Impossible Object
10 best books like Impossible Object (Nicholas Mosley): Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon, The Inquisitory, The Vivisector, Textermination: A Novel, Island People, Moment of Freedom: The Heiligenberg Manuscript, Billy and Girl, Night Soul and Other Stories, Take Five, Springer’s Progress
Carla Carlson is at the Hotel Clarendon in Quebec City trying to finish a novel. Nearby, a woman, preoccupied with sadness and infatuated with her boss, catalogues antiquities at the Museum of Civilization. Every night, the two women meet at the hotel bar and talk – about childhood and parents and...
| 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...
| Author | Patrick White |
| ISBN | 0670747394 |
Hurtle Duffield, a painter, coldly dissects the weaknesses of any and all who enter his circle. His sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion, the passionate illusions of the women who love him-all are used as fodder for his art. It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom...
| Author | Christine Brooke-Rose |
| ISBN | 0811212165 |
In her latest novel, Textermination, the eminent British novelist/critic Christine Brooke-Rose pulls a wide array of characters out of the great works of literature and drops them into the middle of the San Francisco Hilton. Emma Bovary, Emma Woodhouse, Captain Ahab, Odysseus, Huck Finn... all...
| Author | Coleman Dowell |
| ISBN | 1564780937 |
In this complex novel, a gay man who has fled the violence of the city for an island retreat spends his time keeping a journal and writing stories. He invents a female alter-ego who haunts him, as does the ghost of the murderer who occupied his house in the 19th century; ultimately these hauntings are manifestations...
| Author | Jens Bjørneboe |
| ISBN | 0802313280 |
In its apocalyptic view of mankind and in its haunting, devastating portrayal of justice, Moment of Freedom reminds one of Revelation and Kafka's The Trial. Living high in the Alps in a German principality called Heiligenberg, our narrator tells us he's dutifully fulfilling his obligations as a Servant...
| Author | Deborah Levy |
| ISBN | 1564782026 |
In this brilliant, inventive, tragic farce, Deborah Levy creates the ultimate dysfunctional kids, Billy and his sister Girl. Apparently abandoned years ago by their parents, they now live alone somewhere in England. Girl spends much of her time trying to find their mother, going to strangers' doors...
| Author | Joseph McElroy |
| ISBN | 1564786021 |
Best known for his complex and beautiful novels—regularly compared to those of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo—Joseph McElroy is equally at home in the short story, having written numerous pieces over the course of his career that now, collected at last, serve as an ideal introduction...
| Author | D. Keith Mano |
| ISBN | 1564781933 |
Welcome to the world of Simon Lynxx and to one of the great overlooked novels of the 1980s. Con-man, filmmaker (currently working on producing "Jesus 2001", what he calls the religious equivalent of The Godfather, best known for his movie "The Clap That Took Over the World"), descendent of a wealthy...
| Author | David Markson |
| ISBN | 1564782182 |
Here comes Lucien Springer. Age: forty-seven. Still handsome though muchly vodka'd novelist, currently abashed by acute creative dysfunction. Sole preoccupation amid these artistic doldrums: pursuit of fair women. Springer is a randy incorrigible who is guided by only one inflexible precept:...
| Author | Rikki Ducornet |
| ISBN | 1564781739 |
Made speechless by her eccentric father, the beautiful Etheria is traded for a piece of precious jade. Memory, her sister, tells her story, that of a childhood enlivened by Lewis Carroll and an orangutan named Dr. Johnson and envenomed by the pernicious courtship of Radulph Tubbs, Queen Victoria's...
| Author | Ann Quin |
| ISBN | 1564783189 |
As innovative and abrasive as the very best of William Burroughs, Ann Quin's Tripticks offers a scattered account of the narrator's flight across a surreal American landscape, pursued by his "No. 1 X-wife" and her new lover. This masterpiece of pre-punk aesthetics critiques the hypocrisy and consumerism...
| Author | Jacques Roubaud |
| ISBN | 1564785467 |
Devastated by the death of his young wife, Alix, the author conceives a project that will allow him not only to continue writing, but to continue living - writing a book that leads him to confront his terrible loss as well as examine the lonely world in which he now seems, increasingly, to exist: that of...
Hailed by Spain's Revista Quimera as one of the top ten Spanish-language novels of the decade, alongside Bolaño's 2666, Vila-Matas's Bartleby & Co., and Marías's Your Face Tomorrow, The No World Concerto is a many-layered puzzle concerning an old screenwriter who has holed up in a shabby hotel...
| 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 | Charles Newman |
| ISBN | 1564788164 |
The long-awaited final work and magnum opus of one of the United States’s greatest authors, critics, and tastemakers, In Partial Disgrace is a sprawling self-contained trilogy chronicling the troubled history of a small Central European nation bearing certain similarities to Hungary—and...
| Author | Gilbert Sorrentino |
| ISBN | 1564784398 |
Set at a boardinghouse in rural New Jersey in the summer of 1939, this novel revolves around four people who experience the comedies, torments, and rare pleasures of family, romance, and sex while on vacation from Brooklyn and the Depression. As the novel's perspective shifts to each of the four primary...
The Letters of William Gaddis
| Author | William Gaddis |
| ISBN | 1564788040 |
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,...
| Author | William Trevor |
| ISBN | 0140107487 |
This is another very quirky book from the 1970 Booker shortlist - another book with comic elements and a dark human story at its centre, which is clearly something the judges that year liked, as both the winner The Elected Member and Eva Trout have similarities.
The setting for this one is O'Neill's...
| Author | Michael Ignatieff |
| ISBN | 0374527695 |
At the heart of Michael Ignatieff's riveting novel about a woman's descent into Alzheimer's are the tangled threads of a Midwestern family, frayed by time and tragedy yet still connected - as much by pride, embarrassed love, and sibling rivalry as by the painful ties of family loyalty. More than a tale...
