The Free-Lance Pallbearers
10 best books like The Free-Lance Pallbearers (Ishmael Reed): Hopeful Monsters, The Inquisitory, Breaking and Entering, Island People, Night Soul and Other Stories, The Word Book, The Jade Cabinet, Esplendor de Portugal, Siamese, Passages
| Author | Nicholas Mosley |
| ISBN | 1564782425 |
-- A sweeping, comprehensive epic, Hopeful Monsters tells the story of the love affair between Max, an English student of physics and biology, and Eleanor, a German Jewess and political radical. Together and apart, Max and Eleanor participate in the great political and intellectual movements which...
| Author | Robert Pinget |
| ISBN | 1564783278 |
The Inquisitory consists entirely of the interrogation of an old, deaf servant regarding unspecified crimes that may or may not have taken place at his master's French chateau. The servant's replies - which are by turns comic, straightforward, angry, nostalgic, and disingenuous - hint at a variety...
| Author | Joy Williams |
| ISBN | 0394757734 |
SYNOPSIS: young married ne'er do wells do their passive best to fight the anomie of existence by breaking into mcmansions and experiencing their usual buried resentments and lack of affect in new environments rather than their own ill-tended home.
Joy Williams is often an artist with the...
| 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 | 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 | 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 | Rikki Ducornet |
| ISBN | 1564781739 |
Made speechless by her eccentric father, the beautiful Etheria is traded for a piece of precious jade. Memory, her sister, tells her story, that of a childhood enlivened by Lewis Carroll and an orangutan named Dr. Johnson and envenomed by the pernicious courtship of Radulph Tubbs, Queen Victoria's...
| Author | António Lobo Antunes |
| ISBN | 8478446141 |
La ironia del titulo -frase tomada de una estrofa del himno nacional- ya anuncia lo que sera el desarrollo y el proposito de esta novela de Lobo Antunes: mostrar el otro lado de ese B+esplendorB; , desvelar sin paliativos la verdad a uno y otro lado del espectro politico, a traves de dos espacios narrativos...
| Author | Stig Sæterbakken |
| ISBN | 1564783251 |
A brutally comic portrait of marriage, taken to extremes reminiscent of the work of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. Edwin Mortens is almost blind, but has good hearing; his wife Erna is hard of hearing, but has excellent eyes. Paralyzed from the waist down, Edwin sits locked in his bathroom all day,...
| Author | Ann Quin |
| ISBN | 1564782794 |
A poetic book of voices, landscapes and the passing of time, Ann Quin's finely wrought novel reflects the multiple meanings of the very word "passages." Two characters move through the book--a woman in search of her brother, and her lover (a masculine reflection of herself) in search of himself. The...
| Author | Orly Castel-Bloom |
| ISBN | 0952942607 |
Fucked up. At times brilliant, at times hilarious. I was not horrified because I immediately read it as an allegory of internal states. It is curious that unlike other unreliable narrators (closest comparison that comes to my mind is Beckett's narrators), Dolly knows she's crazy and reflects on her...
| 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 | Harry Mathews |
| ISBN | 1564782336 |
I am drawn to Harry Mathews—eighty-year-old Anglo-French poet, essayist, novelist and American Oulipian—largely because the Dalkey Archive Press publish a large wodge of his novels, and I respect the Dalkey Archive Press more than I respect all the world’s leaders and notable persons. So...
| Author | Gilbert Sorrentino |
| ISBN | 1564784398 |
Set at a boardinghouse in rural New Jersey in the summer of 1939, this novel revolves around four people who experience the comedies, torments, and rare pleasures of family, romance, and sex while on vacation from Brooklyn and the Depression. As the novel's perspective shifts to each of the four primary...
| Author | Momus |
| ISBN | 1564785610 |
Imagine a universe where every joke you’ve ever heard is solid, real, and occasionally dangerous—and all happening, one after the other, to the same small group of people. Detailing a series of filthy and ludicrous episodes in the life of a single family, saddled with a super-eccentric, sexually...
Best European Fiction 2012
| Author | Aleksandar Hemon |
| ISBN | 1564786803 |
Now in its third year, the Best European Fiction series has become a mainstay in the literary landscape, each year featuring new voices from throughout Europe alongside more established names such as Hilary Mantel, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Ingo Schulze, George Konrad, Victor Pelevin, and Enrique...
| Author | Jon Fosse |
| ISBN | 1564785734 |
In her old house by the fjord, Signe lies on a bench and sees a vision of herself as she was more than twenty years earlier: standing by the window waiting for her husband Asle, on that terrible late November day when he took his rowboat out onto the water and never returned. Her memories widen out to include...
| Author | Alain Robbe-Grillet |
| ISBN | 0802152007 |
A provocative novel by the most influential living French writer, Recollections of the Golden Triangle is a tour de force: a literary thriller constructed of wildly diverse elements—fantasy and dream, erotic invention, and the stuff of popular fiction and movies taken to its farthest limits.
A...
| Author | Louis-Ferdinand Céline |
| ISBN | 1564781623 |
Often comic and always angry, the first-person autobiographical narrator, with his wife and their cat in tow, takes the reader with him on his flight from Paris to Denmark after finding himself on the losing side of World War II. The train rides that encompass the novel are filled with madness and mercy,...
| Author | Stanley Elkin |
| ISBN | 1564783324 |
Vendibility
In that mysterious place between the conscious and unconscious, that murky reality after sleep but before waking, that long lonely road... well, from the Lower East Side of Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge to Williamsburg, there writes Stanley Elkin. A Bad Man is Elkin at...
| Author | Michal Ajvaz |
| ISBN | 1564785785 |
Heir to the philosophical-fantastical tradition of Borges, Calvino, and Perec, The Golden Age is Michal Ajvaz’s greatest and most ambitious work.
The Golden Age is a fantastical travelogue in which a modern-day Gulliver writes a book about a civilization he once encountered on a tiny...
