Take Five

Author	Felipe Alfau
ISBN	1564782042

Chromos is one of the true masterpieces of post-World War II fiction. Written in the 1940s but left unpublished until 1990, it anticipated the fictional inventiveness of the writers who were to come along - Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Sorrentino, and Gaddis. Chromos is the American immigration novel...

Author	Gilbert Sorrentino
ISBN	1564780872

Mulligan Stew takes as its subject the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination. As avant-garde novelist Antony Lamont struggles to write a "new wave murder mystery," his frustrating emotional and sexual life wreaks havoc on his work-in-progress. As a result, his narrative (the very...

Author	John Barth
ISBN	0801855578

"Whether discussing modernism, postmodernism, semiotics, Homer, Cervantes, Borges, blue crabs or osprey nests, Barth demonstrates an enthusiasm for the life of the mind, a joy in thinking (and in expressing those thoughts) that becomes contagious... A reader leaves The Friday Book feeling intellectually...

Author	Alexander Theroux
ISBN	0805043659

The main story is a love affair between Alaric Darconville, an English professor at a Virginia women's college, and one of his students, Isabel.

The style relies on complex syntax and unusual words. The satire is broad, and uses southern culture cliches but is often very funny. Some of the names...

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	Raymond Federman
ISBN	1573660302

As told, or rather retold second-hand, by the narrator, Take It or Leave It relates the hilarious and amorous adventures of a young Frenchman who has been drafted into the U.S. Army and is being shipped Overseas to fight in Korea. The obsessed narrator retells, as best he can, what the young man supposedly...

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	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

Stanley Elkin

Exuberance is the perfect descriptor for Elkin’s works. Like his bunkmate Bill Gass, his fictions swing to their own rhythms, refuse to conform to any cosily crafted preconception of a satisfying sellable sentence, and demonstrate a fearless dexterity over the English language that would make...

Author	William H. Gass
ISBN	0465026206

In the words of the late Walker Percy, William Gass is a “totally committed, totally uncompromising, and extraordinarily gifted writer.” His latest work is a suite of four novellas that explore Mind, Matter, and God.In the title story, God is a writer in a constant state of fumble, Mind is a housewife...

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...

Author	Rikki Ducornet
ISBN	1564781550

"My sleep began in the spring of 1914. I slept through both World Wars and the tainted calm between. It was as if I had been cursed by an evil fairy, pricked by an enchanted spinning wheel; an impenetrable briar had gripped my mind."
Thus begins Rikki Ducornet's brilliant lyric novel about Nicolas...

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	Marguerite Young
ISBN	0720654858

This novel is one of the most ambitious and remarkable literary achievements of our time. It is a picaresque, psychological novel--a novel of the road, a journey or voyage of the human spirit in its search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare. It is an epic of what might be called the Arabian...

Author	Julián Ríos
ISBN	1564783685

A striking reassessment of the Don Juan myth. A literary tour de force, this extraordinary novel is told in single-minded pursuit of double meanings, but it is serious play. Larva is a rollicking account of a masquerade party in an abandoned mansion in London. Milalias (disguised as Don Juan) searches...

Author	Paul Verhaeghen
ISBN	1564784770

Berlin, Spring of 1995. While a group of neo-Nazis are preparing an anniversary bash of disastrous proportions, an old physics professor returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoc designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe, and, in a room at Le Charit?, a Holocaust...

Author	Camilo José Cela
ISBN	1564783413

Christ versus Arizona turns on the events in 1881 that surrounded the shootout at the OK Corral, where Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Virgil and Morgan Earp fought the Clantons and the McLaurys. Set against a backdrop of an Arizona influenced by the Mexican Revolution and the westward expansion of the...