Take It or Leave It

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	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

Stephen Wright

Going Native is Stephen Wright’s darkly comic take on the road novel, in which one man’s headlong escape from the American Dream becomes everybody’s worst nightmare. Wylie Jones is set: lovely wife, beautiful kids, barbecues in the backyard of his tastefully decorated suburban Chicago house...

Author	John Hawkes
ISBN	0811200639

"No synopsis conveys the quality of this now famous novel about an hallucinated Germany in collapse after World War II. John Hawkes, in his search for a means to transcend outworn modes of fictional realism, has discovered a highly original technique for objectifying the perennial degradation of...

Author	D. Keith Mano
ISBN	1564781933

Welcome to the world of Simon Lynxx and to one of the great overlooked novels of the 1980s. Con-man, filmmaker (currently working on producing "Jesus 2001", what he calls the religious equivalent of The Godfather, best known for his movie "The Clap That Took Over the World"), descendent of a wealthy...

Author	Mieko Kanai
ISBN	1564785661

Like the surfaces of a jagged crystal, each story in this collection shows an entirely different facet when viewed from a different angle. Playing games with the basic units of both life and fiction—the solid certainties of the self, the world around us, and the words we use to describe these things...

Author	Andrzej Stasiuk
ISBN	1564786870

At several points in the haunting Dukla, Andrzej Stasiuk claims that what he is trying to do is “write a book about light.” The result is a beautiful, lyrical series of evocations of a very specific locale at different times of the year, in different kinds of weather, and with different human landscapes....

Author	Ishmael Reed
ISBN	1564782387

"Folks. This here is the story of the Loop Garoo Kid. A cowboy so bad he made a working posse of spells phone in sick. A bullwhacker so unfeeling he left the print of winged mice on hides of crawling women. A desperado so onery he made the Pope cry and the most powerful of cattlemen shed his head to the Executioner's...

Author	Leslie Forbes
ISBN	0553383418

La Muta, "the mute woman." Amidst a country rocked by scandal and corruption, inhabitants of the idyllic city of Urbino, Italy, birthplace of Raphael, are more concerned with a sudden outbreak of miracles than with politics. But what unspeakable secret lies hidden in Raphael's enigmatic painting?...

Author	Joseph McElroy
ISBN	1585673528

With "Lookout Cartridge," Joseph McElroy established a reputation as one of contemporary fiction's foremost innovators and deft observers into the fissures of modern society. It is a novel of dazzling intricacy, absorbing suspense, and the highest ambition: to redeem the great claim of paranoia...

Author	Paul Metcalf
ISBN	0826313000

First published in 1965, this remarkable novel is Paul Metcalf's purging of the burden of his relationship to Herman Melville (his great-grandfather), but it is much broader than that. In the extraordinary style of writing that is now Metcalf's signature, he collages multiple stories. Metcalf explores...

Author	Rikki Ducornet
ISBN	1564780856

In "The Stain" Rikki Ducornet tells the story of a young girl named Charlotte, branded with a furry birthmark in the shape of a dancing hare, regarded as the mark of Satan. "Sadistic nuns, scatology, butchered animals, monkish rapists, and Satan" (Kirkus), as well as the village exorcist, inhabit this...

Author	William T. Vollmann
ISBN	0140176233

The story of John Franklin’s doomed 1845 attempt to discover a Northwest Passage, from the National Book Award-winning author of Europe Central

Vaulting through time to another flashpoint in the long struggle between Indians and Europeans, William T. Vollmann's visionary fictional...

Author	Stanley Elkin
ISBN	1564783057

Ben Flesh is one of the men "who made America look like America, who made America famous." He collects franchises, traveling from state to state, acquiring the brand-name establishments that shape the American landscape. But both the nation and Ben are running out of energy. As blackouts roll through...

Author	Harry Mathews
ISBN	1564781941

This novel begins in a Russian prison camp at a baseball game featuring the defective Baptists versus the Fideists. There is a plot (of sorts), one of revenge surrounding a doctor who, in removing a bone spur from our narrator, manages to amputate a ring and index finger, a significant surgical error...

Author	Ted Mooney
ISBN	0679738835

The language in this book flows, cool and clear and liquid; it's full of knowledge that, like water, we always carry inside our bodies but which becomes utterly alien, even dangerous, when we submerge ourselves in it too deeply. From the opening page on, this book made me think of the Neutral Milk Hotel...

Author

Kathy Acker

In this characteristically sexy, daring, and hyperliterate novel, Kathy Acker interweaves the stories of three characters who share the same tragic flaw: a predilection for doomed, obsessive love. Rimbaud, the delinquent symbolist prodigy, is deserted by his lover Verlaine time and time again....

Author	David L. Ulin
ISBN	1931082278

Los Angeles has always been a place of paradisal promise and apocalyptic undercurrents. Simone de Beauvoir saw a kaleidoscopic "hall of mirrors," Aldous Huxley a "city of dreadful joy." Jack Kerouac found a "huge desert encampment," David Thomson imagined "Marilyn Monroe, fifty miles long, lying...

Author	Stephen Dixon
ISBN	0805048839

The esteemed and prescient critic John Hollander wrote that "Frog represents a new phase of Stephen Dixon's work, and manifests a new concentration of creative power and unfailing rhetorical control, and it should certainly bring him the broadened recognition which is already so deep a one." Indeed,...

Author	Frederic Prokosch
ISBN	0374529248

André Gide praised The Asiatics as "an authentic masterpiece"; Thomas Mann called it "brilliant." First published in 1935 and virtually unavailable for years, this extraordinary novel tells the story of a young American--the unnamed narrator--who hitchhikes his way across Asia, from Beirut...

Author	Paolo Rumiz
ISBN	0847845427

An award-winning writer travels the eastern front of Europe, where the push/pull between old empires and new possibilities has never been more evident. Paolo Rumiz traces the path that has twice cut Europe in two--first by the Iron Curtain and then by the artificial scaffolding of the EU--moving through...