Magnificence
10 best books like Magnificence (Lydia Millet): The Finno-Ugrian Vampire, Wheat that Springeth Green, Assumption, Karaoke Culture, Fobbit, Novels 1955–1962: Lolita / Pnin / Pale Fire / Lolita: A Screenplay, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel, My Poets, Nearer Home: A Nola Céspedes Mystery, All We Know: Three Lives
| Author | Noémi Szécsi |
| ISBN | 0957132662 |
An entertaining story of a Budapest vampire dynasty. Jerne Voltampere's grandmother doesn't look her age, but she is 284 years old. She looks like a young woman. No wonder, as every night she sucks the blood of assorted men. She is a vampire and wants her grandchild to follow the family tradition.
Her...
| Author | J.F. Powers |
| ISBN | 0940322242 |
Wheat That Springeth Green, J. F. Powers's beautifully realized final work, is a comic foray into the commercialized wilderness of modern American life. Its hero, Joe Hackett, is a high school track star who sets out to be a saint. But seminary life and priestly apprenticeship soon damp his ardor, and...
| Author | Percival Everett |
| ISBN | 1555975984 |
A baffling triptych of murder mysteries by the author of I Am Not Sidney Poitier
Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff of a small New Mexico town, is on the trail of an old woman's murderer. But at the crime scene, his are the only footprints leading up to and away from her door. Something is amiss, and even...
| Author | Dubravka Ugrešić |
| ISBN | 1934824577 |
Ugrešić's few essays on former-Yugoslav literature in its context are engrossing, but too much of the other material here was mediocre. These weren't the sort of pieces that, based on the author's formidable reputation, I'd variously looked forward to reading, or assumed to be intimidating.
In...
| Author | David Abrams |
| ISBN | 0802120326 |
Fobbit \’fä-bit\, noun. Definition: A U.S. soldier stationed at a Forward Operating Base who avoids combat by remaining at the base, esp. during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003-2011). Pejorative.
In the satirical tradition of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, Fobbit takes us into the chaotic world...
| Author | Vladimir Nabokov |
| ISBN | 1883011191 |
This Library of America volume is the second of three volumes that contain the most authoritative versions of the English works of the brilliant Russian émigré, Vladimir Nabokov.
Lolita (1955), Nabokov’s single most famous work, is one of the most controversial and widely read books...
| Author | Martha Baillie |
| ISBN | 1935639900 |
Martha Baillie’s hypnotic novel follows Heinrich Schlögel from Germany to Canada, where he sets out on a two-week hike into the isolated interior of Baffin Island. His journey quickly becomes surreal; he experiences strange encounters and inexplicable visions as shards of Arctic history emerge...
| Author | Maureen N. McLane |
| ISBN | 0374217491 |
A thrillingly original exploration of a life lived under poetry’s uniquely seductive spell.
“Oh! There are spirits of the air!” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley. In this stunningly original book Maureen N. McLane channels the spirits and voices that make up the music in one poet’s mind. Weaving...
| Author | Joy Castro |
| ISBN | 1250004586 |
Alors que la Nouvelle-Orléans s’éveille et qu’elle fait son jogging dans un parc, la journaliste du Times-Picayune Nola Céspedes se retrouve au beau milieu d’une scène de crime. Et elle connaît la victime de ce meurtre : il s’agit de Judith Taffner, son ancienne professeure de journalisme....
| Author | Lisa Cohen |
| ISBN | 0374176493 |
A revelatory biography of three glamorous, complex, modern women
Esther Murphy was a brilliant New York intellectual who dazzled friends and strangers with an unstoppable flow of conversation. But she never finished the books she was contracted to write—a painful failure and yet a kind...
| Author | Laird Hunt |
| ISBN | 1566893119 |
As a teenage girl, Ginny marries Linus Lancaster, her mother's second cousin, and moves to his Kentucky pig farm "ninety miles from nowhere." In the shadows of the lush Kentucky landscape, Ginny discovers the empty promises of Linus' "paradise"—a place where the charms of her husband fall away to...
| Author | Nicholson Baker |
| ISBN | 0399160965 |
cross-posted at: http://themocentricuniverse.blogspot....
i adore nicholson baker's writing voice and i really feel i can give no higher compliment than this: quite often it is how a writer's voice resonates with me that makes or breaks a novel for me; no matter what craft it might otherwise...
From the critically-acclaimed author of Red Weather comes a heartwarming, witty story of immigration and belonging, false starts and new beginnings, and finding out what home truly means
Khosi Saqr has always felt a bit out of place in Butte, Montana, hometown of motorcycle daredevil...
Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work
| Author | Philip Roth |
| ISBN | 0375714138 |
In Philip Roth’s intimate intellectual encounters with an international and diverse cast of writers, they explore the importance of region, politics and history in their work and trace the imaginative path by which a writer’s highly individualized art is informed by the wider conditions of...
| Author | Terry Eagleton |
| ISBN | 0300178816 |
In this characteristically concise, witty, and lucid book, Terry Eagleton turns his attention to the questions we should ask about literature, but rarely do. What is literature? Can we even speak of "literature" at all? What do different literary theories tell us about what texts mean and do? In throwing...
| Author | Stephen Dixon |
| ISBN | 0805050280 |
It would be easy to assume that Interstate comes across as a kind of MFA writing exercise: in eight different sections, tell and retell the horrific story of a shooting on an interstate, in which a father and his older daughter watch his younger daughter die. But this is not some postmodern version of the...
| Author | Nihad Sirees |
| ISBN | 1590516451 |
Available in English for the first time, The Silence and the Roar is a funny, sexy, dystopian novel about the struggle of an individual over tyranny.
The Silence and the Roar follows a day in the life of Fathi Sheen, an author banned from publishing because he refuses to write propaganda...
| Author | Jean-Christophe Valtat |
Book two in The Mysteries of New Venice, the steampunk adventure series The Guardian called a "magnificent achievement"
It's 1907 in the icily beautiful New Venice, and the hero of the city's liberation, Brentford Orsini, has been deposed by his arch-rival -- who immediately assigns Brentford...
| Author | Joyce Carol Oates |
| ISBN | 0517079798 |
Oh, how I love a compelling family tragedy! But this whole drama could have been avoided if the husband had just followed my advice--Dude, if you're going to pay for a young woman's abortion, and the young woman happens to be your wife's friend, and you are not--repeat ARE NOT having an affair with said...
| Author | Will Self |
| ISBN | 0802137024 |
The New York Times Book Review has called Will Self "a defiant satirist with a peculiar mastery of the vocabulary of modern neurosis," and Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys is a dazzling foray into his funhouse world. Status-conscious New Yorkers navigate the perils of dating along with their...
No voy a pedirle a nadie que me crea
| Author | Juan Pablo Villalobos |
| ISBN | 8433998226 |
«No voy a pedirle a nadie que me crea», nos advierten con frecuencia los distintos narradores y personajes de esta historia, en la que lo corriente se transforma en un delirio sin que uno sepa muy bien cómo, en la que lo raro acaba siendo normal y en la que no podemos hacer otra cosa que reírnos, porque...
| Author | Michelle Huneven |
| ISBN | 0747572429 |
Jamesland, the buoyant second novel by Michelle Huneven, critically acclaimed author of Round Rock, is a witty, sophisticated, and deeply humane comedy of unlikely redemption.
When thirty-three-year-old Alice Black discovers a deer in her dining room after fighting with her boyfriend,...
| Author | Jenny Uglow |
| ISBN | 0374112363 |
A beautifully illustrated biography of Thomas Bewick (1753-1828), the man whose art helped shape the way we view the natural world
At the end of the eighteenth century, Britain, and much of the Western world, fell in love with nature. Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds marked the moment,...
| Author | Sara Paretsky |
| ISBN | 0399154051 |
In Kansas, on land that once saw some of America's bloodiest antislavery battles, three families have coexisted for more than one hundred fifty years: the Grelliers, the Fremantles, and the Schapens. Once allies in the fight against slavery, today the Schapens and the Grelliers disagree on every...
