The Age of Wire and String
10 best books like The Age of Wire and String (Ben Marcus): Mulligan Stew, AM/PM, Pricksongs and Descants, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories, Night Soul and Other Stories, In the Penny Arcade, Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine, Genoa: A Telling of Wonders, The Stain, The Rifles
| 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 | Amelia Gray |
| ISBN | 0977199274 |
If anything's going to save the characters in Amelia Gray's debut from their troubled romances, their social improprieties, or their hands turning into claws, it's a John Mayer concert tee. In AM/PM, impish humor and cutting insight are on full display. Readers tour the lives of 23 characters across...
| Author | Robert Coover |
| ISBN | 0802136672 |
Pricksongs & Descants, originally published in 1969, is a virtuoso performance that established its author - already a William Faulkner Award winner for his first novel - as a writer of enduring power and unquestionable brilliance, a promise he has fulfilled over a stellar career. It also began...
| 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 | 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 | Steven Millhauser |
| ISBN | 0753808226 |
The seven stories of In the Penny Arcade blend both the real and the fantastic in a seductive mix that illuminates the full range of Steven Millhauser's gifts, from 'August Eschenburg', the story of a clockmaker's son whose extraordinary talent for creating animated figures is lost on a world whose...
Forty years ago I first linked up with Unguentine and we made love on twin-hulled catamarans, sails a-billow, bless the seas... So begins the courtship of a certain Unguentine to the woman we know only as Mrs. Unguentine, the chronicler of their sad, fantastical tale. For forty years, they sail the seas...
| 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 | Lydia Davis |
| ISBN | 0312420560 |
From one of our most imaginative and inventive writers, a crystalline collection of perfectly modulated, sometimes harrowing and often hilarious investigations into the multifaceted ways in which human beings perceive each other and themselves. A couple suspects their friends think them boring;...
Fiction. Short Stories. Originally released by Knopf in 1996, Lutz's rigorously innovative debut barely made a ripple in the mainstream publishing world. Meanwhile, however, the book attained a cult status, and its influence has grown tremendously in the years since its appearance, disappearance,...
| Author | David Markson |
| ISBN | 1564781321 |
In this spellbinding, utterly unconventional fiction, an aging author who is identified only as Reader contemplates the writing of a novel. As he does, other matters insistently crowd his mind - literary and cultural anecdotes, endless quotations attributed and not, scholarly curiosities - the...
| Author | Blake Butler |
| ISBN | 0979808065 |
Fiction. "Within the psychic architecture that is EVER, Blake Butler explores the way bodies swell and contract, going from skin to house and back again. And the way houses too shrink to fit us first like clothing and then like skin and then tighter still. The result is a strange, visionary ontological...
| Author | David Ohle |
| ISBN | 0970942826 |
Fiction. "It is curious that a reprint could be heroic. It is more curious that a book this good could go out of print so quickly. And it is most curious that an introduction would even be required for a novel that, if you examine it carefully in the right kind oflight, might actually be seen to be steaming....
| Author | Felipe Alfau |
| ISBN | 1564781712 |
The interconnected stories that form Felipe Alfau's novel Locos take place in a Madrid as exotic as the Baghdad of the 1001 Arabian Nights and feature unforgettable characters in revolt against their young 'author'.
"For them," he complains, "reality is what fiction is to real people; they simply...
