The Rainbow Stories
10 best books like The Rainbow Stories (William T. Vollmann): The Littlest Hitler, Lost in the Funhouse, Airships, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories, Thirst, Night Soul and Other Stories, The Age of Wire and String, The Gold Bug Variations, The Lore of Love
| Author | Ryan Boudinot |
| ISBN | 1582433577 |
Bette wore what I had come to secretly call her Star Trek uniform, a hideous white suit jacket with too-pointy collars. From her face hung a beard of bees. Everyone's seen these things on TV or in National Geographic. Some farmer standing shirtless in his field, a stalactite of writhing insects dangling...
| Author | John Barth |
| ISBN | 0385240872 |
Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth’s collection of fourteen metafictional short-stories could take the cupcake for the most extreme form of self-reflexive postmodern literature ever written. Frame-Tale is ten words long on a Mobius strip, Night-Sea Journey a ten-pager, an occasionally...
| Author | Barry Hannah |
| ISBN | 0802133886 |
Now considered a contemporary classic, Airships was honored by Esquire magazine with the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award. The twenty stories in this collection are a fresh, exuberant celebration of the new American South — a land of high school band contests, where good old boys from Vicksurg...
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
| Author | Harold Brodkey |
| ISBN | 0679724311 |
Harold Brodkey (1930 – 1996) is a major twentieth-century American writer of highly polished, highly poetic fiction first published in The New Yorker, Esquire and other magazines over a thirty years span, 1960s through the 1990s. Published as part of the 1980s Vintage Contemporaries series,...
| 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 | Ken Kalfus |
| ISBN | 1571310185 |
A few quite good stories, reminiscent of Calvino and Borges, surrounded by some okay stories. And then I remembered, Calvino and Borges do a pretty good Calvino and Borges as well--so I'll read them instead. If you only read one story from this collection, though read "Night And Day You Are The One"
I'll...
| 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 | Ben Marcus |
| ISBN | 1564781968 |
In The Age of Wire and String, hailed by Robert Coover as "the most audacious literary debut in decades," Ben Marcus welds together a new reality from the scrapheap of the past. Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles, and the weather are some of the recycled elements in Marcus's first collection—part fiction,...
| Author | Richard Powers |
| ISBN | 0060975008 |
A Source of Meditative Awe
As soon as I finished reading this novel, I wanted to respond the only way I could that would do justice to my feelings for the book: and that was to admit that I was in a state of wonder and to say that, in Richard Powers’ own words, the novel was "a source of meditative awe".
Although,...
| Author | Ellen Galford |
| ISBN | 0809452812 |
My review for all of these books in this series is the same.
Time-Life has once again done an outstanding job putting together a series. From cover to cover they are thoughtful, beautiful books. I'm starting to sound generic, but it's true.
I'm a DK fan, I like white backgrounds and side notes...
| Author | Donald Barthelme |
| ISBN | 0679741194 |
A hypothetical episode of Batman hilariously slowed down to soap-opera speed. A game of baseball as played by T.S. Eliot and Wilem "Big Ball" de Kooning. A recipe suitable for feeding sixty park-enamored celebrants at one's daughter's wedding. An outlandishly illustrated account of a scientific...
| Author | Don DeLillo |
| ISBN | 1451655843 |
From one of the greatest writers of our time, a collection of short stories, written between 1979 and 2011; chronicling—and foretelling—three decades of American culture.
From one of the greatest writers of our time, his first collection of short stories, written between 1979 and...
What can I say? This is a must-have book for anyone who wants ALL their lit theory bases covered. This collection culls short stories and excerpts from novels and culminates with a section on postmodernist theory itself. My favorites so far are the stories from Walter Abish, David Foster Wallace, Ishmael...
| Author | Gilbert Sorrentino |
| ISBN | 1564784703 |
‘There is no place for an artist here any more. He has been officially dismissed in favor of the entertainer.’
Gilbert Sorrentino mourns the artist, the true purveyor of prose drowning in the growing mass of fakers and sell-outs whose false glamour makes them the candle in which the literary...
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories
| Author | Delmore Schwartz |
| ISBN | 0811206807 |
Bi-Partisan Preview
I was introduced to Delmore Schwartz's writing from two different perspectives in the mid-70's.
It might come as little surprise that these introductions had to do with passions that persist to this day: music, literature and politics.
Firstly, I...
| Author | Robert Coover |
| ISBN | 1932416226 |
Casey returns to bat. The Pied Piper pipes again. Little Red Riding Hood is not safe yet. Robert Coover returns with a new collection of short fiction, reexamining our shared narrative heritage — myths, fairy tales, and favorite childhood stories — and unearthing the underlying hope, fear, and...
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 | Joshua Cohen |
| ISBN | 1564785882 |
On Christmas Eve 1999, all the Jews in the world die in a strange, millennial plague, with the exception of the firstborn males, who are soon adopted by a cabal of powerful people in the American government. By the following Passover, however, only one is still alive: Benjamin Israelien; a kindly, innocent,...
| Author | Samuel Beckett |
| ISBN | 0802134904 |
Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett is one of the most profoundly original writers of the twentieth-century. A tremendously influential poet and dramatist, Beckett spoke of his prose fiction as the "important writing", the medium in which his ideas were most powerfully distilled. Here, for the first...
