You Bright and Risen Angels
10 best books like You Bright and Risen Angels (William T. Vollmann): The Tunnel, Mulligan Stew, The Public Burning, JR, Letters, Darconville’s Cat, Take It or Leave It, Going Native, The Cannibal, The Gold Bug Variations
| Author | William H. Gass |
| ISBN | 1564782131 |
Thirty years in the making, William Gass's second novel first appeared on the literary scene in 1995, at which time it was promptly hailed as an indisputable masterpiece. The story of a middle aged professor who, upon completion of his massive historical study, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany,...
| 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 | Robert Coover |
| ISBN | 0802135277 |
A controversial best-seller in 1977, The Public Burning has since emerged as one of the most influential novels of our time. The first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use living historical figures as characters, the novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the...
| Author | William Gaddis |
| ISBN | 0140187073 |
J R is the long-awaited novel from William Gaddis, author of The Recognitions, that tremendous book which, in the twenty years since its publication, has come to be acknowledged as an American masterpiece. And J R is a book of comparable magnitude, substance, and humor--a rushing, raucous look at money...
| Author | John Barth |
| ISBN | 1564780619 |
A landmark of postmodern American fiction, Letters is (as the subtitle genially informs us) "an old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers each of which imagines himself factual." Seven characters (including the Author himself) exchange a novel's worth of letters during...
| Author | Alexander Theroux |
| ISBN | 0805043659 |
The main story is a love affair between Alaric Darconville, an English professor at a Virginia women's college, and one of his students, Isabel.
The style relies on complex syntax and unusual words. The satire is broad, and uses southern culture cliches but is often very funny. Some of the names...
| Author | Raymond Federman |
| ISBN | 1573660302 |
As told, or rather retold second-hand, by the narrator, Take It or Leave It relates the hilarious and amorous adventures of a young Frenchman who has been drafted into the U.S. Army and is being shipped Overseas to fight in Korea. The obsessed narrator retells, as best he can, what the young man supposedly...
Going Native is Stephen Wright’s darkly comic take on the road novel, in which one man’s headlong escape from the American Dream becomes everybody’s worst nightmare. Wylie Jones is set: lovely wife, beautiful kids, barbecues in the backyard of his tastefully decorated suburban Chicago house...
| Author | John Hawkes |
| ISBN | 0811200639 |
"No synopsis conveys the quality of this now famous novel about an hallucinated Germany in collapse after World War II. John Hawkes, in his search for a means to transcend outworn modes of fictional realism, has discovered a highly original technique for objectifying the perennial degradation of...
| 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 | D. Keith Mano |
| ISBN | 1564781933 |
Welcome to the world of Simon Lynxx and to one of the great overlooked novels of the 1980s. Con-man, filmmaker (currently working on producing "Jesus 2001", what he calls the religious equivalent of The Godfather, best known for his movie "The Clap That Took Over the World"), descendent of a wealthy...
| 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 | Ishmael Reed |
| ISBN | 1564782387 |
"Folks. This here is the story of the Loop Garoo Kid. A cowboy so bad he made a working posse of spells phone in sick. A bullwhacker so unfeeling he left the print of winged mice on hides of crawling women. A desperado so onery he made the Pope cry and the most powerful of cattlemen shed his head to the Executioner's...
| Author | Joseph McElroy |
| ISBN | 1585673528 |
With "Lookout Cartridge," Joseph McElroy established a reputation as one of contemporary fiction's foremost innovators and deft observers into the fissures of modern society. It is a novel of dazzling intricacy, absorbing suspense, and the highest ambition: to redeem the great claim of paranoia...
| Author | Paul Metcalf |
| ISBN | 0826313000 |
First published in 1965, this remarkable novel is Paul Metcalf's purging of the burden of his relationship to Herman Melville (his great-grandfather), but it is much broader than that. In the extraordinary style of writing that is now Metcalf's signature, he collages multiple stories. Metcalf explores...
| Author | Stanley Elkin |
| ISBN | 1564783057 |
Ben Flesh is one of the men "who made America look like America, who made America famous." He collects franchises, traveling from state to state, acquiring the brand-name establishments that shape the American landscape. But both the nation and Ben are running out of energy. As blackouts roll through...
| 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...
| Author | Ted Mooney |
| ISBN | 0679738835 |
The language in this book flows, cool and clear and liquid; it's full of knowledge that, like water, we always carry inside our bodies but which becomes utterly alien, even dangerous, when we submerge ourselves in it too deeply. From the opening page on, this book made me think of the Neutral Milk Hotel...
Cutting a terrifying path from a Pennsylvania farm to the Europe of the 1930s, Banning Jainlight becomes the private pornographer of the world's most evil man. In a Vienna window, he glimpses the face of a lost erotic dream, and from there travels to the Twentieth Century's darkest corner to confront...
