The Dead Father
10 best books like The Dead Father (Donald Barthelme): Mulligan Stew, Omensetter's Luck, Unlikely Stories, Mostly, Pricksongs and Descants, Giles Goat-Boy, Ratner's Star, Three Lives & Tender Buttons, Tlooth, A Smuggler's Bible, Carpenter's Gothic
| 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 | William H. Gass |
| ISBN | 0141180102 |
Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of...
| Author | Alasdair Gray |
| ISBN | 0140069259 |
With his first collection of short fiction, Unlikely Stories, Mostly, Scottish artist and author Alasdair Gray perfected the blend of visual and verbal elements which has since characterised his work.
The book’s dust jacket advertises the cocktail of surreal, macabre and mock-historical...
| 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 | 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...
Avoiding Cosmic Fake News
Every community of human beings has its own way of thinking about things, its rules for connecting words and experiences. These rules constitute the community’s epistemology. Epistemology determines who to believe, what is valid and true, and ‘what counts’...
Three Lives & Tender Buttons
| Author | Gertrude Stein |
| ISBN | 0451528727 |
Three Lives is...magnificent, ground-breakingly original, exciting, controversial, ahead-of-its-time...These are just a few adjectives that come immediately to mind when I think of this book.
For those who say that Gertrude Stein is 'difficult' to read, then boy try reading Faulkner...
| 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...
"A Smuggler's Bible is the novel that launched the career of one of the most daring and original writers of modern fiction. Driven by despairs as terrible as they are comic, David Brooke sets out to "project" himself into the lives of other people. One may wonder what ties connect the figures whose diverse...
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 | John Hawkes |
| ISBN | 0811216446 |
Skipper, an ex-World War II naval Lieutenant and the narrator of Second Skin, interweaves past and present—what he refers to as his "naked history"—in a series of episodes that tell the story of a volatile life marked by pitiful losses, as well as a more elusive, overwhelming, joy. The past: the...
Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme
| Author | Tracy Daugherty |
| ISBN | 0312378688 |
In the 1960s Donald Barthelme came to prominence as the leader of the Postmodern movement. He was a fixture at the New Yorker, publishing more than 100 short stories, including such masterpieces as "Me and Miss Mandible," the tale of a thirty-five-year-old sent to elementary school by clerical...
| 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...
