casanova’s native Italian, The Duel is an important example of the infamous Lothario’s vivid prose style. Translated for the first time into English, this autobiographical novel describes Casanova’s extraordinary battle with a Polish count, while on the run...
| Author | Edmond Jabès |
| ISBN | 0819562475 |
This is probably the most important book I've read so far this year. It's sublime and I hope to write a proper review of it someday. Jabès redefined what poetry could be and how it can be presented. There is so much in here to reflect on-- even taking three months to read it felt like I was rushing. An infinitely...
| Author | Sonallah Ibrahim |
| ISBN | 0811220362 |
That Smell is Sonallah Ibrahim’s modernist masterpiece and one of the most influential novels written in Arabic since WWII. Composed after a five-year term in prison, the semi-autobiographical story follows a recently released political prisoner as he wanders through Cairo, adrift in his native...
| Author | Fanny Howe |
| ISBN | 0976718537 |
Fiction. Five short novels gathered into one volume: Nod, The Deep North, Famous Questions, Saving History and Indivisible. "I have not the least doubt that her work is parallel to Paul Auster's, say, or any writer thus whose books are not simply products for the market - albeit the work can reach a very...
| Author | Jakov Lind |
| ISBN | 0809015269 |
Soul of Wood made Jakov Lind's reputation as one of the most boldly imaginative postwar writers, and it remains his most celebrated achievement. In the title novella and six subsequent stories, Lind distorts and refashions reality to make the deepest horrors of the twentieth century his own.
Set...
| Author | Edith Wharton |
| ISBN | 0684806843 |
Madame de Treymes, Edith Wharton's first publication after the highly successful The House of Mirth, is a captivating portrait of turn-of-the-century American and French culture. Inspired by Wharton's own entré into Parisian society in 1906 and reminiscent of the works of Henry James, it tells...
The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings
| Author | Germaine Greer |
| ISBN | 0871133083 |
Always strong and fearless, Germaine Greer strikes right at the heart of the matter—be it John F. Kennedy and vaginal deodorants, rape and artificial insemination, cosmetic surgery, the death of Jimi Hendrix, or the famine in Ethiopia. This collection represents a mosaic of essays, long and short,...
| Author | Ross Macdonald |
| ISBN | 0553235141 |
Doctor Robert Branch is a university professor, not a secret agent. But his best friend is dead and Branch knows that it can't have been suicide. He is also certain that the murder has been arranged by a Nazi espionage group operating on campus. The only trouble is, no one will believe him. Branch knows...
| Author | Jorge Luis Borges |
| ISBN | 0802130771 |
After almost a half a century of scrupulous devotion to his art, Jorge Luis Borges personally compiled this anthology of his work—short stories, essays, poems, and brief mordant “sketches,” which, in Borges’s hands, take on the dimensions of a genre unique in modern letters.
In...
Gerard de Nerval (1808-1855), a contemporary of Poe, De Quincey, Gogol, and Heine, introduced into French literature a mode of writing rooted in German romanticism yet already recognizably modernist in its explorations of the uncertain borderlines between dream and reality, irony and madness,...
| Author | Emily Holmes Coleman |
In a prose form as startling as its content, "The Shutter of Snow" portrays the post-partum psychosis of Marthe Gail, who after giving birth to her son, is committed to an insane asylum. Believing herself to be God, she maneuvers through an institutional world that is both sad and terrifying, echoing...
Disavowals: Or Cancelled Confessions
| Author | Claude Cahun |
| ISBN | 0262533030 |
Memories? Choice morsels. My soul is fragmentary.--from DisavowalsClaude Cahun (1894-1954), born Lucy Schwob, was a poet, performer, resistance fighter, prisoner, Surrealist, "constructor and explorer of objects," photographer, and "queer freak" who invented her life by flaunting the interchangability...
| Author | Ying Chen |
| ISBN | 0520220137 |
"I was dying to see Mother suffer at the sight of my corpse," announces the young woman at the heart of this powerful and disquieting novel, which has won acclaim in France and in Canada upon original publication in French. In Ingratitude,Ying Chen tells the story of Yan-Zi, who decides to commit suicide...
| Author | Joy Kogawa |
| ISBN | 0385468857 |
"Profoundly political, exquisitely intimate, Itsuka reverberates with longing and hope."--The Canada Times
Already a Canadian bestseller, the sequel to Joy Kogawa's award-winning novel Obasan follows the character Naomi Nakane into adulthood, where she becomes involved in the movement...
Clarice Lissssssspector. It's on the back of the tongue, the name of the authoress from the wilds of Russia to Brazil. Soulstorm is a collection of stories about lives of her and her others. Her voice that was baby talk as we all learn to walk, and Russian and Portugese. A self concious translator Alexis...
| Author | Stéphane Mallarmé |
| ISBN | 0520081889 |
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) is one of the giants of nineteenth-century French poetry. Leader of the Symbolist movement, he exerted a powerful influence on modern literature and thought, which can be traced in the works of Paul Valéry, W.B. Yeats, and Jacques Derrida. From his early twenties...
