Second Skin
10 best books like Second Skin (John Hawkes): Lost in the Funhouse, Beverly, Snow White, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories, A Frolic of His Own, Giles Goat-Boy, The Dead Father, The Collected Stories, The Angel Esmeralda, Myths of the Near Future
| Author | John Barth |
| ISBN | 0385240872 |
Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth’s collection of fourteen metafictional short-stories could take the cupcake for the most extreme form of self-reflexive postmodern literature ever written. Frame-Tale is ten words long on a Mobius strip, Night-Sea Journey a ten-pager, an occasionally...
| Author | Nick Drnaso |
| ISBN | 1770462252 |
Nick Drnaso's comics mercilessly reveal the sterile sameness of the suburbs. Connected by a series of gossipy teens, the modern lost souls of Beverly struggle with sexual anxieties that are just barely repressed and social insecurities that undermine every word they speak.
A group of teenagers...
| Author | Donald Barthelme |
| ISBN | 0684824795 |
“Eccentric, dazzling…the literary conversation piece of the year.” –San Francisco Chronicle
An American short story writer and novelist acclaimed for his playful, postmodern style of short fiction, Barthelme’s first novel, Snow White, is a countercultural, experimental...
| 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 | William Gaddis |
| ISBN | 0684800527 |
With the publication of the "Recognitions" in 1955, William Gaddis was hailed as the American heir to James Joyce. His two subsequent novels, "J R" (winner of the National Book Award) and "Carpenter's Gothic," have secured his position among America's foremost contemporary writers. Now "A Frolic...
| Author | John Barth |
| ISBN | 0385240864 |
MJ Nicholls inquires:
"I have been tempted to read this for some time, but Nate's review put me off. What do you make of his thoughts?:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/..."
The first part.
I am an not an impartial commentator on John Barth's work. I...
| 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...
| Author | Deborah Eisenberg |
| ISBN | 0312429894 |
Since 1986 with the publication of her first story collection, Deborah Eisenberg has devoted herself to writing “exquisitely distilled stories” which “present an unusually distinctive portrait of contemporary American life” to quote the MacArthur Foundation. This one volume brings...
| Author | Don DeLillo |
| ISBN | 1451655843 |
From one of the greatest writers of our time, a collection of short stories, written between 1979 and 2011; chronicling—and foretelling—three decades of American culture.
From one of the greatest writers of our time, his first collection of short stories, written between 1979 and...
| Author | J.G. Ballard |
| ISBN | 0099334712 |
JGB is one of my favourite authors. Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition are two of my favourite books and stand up well in the canon of English contemporary fiction. You can have the discussion of science fiction as literature ad infinitum as well as whether JGB was a science fiction writer or not. Yes he...
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 | Ben Marcus |
| ISBN | 0375713786 |
Ben Marcus achieved cult status and gained the admiration of his peers with his first book, The Age of Wire and String. With Notable American Women he goes well beyond that first achievement to create something radically wonderful, a novel set in a world so fully imagined that it creates its own reality.
On...
