The Trick is to Keep Breathing
10 best books like The Trick is to Keep Breathing (Janice Galloway): Chromos, Hopeful Monsters, Docherty (Coronet Books), How Late it Was, How Late, Faces in the Water, The Loony-Bin Trip, Am I a Redundant Human Being?, Amalgamemnon, Morvern Callar, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann
| Author | Felipe Alfau |
| ISBN | 1564782042 |
Chromos is one of the true masterpieces of post-World War II fiction. Written in the 1940s but left unpublished until 1990, it anticipated the fictional inventiveness of the writers who were to come along - Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Sorrentino, and Gaddis. Chromos is the American immigration novel...
| 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 | William McIlvanney |
| ISBN | 0340407573 |
His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job.
Newborn Conn Docherty, raw as a fresh wound, lies between his parents in their tenement room, with no birthright but a life's labour in the pits of his...
One Sunday morning in Glasgow, shoplifting ex-con Sammy awakens in an alley, wearing another man's shoes and trying to remember his two-day drinking binge. He gets in a scrap with some soldiers and revives in a jail cell, badly beaten and, he slowly discovers, completely blind. And things get worse:...
| Author | Janet Frame |
| ISBN | 0704338610 |
I have been a reader for as long as I can remember, not going to say how many years that is, but it has only been in the last ten years or so that I started reading non fiction. I used to think that knowing an author's background was unnecessary, but after I now realize how much of an author is put into even the fictional...
| Author | Kate Millett |
| ISBN | 0252068882 |
this is my second time around, after many years, and i still find this books exceptional. first of all, kate millett writes beautifully. this woman's had many careers -- artist, activist, feminist theorist, writer -- but if her talents resided only in putting words in sequence and saying amazing things...
| Author | Mela Hartwig |
| ISBN | 1564785815 |
Aloisia Schmidt is an ordinary secretary with a burning question: am I a redundant human being? She’s neither pretty nor ugly (though she wishes she were hideous: at least that would be something), has no imagination, and is forced to live vicariously through “borrowed” fantasy—fantasy,...
| Author | Christine Brooke-Rose |
| ISBN | 1564780503 |
A woman about to lose her job as a professor of literature and history delivers a passionate, witty, and word-mad monologue in this inventive novel, which was called "brilliant" (The Listener), "dazzling" (The Guardian), "elegant, rueful and witty" (The Observer) upon its original publication...
Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket in a desolate and beautiful port town in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on the kitchen floor. Morvern's reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What...
| Author | Ingeborg Bachmann |
| ISBN | 0810112043 |
There are things in the world that just suck and there is nothing you can do about them. I'm not talking about 'important' things like awful governments and assholes ruining the world or any of that kind of stuff, but rather things that should exist but never will. For example some of mine are that there...
| Author | Deborah Levy |
| ISBN | 1564782026 |
In this brilliant, inventive, tragic farce, Deborah Levy creates the ultimate dysfunctional kids, Billy and his sister Girl. Apparently abandoned years ago by their parents, they now live alone somewhere in England. Girl spends much of her time trying to find their mother, going to strangers' doors...
| Author | Andrew Greig |
| ISBN | 0571212859 |
What a wonderful book this is, one of those that lingers with you long after you’ve finished reading it. It’s got a deep melancholy running through it but also lots of passion, love, and light(ish)-hearted comment on Scotland’s east/west divide. Author Andrew Greig has published books on mountaineering,...
| Author | Anne Donovan |
| ISBN | 1841954519 |
Anne Marie's dad, a Glaswegian painter and decorator, has always been game for a laugh. So when he first takes up meditation at the Buddhist Center, no one takes him seriously. But as Jimmy becomes more involved in a search for the spiritual, his beliefs start to come into conflict with the needs of his...
| Author | James Robertson |
| ISBN | 0007150253 |
Exiled to Jamaica after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Sir John Wedderburn made a fortune, alongside his three brothers, as a faux surgeon and sugar planter. In the 1770s, he returned to Scotland to marry and re-establish the family name. He brought with him Joseph Knight, a black slave and a token of...
| Author | Lewis Grassic Gibbon |
A Scots Quair is revolutionary—innovative in its form, deft and humorous in its use of the Scots language, courageous in its characterization and politics. Central to the trilogy is Chris Guthrie, one of the most remarkable female characters in modern literature. In Sunset Song, Gibbon's finest...
| Author | A.L. Kennedy |
| ISBN | 0375707476 |
From the prodigiously talented A. L. Kennedy comes a flamboyantly stylish and fiercely emotional novel about fathers and daughters, creation and self-destruction, and love’s paradoxical power to heal its most devastated victims. One such victim is Nathan Staples, a writer whose hilarious contempt...
| Author | Ann Quin |
| ISBN | 1564783189 |
As innovative and abrasive as the very best of William Burroughs, Ann Quin's Tripticks offers a scattered account of the narrator's flight across a surreal American landscape, pursued by his "No. 1 X-wife" and her new lover. This masterpiece of pre-punk aesthetics critiques the hypocrisy and consumerism...
| Author | Emily Holmes Coleman |
In a prose form as startling as its content, "The Shutter of Snow" portrays the post-partum psychosis of Marthe Gail, who after giving birth to her son, is committed to an insane asylum. Believing herself to be God, she maneuvers through an institutional world that is both sad and terrifying, echoing...
| Author | Anna Kavan |
| ISBN | 0720611237 |
This collection of stories, mostly interlinked and largely autobiographical, chart the descent of the narrator from the onset of neurosis to final incarceration in a Swiss clinic. The sense of paranoia, of persecution by a foe or force that is never given a name, evokes The Trial by Kafka, a writer with...
| Author | Aleksandar Hemon |
| ISBN | 1564786005 |
The launch of Dalkey’s Best European Fiction series was nothing short of phenomenal, with wide-ranging coverage in international media such as Time magazine, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Financial Times, and the Guardian; glowing reviews and interviews in print...
| Author | Noëlle Revaz |
| ISBN | 1564787214 |
When reading With the Animals, one can imagine what it must have been like for sensitive Noëlle Revaz to grow up in Switzerland's rustic hinterland. How much contact with farms and farmers did she have? How much coarseness, brutality, hardship and violence did she witness?
In the...
Agnes's Jacket: A Psychologist's Search for the Meanings of Madness
| Author | Gail A. Hornstein |
| ISBN | 1594865442 |
In a Victorian-era German asylum, seamstress Agnes Richter painstakingly stitched a mysterious autobiographical text into every inch of the jacket she created from her institutional uniform. Despite every attempt to silence them, hundreds of other patients have managed to get their stories out,...
| Author | Camilla Gibb |
| ISBN | 0786709669 |
By turns harrowing and hilarious, this adroitly narrated winner of the Toronto Book Award re-creates the world in the imagination of Thelma. It's a world in which she can escape some of her more painful childhood realities, like those games her father likes to make her play, where he's the boss and she...
Out of Her Mind: Women Writing on Madness (Modern Library)
| Author | Rebecca Shannonhouse |
| ISBN | 0679603301 |
Ever since doctors first labeled their female patients "hysterical," women have occupied a unique place in the world of mental illness. Whether harboring a dark mood or suffering from mental illness, such as schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or manic depression, a select few of these...
| Author | Ali Smith |
| ISBN | 0151003505 |
When we meet Amy Shone, she is a young parent struggling to raise Kate, a precocious eight-year-old. Amy is an enigma-a brilliant scholar who has forgotten how to read. She is estranged from her wealthy English parents and lives a nomadic life in Scotland, dragging Kate from one school to the next, barely...
