Hopeful Monsters
10 best books like Hopeful Monsters (Nicholas Mosley): Thank You for Not Reading, Am I a Redundant Human Being?, Siamese, The Planetarium, Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine, Palinuro de México, Best European Fiction 2011, On Elegance While Sleeping, A Máquina de Joseph Walser, Adán en Edén
| Author | Dubravka Ugrešić |
| ISBN | 1564782980 |
In this collection of acerbic essays, Ugresic dissects the nature of the contemporary book industry, which she argues is so infected with the need to create and promote literature that will appeal to the masses — literally to everyone — that if Thomas Mann were writing nowadays, his books wouldn't...
| Author | Mela Hartwig |
| ISBN | 1564785815 |
Aloisia Schmidt is an ordinary secretary with a burning question: am I a redundant human being? She’s neither pretty nor ugly (though she wishes she were hideous: at least that would be something), has no imagination, and is forced to live vicariously through “borrowed” fantasy—fantasy,...
| Author | Stig Sæterbakken |
| ISBN | 1564783251 |
A brutally comic portrait of marriage, taken to extremes reminiscent of the work of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. Edwin Mortens is almost blind, but has good hearing; his wife Erna is hard of hearing, but has excellent eyes. Paralyzed from the waist down, Edwin sits locked in his bathroom all day,...
A young writer has his heart set on his aunt's large apartment. With this seemingly simple conceit, the characters of The Planetarium are set in orbit and a galaxy of argument, resentment, and bitterness erupts. Telling the story from various points of view, Sarraute focuses below the surface, on the...
Forty years ago I first linked up with Unguentine and we made love on twin-hulled catamarans, sails a-billow, bless the seas... So begins the courtship of a certain Unguentine to the woman we know only as Mrs. Unguentine, the chronicler of their sad, fantastical tale. For forty years, they sail the seas...
| 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 | Aleksandar Hemon |
| ISBN | 1564786005 |
The launch of Dalkey’s Best European Fiction series was nothing short of phenomenal, with wide-ranging coverage in international media such as Time magazine, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Financial Times, and the Guardian; glowing reviews and interviews in print...
| Author | Emilio Lascano Tegui |
| ISBN | 1564786048 |
The first English translation of the self-proclaimed “Viscount” Emilio Lascano Tegui—a friend of Picasso and Apollinaire, and a larger-than-life eccentric in his own right—On Elegance While Sleeping is the deliciously macabre novel, part Maldoror and part Dorian Gray, that established...
| Author | Gonçalo M. Tavares |
| ISBN | 9722116207 |
Continuing Tavares’s award-winning “Kingdom” series (begun in Jerusalem, winner of the Saramago Prize), Joseph Walser’s Machine recounts a life of bizarre routines and patterns. Routine humiliation at a factory; routine maintenance of the world’s most esoteric collection; and the...
| Author | Carlos Fuentes |
| ISBN | 6071103061 |
Adán Gorozpe ha pasado de pobretón estudiante a poderoso mandamás gracias a un afortunado braguetazo. Adán Góngora es ministro a cargo de la seguridad nacional y ha puesto en marcha una estrategia espeluznante: se alía con los criminales y encierra o manda matar a los menos aptos; encarcela...
| Author | Noëlle Revaz |
| ISBN | 1564787214 |
When reading With the Animals, one can imagine what it must have been like for sensitive Noëlle Revaz to grow up in Switzerland's rustic hinterland. How much contact with farms and farmers did she have? How much coarseness, brutality, hardship and violence did she witness?
In the...
| Author | Paul Verhaeghen |
| ISBN | 1564784770 |
Berlin, Spring of 1995. While a group of neo-Nazis are preparing an anniversary bash of disastrous proportions, an old physics professor returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoc designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe, and, in a room at Le Charit?, a Holocaust...
| Author | Juan Filloy |
| ISBN | 1564784347 |
His life runs according to a methodical and rigid schedule, with everything—from his meals down to his regular visits to the city brothels—timed to the minute. But when an insignificant traffic delay upsets this sacred schedule, and on the day of Oloop's engagement party, the clock begins ticking...
| Author | Michal Ajvaz |
| ISBN | 1564785785 |
Heir to the philosophical-fantastical tradition of Borges, Calvino, and Perec, The Golden Age is Michal Ajvaz’s greatest and most ambitious work.
The Golden Age is a fantastical travelogue in which a modern-day Gulliver writes a book about a civilization he once encountered on a tiny...
