Lost in the Funhouse
10 best books like Lost in the Funhouse (John Barth): The Crying of Lot 49, Mason & Dixon, Sixty Stories, The Recognitions, Malone Dies, Wittgenstein's Mistress, Omensetter's Luck, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories, The Dead Father, Carpenter's Gothic
Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humor, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd...
| Author | Thomas Pynchon |
| ISBN | 0312423209 |
The New York Times Best Book of the Year, 1997
Time Magazine Best Book of the Year 1997
Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon...
| Author | Donald Barthelme |
| ISBN | 0141180935 |
With these audacious and murderous witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupation of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries...
| Author | William Gaddis |
| ISBN | 0140187081 |
The book Jonathan Franzen dubbed the "ur-text of postwar fiction" and the "first great cultural critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadn't read it while composing Catch-22 and V., managed to anticipate the spirit of both”—The Recognitions is a masterwork about art and forgery, and the...
| Author | Samuel Beckett |
| ISBN | 0802151175 |
Written and published in French in 1951, and in Samuel Beckett’s English translation in 1956, Malone Dies is the second of his immediate post-war novels, written during what Beckett later referred to as ‘the siege in the room’.
‘Malone’, writes Malone, ‘is what I am called now.’...
| Author | David Markson |
| ISBN | 1564782115 |
Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson - or anyone else - has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced, and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well, that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing...
| Author | William H. Gass |
| ISBN | 0141180102 |
Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of...
| Author | William H. Gass |
| ISBN | 0879233745 |
IN THIS SUITE of five short pieces -- one of the unqualified literary masterpieces of the American 1960s -- William Gass finds five beautiful forms in which to explore the signature theme of his fiction: the solitary soul’s poignant, conflicted, and doomed pursuit of love and community. In their...
| Author | Donald Barthelme |
| ISBN | 0374529256 |
The Dead Father is a gargantuan half-dead, half-alive, part mechanical, wise, vain, powerful being who still has hopes for himself--even while he is being dragged by means of a cable toward a mysterious goal. In this extraordinary novel, marked by the imaginative use of language that influenced a...
This story of raging comedy and despair centers on the tempestuous marriage of an heiress and a Vietnam veteran. From their "carpenter gothic" rented house, Paul sets himself up as a media consultant for Reverend Ude, an evangelist mounting a grand crusade that conveniently suits a mining combine...
| Author | Thomas Pynchon |
| ISBN | 0099532514 |
Slow Learner is a compilation of early stories written between 1959 and 1964, before Pynchon achieved recognition as a prominent writer for his 1963 novel, V and containing a revelatory essay on his early influences and writing.
The collection consists of five short stories: 'The Small Rain',...
| Author | David Foster Wallace |
Remarkable, hilarious and unsettling re-imaginations of reality by "a dynamic writer of extraordinary talent " (Jenifer Levin, New York Times Book Review).
Girl with Curious Hair is replete with David Foster Wallace's remarkable and unsettling reimaginations of reality. From the eerily...
