The Sea Came in at Midnight
10 best books like The Sea Came in at Midnight (Steve Erickson): Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico, The Taste of a Man, The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, Meet Me in the Moon Room, Cut Through the Bone, The Zoo Where You're Fed to God, Like Being Killed, Lightning Bug, Laura Warholic or, the Sexual Intellectual, The Lost Scrapbook
Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico
| Author | Javier Marías |
| ISBN | 0811218589 |
A boiled-down gem of a Marías story about how Elvis (in Acapulco to film a movie) and his hard-drinking entourage abandon their interpreter in a seedy cantina full of enraged criminals after insults start to fly. When the local kingpin demands to be told what the Americans are saying, Elvis himself...
| Author | Slavenka Drakulić |
| ISBN | 0140266224 |
She is a Polish graduate student, finishing her doctorate in New York. He is a Brazilian anthropologist, in the city on a three-month research grant. They meet by chance in the New York Public Library, fall in love, and move into a tiny apartment together. Tereza has a lover waiting for her in Poland, Jose...
| Author | Steven Millhauser |
| ISBN | 0753808218 |
The Knife Thrower introduces a series of distinctively Millhauserian worlds: tiny, fabulous, self-enclosed, like Fabergé eggs or like the short-story genre itself. Flying carpets; subterranean amusement parks; a band of teenage girls who meet secretly in the night in order to do "nothing at all";...
| Author | Ray Vukcevich |
| ISBN | 1931520011 |
* Philip K. Dick Award finalist* Locus Recommended Reading Here are 33 weird, wonderful stories concerning men, women, teleportation, wind-up cats, and brown paper bags. By turns whimsical and unsettling—frequently managing to be both—these short fictions describe family relationships,...
| Author | Ethel Rohan |
| ISBN | 0615400930 |
**ARC (Advance Reading Copy) review by Mel Bosworth
An entire chocolate cake. A gallon of espresso. A liter of Jameson. For the average person, it’s probably not wise to consume any of these things in one sitting, regardless of how tempting it might be. Ethel Rohan’s debut collection Cut...
The Zoo Where You're Fed to God
| Author | Michael Ventura |
| ISBN | 0671892223 |
i was just reading my delight of a book, readers' advisory service in the public library, and the chapter i was reading was the one on "appeal". basically, appeal is how you describe a book to a patron based on its salient elements: pacing, characterization, story line, frame/tone, and style. the idea...
| Author | Ellen Miller |
| ISBN | 0452279291 |
"I could never predict what was going to ruin me and what was going to rescue me..." Ilyana Meyerovich has never been very far front disaster and loss. A self-described "suicidal, strung-out, psychotic Jew under thirty" Ilyana retreats into her astonishing mind, prays to obscure Catholic saints,...
| Author | Donald Harington |
| ISBN | 1592641024 |
"The smells of things in the air of the night are the calls of lives wanting to be found. Why else are fragrances fragrant?
We see to find, we hear to find, we smell to find and be found. Until we find or be found, we are lost and wanting."
The theme of the mood of an ending is of a loss or finding.I...
Laura Warholic or, the Sexual Intellectual
| Author | Alexander Theroux |
| ISBN | 1560977981 |
Eugene Eyestones, an erudite sex columnist for a Boston cultural magazine, becomes enmeshed in the messy life of a would-be artist named Laura Warholic. Repulsing and fascinating him at the same time, she becomes a mirror in which he not only sees himself but through which he is forced to face his own...
| Author | Evan Dara |
| ISBN | 1573660388 |
It may be the defining irony of our time: just as we are coming to recognize our shared destiny and necessary interdependence, our culture seems to be fracturing along every fault line available to it. The Lost Scrapbook is a novel that passionately captures the contradictory richness of our historical...
"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...
| Author | Ron Loewinsohn |
| ISBN | 1564782824 |
Organized around the idea that "you can't know what a magnetic field is like unless you're inside of it, " Ron Loewinsohn's first novel opens from the disturbing perspective of a burglar in the midst of a robbery and travels through the thoughts and experiences (both real and imaginary) of a group of characters...
| Author | George Elliott Clarke |
| ISBN | 0006485693 |
It was, by all accounts, a slug-ugly crime. Brothers George and Rufus Hamilton, in a robbery gone wrong, drunkenly bludgeoned a taxi driver to death with a hammer. It was 1949, and the two siblings, part Mi'kmaq and part African, were both hanged for the killing. Those facts are also skeletons in George...
| Author | Jonathan Carroll |
| ISBN | 0099709503 |
Just as the the word "weird" has many implications and shades of meaning, so too does the latest--weird--work by this gifted and perplexing writer. As Carroll ( Bones of the Moon ; Sleeping in Flame ) himself says, "Life has a habit of turning dark corners." Applied here, this observation seems an understatement:...
| Author | Liz Jensen |
| ISBN | 1596911883 |
A thrillingly imagined rollercoaster of a novel bursting with sex, time travel, and true love.
Charlotte Schleswig, the delightful narrator of Liz Jensen's latest novel, supports herself and the lumpen Fru Schleswig (who may or may not be her mother) as a prostitute in 1890s Copenhagen....
| Author | David Markson |
| ISBN | 1582431337 |
The Barnes & Noble Review
This experimental work is an enthralling amalgamation of anecdotes, aphorisms, and quotations from writers and artists, interspersed with self-reflexive comments by the Writer who has assembled them. As the title implies, this is certainly not a novel --...
| Author | Percival Everett |
| ISBN | 0786869178 |
Part parable, part fantasy novel, part laugh-out-loud satire, American Desert is the story of Theodore Street, a college professor on the brink of committing suicide. When the decision is taken out of his hands--he's hit by a car and his head is severed from his body--he must come to terms with himself....
| Author | Don DeLillo |
| ISBN | 0679722947 |
DeLillo's "Running Dog," originally published in 1978, follows Moll Robbins, a New York city journalist trailing the activities of an influential senator. In the process she is dragged into the black market world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an erotic film...
| Author | Chris Bachelder |
| ISBN | 1582346364 |
In this hilarious and wildly inventive novel, Chris Bachelder brings Upton Sinclair back from the dead to see what he might make of our modern world.
U.S.! is a playful, darkly comic novel that imagines the serial resurrection and assassination of tireless muckraker Upton Sinclair. In Chris...
