Textermination: A Novel
10 best books like Textermination: A Novel (Christine Brooke-Rose): Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon, The Egg Said Nothing, The Ghost of Dibble Hollow, The Time: Night, A Postmodern Belch, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume II, Island People, Impossible Object, Gazelle, Going For a Beer: Selected Short Fictions
Carla Carlson is at the Hotel Clarendon in Quebec City trying to finish a novel. Nearby, a woman, preoccupied with sadness and infatuated with her boss, catalogues antiquities at the Museum of Civilization. Every night, the two women meet at the hotel bar and talk – about childhood and parents and...
| Author | Caris O'Malley |
| ISBN | 1936383268 |
Meet Manny. He's your average shut-in with a penchant for late night television and looting local fountains for coins. With eight locks on his door and newspapers covering his windows, he's more than a bit paranoid too.
His wasn't a great life, but it was comfortable-at least it was until the...
| Author | May Nickerson Wallace |
Out of the graveyard comes a ghost--the ghost of ten-year-old Miles Dibble. "I've been waiting a long time for you to come to Dibble Hollow, Cousin," he tells Pug. "Now you must help me find that lost money."
From that moment on the ghostly Miles leads Pug from one spooky adventure to another.
All...
| Author | Ludmilla Petrushevskaya |
| ISBN | 0810118009 |
First published in Russia in 1992, The Time: Night is a darkly humorous depiction of the Soviet utopia's underbelly by one of the most brilliant stylists in contemporary Russian literature. Anna Andrianova is a trite poet and disastrous parent. Heading a household dominated by women, she can cling...
| Author | M.J. Nicholls |
| ISBN | 1291980342 |
This edition of A Postmodern Belch has been discredited. Pending article 9.6 of the Creative Commons Licence, portions of this work contain improperly brushed syllables taken from a 1978 edition of A Postmodern Belch and inelegantly buffered clauses taken from a 1997 edition of A Postmodern Belch....
| Author | Arthur Conan Doyle |
| ISBN | 0553212427 |
Since his first appearance in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes has been one of the most beloved fictional characters ever created.
Now, in two paperback volumes, Bantam presents all fifty-six short stories and four novels featuring Conan...
| 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 | Nicholas Mosley |
| ISBN | 1564784657 |
"The object of life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one's hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended."
In these closing lines from Impossible Object, one has embodied both Nicholas Mosley's subject of love...
| Author | Rikki Ducornet |
| ISBN | 0385720432 |
As mesmerizing as a tale from the lips of Sheherazade, Gazelle traces the story of Elizabeth, a thirteen-year-old American girl whose adolescent passion is awakened in the exotic climate of 1950s Cairo. While her mother–whose beauty and sexual prowess both frighten and fascinate Elizabeth–moves...
| Author | Robert Coover |
| ISBN | 0393356647 |
Robert Coover has been playing by his own rules for more than half a century, earning the 1987 Rea Award for the Short Story as “a writer who has managed, willfully and even perversely, to remain his own man while offering his generous vision and versions of America.” Here, in this selection of his...
| Author | Martín Adán |
| ISBN | 1555971296 |
Published in 1928 to great acclaim when its author was just twenty years old, The Cardboard House is sweeping and passionate. The novel presents a series of flashes — scenes, moods, dreams, and weather — as the narrator wanders through Barranco (then an exclusive seaside resort outside Lima)....
| Author | Jens Bjørneboe |
| ISBN | 0802313280 |
In its apocalyptic view of mankind and in its haunting, devastating portrayal of justice, Moment of Freedom reminds one of Revelation and Kafka's The Trial. Living high in the Alps in a German principality called Heiligenberg, our narrator tells us he's dutifully fulfilling his obligations as a Servant...
| Author | Stevie Smith |
| ISBN | 0811212394 |
Sometimes it's not what a book is about that keeps me reading, but how it's written. The trouble is, it's much harder to talk about how a book is written than to simply tell what it's about.
About, about. There are a lot of 'abouts' in the beginning of this review, aren't there? But 'about' is a word...
| Author | Ingeborg Bachmann |
| ISBN | 0810112043 |
There are things in the world that just suck and there is nothing you can do about them. I'm not talking about 'important' things like awful governments and assholes ruining the world or any of that kind of stuff, but rather things that should exist but never will. For example some of mine are that there...
| Author | Hélène Cixous |
| ISBN | 0231076592 |
"Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing" is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of 'the strange science of writing.' In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for 'great' writing: "The School of the...
| Author | Fleur Jaeggy |
| ISBN | 0811215504 |
Our fifteen-year-old protagonist and her distant, financially ruined, yet somehow beloved father, Johannes, take a cruise together to Greece on the SS Proleterka. With a strange telescopic perspective, narrated from the day she suddenly decides she would like to receive her father’s ashes,...
| Author | Eliot Weinberger |
| ISBN | 0811226182 |
The Ghosts of Birds offers thirty-five essays by Eliot Weinberger: the first section of the book continues his linked serial-essay, An Elemental Thing, which pulls the reader into “a vortex for the entire universe” (Boston Review). Here, Weinberger chronicles a nineteenth-century journey...
| Author | Gregory Rabassa |
| ISBN | 0811216659 |
A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year for 2005.
Gregory Rabassa's influence as a translator is tremendous. His translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch have helped make these some of the the most widely read and respected...
Three early stories about myth, power, and sex by the acclaimed author of The Flamethrowers.
An explorer’s unknown whereabouts keep a queen in anticipation; a faith healer’s illegal radio broadcasts give hope to an oppressed people; a president’s offer of ice cream surprises a prostitute...
| 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 | Jason Schwartz |
| ISBN | 1939293219 |
John the Posthumous exists in between fiction and poetry, elegy and history: a kind of novella in objects, it is an anatomy of marriage and adultery, an interlocking set of fictional histories, and the staccato telling of a murder, perhaps two murders. This is a literary album of a pre-Internet world,...
| Author | Deborah Levy |
| ISBN | 1564782026 |
In this brilliant, inventive, tragic farce, Deborah Levy creates the ultimate dysfunctional kids, Billy and his sister Girl. Apparently abandoned years ago by their parents, they now live alone somewhere in England. Girl spends much of her time trying to find their mother, going to strangers' doors...
