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I Am Not Jackson Pollock: Stories

10 best books like I Am Not Jackson Pollock: Stories (John Haskell): Nice Big American Baby, The Brutal Language of Love: Stories, Thirst, The Map of the System of Human Knowledge, What was Mine, Someday This Will Be Funny, The Shutter of Snow, Stories V!, You Private Person, Normally Special

Nice Big American Baby
AuthorJudy Budnitz
ISBN0375726861
A blazingly original, profoundly moving new work of fiction by a writer whose world–and imagination–knows no boundaries. “I don’t know what planet Judy Budnitz comes from,” said Newsweek on the publication of her fiction debut, Flying Leap, “but I’m happy to have her. Tremendous...
The Brutal Language of Love: Stories
AuthorAlicia Erian
ISBN0375760334
Alicia Erian, whose work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Zoetrope, and Nerve, casts aside traditional notions of right and wrong and conjures up situations that are at once familiar and unsettling. Her characters—flawed, brave, disarming, affectionate—inhabit the not-so-very-wide space...
Thirst
AuthorKen Kalfus
ISBN1571310185
A few quite good stories, reminiscent of Calvino and Borges, surrounded by some okay stories. And then I remembered, Calvino and Borges do a pretty good Calvino and Borges as well--so I'll read them instead. If you only read one story from this collection, though read "Night And Day You Are The One"

I'll...
The Map of the System of Human Knowledge
AuthorJames Tadd Adcox
The Map of the System of Human Knowledge is a short encyclopedia, full of entries that waver between fiction and memoir, poetry and prose, realism and irrealism.

Construction workers build Indiana’s first official mountain. The entrails of vacuum cleaners are examined for hints of a dark...
What was Mine
AuthorAnn Beattie
ISBN0679739033
I don't remember most of this being especially great, except "The Working Girl," which is one of my favorite short stories. It's not a big deal, and I don't know that it'd do much for most people, but I have a large amount of affection for it. If you're in the bookstore, maybe check it out: that is Jessica's...
Someday This Will Be Funny
AuthorLynne Tillman
ISBN1935869000
The stories in Some Day This Will Be Funny marry memory to moment in a union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman, author of American Genius, presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Madame Realism mingle at...
The Shutter of Snow
AuthorEmily 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...
Stories V!
AuthorScott McClanahan
ISBN0983258961
Don't read this book. Scott rips through each page and pokes you in the chest with bully fingers while you read it. He also yells at you. WHILE YOU ARE READING IT. He challenges you in a not nice way. If you like Scott on a personal level, you might be okay with all of his shenanigans. Maybe you are used to them....
You Private Person
AuthorRichard Chiem
Ridiculously good. It reads like poetry, and the author's mastery of speed and cadence is spectacular. I particularly liked "What If, Wendy" and "Planet B Boy." Richard Chiem's style is really unique and his way of writing without simile is awesome, as he just links words and ideas and feelings with...
Normally Special
AuthorxTx
ISBN9780982469
This review was originally published at The Nervous Breakdown:

“It is difficult to masturbate about your father, but not impossible, as it turns out.”

“I am the Champion of Failure.”

“What I do remember most though, are the fireflies and how she proved that they...
The Really Funny Thing About Apathy
AuthorChelsea Martin
ISBN1934513245
Fiction. In THE REALLY FUNNY THING ABOUT APATHY, Chelsea Martin's charming but merciless prose employs mathematical paradoxes and theories of infinity to examine the inner workings of the bored and culturally over-stimulated while they idly consider the meaning of life. Overwhelmed and assaulted...
The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber
AuthorNicholson Baker
ISBN0679776249
What happened to Nicholson Baker, I wonder? The earliest pieces collected in The Size of Thoughts are so dazzling that, when I first dipped into them, I nearly fell off my barstool. (Okay, it was actually a food court stool, but still, I was all set to jab my plastic fork in my chest out of sheer, dyspeptic...
IF U DONT LOVE THE MOON YOUR AN ASS HOLE
AuthorSteve Roggenbuck
Poems are humorous and quirky, some full of inspiration. His love poems redefine romance, or as he might say, re-brands it. He fuses modern internet lingo like smiley faces and "lol," following a partly established internet voice in writing. Daring, he challenges conventionally written language...
The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa
AuthorFernando Pessoa
ISBN0802116949
The Washington Post Book World has written that Fernando Pessoa was "Portugal's greatest writer of the twentieth century [though] some critics would even leave off that last qualifying phrase" and "one of the most appealing European modernists, equal in command and range to his contemporaries Rilke...
The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade
AuthorCameron Pierce
ISBN1621050564
A feeling has been tearing up the underground of the fiction world. It’s a nightmare reflection of the society you inhabit, a surreal explosion of pop, punk, and the post-apocalypse. Over the last decade, Bizarro Fiction has changed the definition of avant garde, it’s abolished the traditional...
Almost No Memory
AuthorLydia Davis
ISBN0312420552
Losing Sleep

A woman wanted the Cubs to win, and thought surely everyone was rooting for them, because they had not won since 1908. But her husband, a White Sox fan, assured her this was not so. This had come up before, but now it distressed her more. Both of them had grown up on the South Side, White...
Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries
AuthorDennis Cooper
ISBN0061715611
“In another country or another era, Dennis Cooper’s books would be circulated in secret, explosive samizdat editions that friends and fans would pass around and savor like forbidden absinthe.” —New York Times Book Review

“His work belongs to that of Poe, the Marquis de Sade, Charles...
Baby Geisha
AuthorTrinie Dalton
ISBN0983247102
"Half ingenuous and half wily, winningly hard to pin down. The result is a kind of everyday fantastic. Dalton nails the Walserian trick of evincing a sincerity nearly indistinguishable from irony. The effect is a poised instability, more uncanny than the magic the stories sometimes describe."
-Bookforum

"Dalton...
Pieces for the Left Hand: 100 Anecdotes
AuthorJ. Robert Lennon
ISBN1862077401
Finally available in the United States.A student’s suicide note is not what it seems. A high school football rivalry turns absurd—and deadly. A much-loved cat seems to have been a different animal all along. A pair of identical twins aren’t identical at all—or even related. A man finds his...
The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess (Public Square)
AuthorAndrei Codrescu
ISBN0691137781
This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life."--The Posthuman Dada Guide

The Posthuman Dada Guide is an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world--all by way of examining the imagined 1916 chess...
Twenty Grand and Other Tales of Love and Money
AuthorRebecca Curtis
ISBN0061173096
In this dazzling literary debut, Rebecca Curtis displays the gifts that make her one of the most talented writers of her generation. Her characters—young women struggling to find happiness, love, success, security, and adventure—wait tables, run away from home, fall for married men, betray...
Unlucky Lucky Days
AuthorDaniel Grandbois
ISBN1934414107
Inventive, disconcerting, and hilarious, these seventy-three tales of our Unlucky Lucky Days might well be termed Dr. Seuss for adults. They call to mind Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories as readily as they do Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, Rikki Ducornet's Butcher's Tales and Woody Allen's most...
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