Pylon

Author	Wallace Thurman
ISBN	1874509611

It's 1920s Harlem, and man, the joint is jumpin'. Folks are coming and going and everything's copacetic as long as the gin keeps flowing. This is the scene Stephen Jorgenson dives into when he arrives from Canada for the first time. He is taken to "The Niggerati Manor, " an apartment building in Harlem...

Author	Anna Kavan
ISBN	0393302849

‘Whatever I am, I’m among the lost things—I do know that.’

To enter the works of Anna Kavan is to enter a swirling, menacing reality where inexorable doom weighs heavy through each word. Each story in Julia and the Bazooka is comprised of a thinly-fictionalized version of Kavan’s...

Author	Herman Melville
ISBN	1598184083

Herman Melville's "Israel Potter" is the Fictionalised tale of a man who really did fight in the American Revolution -- a man who lived a life of very real adventure. After fighting in the revolution, he went on to be a part of the newly-established United States Navy, ended up serving as a secret courier...

Author	Meridel Le Sueur
ISBN	0975348655

This celebrated novel by one of the leading radical woman writers of the twentieth century is reissued in a format designed for the general reader. Written in 1939, first published in 1978 (by West End Press), The Girl explores the fate of a farm girl who moves to the "dark city" of St. Paul, Minnesota,...

Author	Charles Henri Ford
ISBN	1596541350

A milestone in the history of gay literature and of homosexuality itself, and praised unflinchingly by Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein, this stunning and experimental work, first published in 1933 by the Obelisk Press, Paris, is a non-judgemental depiction of gay life and men, told using characters...

Author	Gertrude Stein
ISBN	0451528727

Three Lives is...magnificent, ground-breakingly original, exciting, controversial, ahead-of-its-time...These are just a few adjectives that come immediately to mind when I think of this book.

For those who say that Gertrude Stein is 'difficult' to read, then boy try reading Faulkner...

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

Emily 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...

Author	Walter Abish
ISBN	0811207765

The question How German Is It underlies the conduct and actions of the characters in Walter Abish's novel, an icy panorama of contemporary Germany, in which the tradition of order and obedience, the patrimony of the saber and the castle on the Rhine, give way to the present, indiscriminate fascination...

Author	Edward Anderson
ISBN	1853753114

"One of the great forgotten novels of the 30s."
- Raymond Chandler

Somewhere between the hardboiled talk of Dashiell Hammett and the dustbowl poetry of John Steinbeck lies the doomed romanticism of Edward Anderson's 'Thieves Like Us'. When three small-time country gangsters break...

Author	Tennessee Williams
ISBN	0811214605

The drama takes it form from the shifting scenes of memory, and Williams's surrogate self invites us to focus, in turn, on the various inhabitants or his dilapidated rooming house in the Vieux Carré: the comically desperate landlady, Mrs. Wire; Jane, a properly brought-up young woman from New York...

Author	Saul Bellow
ISBN	0140119698

This is the second novel I've read by Saul Bellow, a Nobel Prize-winning author. The first, Seize the Day, is very good, about a destructive American obsession with success. A Theft is a little trickier. It's about a woman, Clara Velde, with a successful career life, though a failed love life. What makes...

Author	T.S. Eliot
ISBN	0563523301

These are masterly readings, by renowned actor Paul Schofield, of two substantial works of poetry by T.S. Eliot. The Waste Land, first published in 1922, is one of Eliot's most influential works and has long been on the syllabus for A-Level English Literature. Four Quartets consists of four long poems,...

Author	Louis-Ferdinand Céline
ISBN	1564784495

"Here's the truth, simply stated...bookstores are suffering from a serious crisis of falling sales." So begins the imaginary interview that comprises this novel: a conversation between the stuffy, incontinent Professor Y and Céline himself, who rails against convention and defends his idiosyncratic...

Author	George Soros
ISBN	1586482785

Never before have we stood to gain or lose as much from understanding the international economy. Scandals plague the world's largest corporations, the American trade deficit has soared to historic heights, and international organizations from the World Bank to the WTO are accused of being inefficient...

Author	Vladimir Nabokov
ISBN	0679727248

Glory is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a twenty-two-year-old Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him.  Convinced that his life is about to be wasted and hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a "perilous, daredevil project"--an illegal attempt...

Author	Desmond Bagley
ISBN	1842320505

An agent of the British Government is sent on a new and deadly assignment - to snare The Scarperers (a notorious gang of criminals who organise gaol-breaking for long-term prisoners) and Slade, a notorious Russian double agent whom they have recently liberated. The trail leads him to Malta, where he...

Author	Pietro Di Donato
ISBN	0451525752

Wow. I mean, wow! First, di Donato's powers as a writer humble me. This book is touted as a social justice novel, but it's not quite the screed that Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" was at times; di Donato's book is a cry to the heavens, it plumbs the mysteries and pleads with heart and soul the essential question:...

Author	Joyce Cary
ISBN	0940322188

Ez egy olyan könyv, ami felkanyarodik az M7-esre, és kettesben döcög le egész a Balatonig. Ami nem önmagában rossz, hanem a táj, illetve az utazók lelkiállapotának függvényében. A zarándok elbeszélője idős korában tér vissza (nem igazán önszántából) az udvarházba,...

Author	James Joyce
ISBN	0571131646

Brilliant.
Absolutely. Fucking. Brilliant
Joyce is, no doubt, the mythic, masterful madman who I believe to be THE greatest writer in literary history thus far (of course, I still have much left to read...particularly the works of Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, etc...any one of...