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The Accidental: Library Edition
by Ali Smith

ISBN 1400032180 (1-4000-3218-0)
Softcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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Book summary:
The Accidental is the dizzyingly entertaining, wickedly humorous story of a mysterious stranger whose sudden appearance during a family's summer holiday transforms four variously unhappy people. Each of the Smarts-parents Eve and Michael, son Magnus, and the youngest, daughter Astrid-encounter Amber in his or her own solipsistic way, but somehow her presence allows them to se their lives (and their life together) in a new light. Smith's exhilarating facility with language, her narrative freedom, and her chromatic wordplay propel the novel to its startling, wonderfully enigmatic conclusion.Ali Smith's acclaimed novel won the prestigious Whitbread Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. [via]
More editions of The Accidental: Library Edition:
- The Accidental: Library Edition: ISBN 1400032180 (1-4000-3218-0)
  Softcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
The Activist
by Renee Gladman

ISBN 192865018X (1-928650-18-X)
Softcover, Krupskaya

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- The Activist: ISBN 192865018X (1-928650-18-X)
  Softcover, Krupskaya
The Age of Wire and String
by Ben Marcus

ISBN 1564781968 (1-56478-196-8)
Softcover, Dalkey Archive Pr

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More editions of The Age of Wire and String:
- The Age of Wire and String: Stories: ISBN 0679426604 (0-679-42660-4)
  Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
- The Age of Wire and String: ISBN 1564781968 (1-56478-196-8)
  Softcover, Dalkey Archive Pr
Almost No Memory
by Lydia Davis

ISBN 088001606X (0-88001-606-X)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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- Almost No Memory: ISBN 088001606X (0-88001-606-X)
  Softcover, Harpercollins
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Cosmicomics
by Italo Calvino

ISBN 0156226006 (0-15-622600-6)
Softcover, Harcourt

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Book summary:
An enchanting series of stories about the evolution of the universe. Calvino makes characters out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures. They disport themselves amongst galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms -- and have time for a love life. [via]
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The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon

ISBN 1568493207 (1-56849-320-7)
Hardcover, Buccaneer Books

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Book summary:
The Crying of Lot 49, a novel by Thomas Pynchon. [via]
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The Crying of Lot Forty-Nine
by Thomas Pynchon

ISBN 0553236911 (0-553-23691-1)
Softcover, Bantam Books

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Book summary:
The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self knowledge.
[via]
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- The Crying of Lot Forty-Nine: ISBN 0553236911 (0-553-23691-1)
  Softcover, Bantam Books
The Dead Father
by Donald Barthelme

ISBN 0374529256 (0-374-52925-6)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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Book summary:
The Dead Father is a gargantuan half-dead, half-alive, part mechanical, wise, vain, powerful being who still has hopes for himself--even while he is being dragged by means of a cable toward a mysterious goal. In this extraordinary novel, marked by the imaginative use of language that influenced a generation of fiction writers, Donald Barthelme offered a glimpse into his fictional universe. As Donald Antrim writes in his introduction, "Reading The Dead Father, one has the sense that its author enjoys an almost complete artistic freedom . . . a permission to reshape, misrepresent, or even ignore the world as we find it . . . Laughing along with its author, we escape anxiety and feel alive."
[via]
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Dhalgren
by Samuel R. Delany

ISBN 0375706682 (0-375-70668-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
What is Dhalgren? Dhalgren is one of the greatest novels of 20th-century American literature. Dhalgren is one of the all-time bestselling science fiction novels. Dhalgren may be read with equal validity as SF, magic realism, or metafiction. Dhalgren is controversial, challenging, and scandalous. Dhalgren is a brilliant novel about sex, gender, race, class, art, and identity.
A mysterious disaster has stricken the midwestern American city of Bellona, and its aftereffects are disturbing: a city block burns down and is intact a week later; clouds cover the sky for weeks, then part to reveal two moons; a week passes for one person when only a day passes for another. The catastrophe is confined to Bellona, and most of the inhabitants have fled. But others are drawn to the devastated city, among them the Kid, a white/American Indian man who can't remember his own name. The Kid is emblematic of those who live in the new Bellona, who are the young, the poor, the mad, the violent, the outcast--the marginalized.
Dhalgren is many things, but instantly accessible isn't one of them. While most of this big, ambitious, deeply detailed novel is beautifully pellucid, the opening pages will be difficult for some: the novel starts with the second half of an incomplete sentence, in the viewpoint of a man who doesn't know who he is. If you find the early pages rough going, push on; the story soon becomes clear and fascinating. But--fair warning--the central nature of the disaster, of its strange devastations and disruptions, remains a puzzle for many readers, sometimes after several readings.
Spoiler warning: If you want to figure out the secret of the novel as you read Dhalgren, then stop reading this review right now! If you want to know the secret before you start, this is what the novel is about: the experience of existence inside a novel. Time passes differently for different characters. A river changes location. Stairs change their number. The Kid looks in a mirror and sees not himself, but someone who looks an awful lot like Samuel R. Delany. Central images include mirrors, lenses, and prisms, devices that focus, reflect--and distort. The Kid fills a notebook with a journal that may be Dhalgren, and is uncertain if he has written much, or any, of it. The characters don't know they're in a novel, but they know something is wrong. Dhalgren explores the relationship between characters and author (or, perhaps, characters, "author," and author).
The final chapter can be even tougher going than the opening pages, with its viewpoint change and its stretches of braided narrative--and the novel ends with the beginning of an unfinished sentence. But the last chapter becomes clear as you persevere; and when you get to that unfinished closing line, turn to the first line of the novel to finish the sentence and close the narrative circle. --Cynthia Ward [via]
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Dictee
by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

ISBN 0943219124 (0-943219-12-4)
Softcover, Third Women Pr

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Book summary:
Cha's groundbreaking image/text work back in print [via]
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Ella Minnow Pea
by Mark Dunn

ISBN 0967370167 (0-9673701-6-7)
Hardcover, Macadam Cage Pub

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Book summary:
Ella Minnow Pea is an epistolary novel set in the fictional island of Nollop situated off the coast of South Carolina and home to the inventor the pangram The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog. Now deceased, the islanders have erected a monument to honor their hero, but one day a tile with the letter z falls from the statue. The leaders interpret the falling tile as a message from beyond the grave and the letter is banned from use. On an island where the residents pride themselves on their love of language, this is seen as a tragedy. They are still reeling from the shock, when another tile falls and then another.... Mark Dunn takes us on a journey against time through the eyes of Ella Minnow Pea and her family as they race to find another phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet to save them from being unable to communicate. Eventually, the only letters remaining are LMNOP, when Ella finally discovers the phrase that will save their language. [via]
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- Ella Minnow Pea: ISBN 0967370167 (0-9673701-6-7)
  Hardcover, Macadam Cage Pub
Essential Acker
by Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Amy Acker, Jeanette Winterson

ISBN 0802139213 (0-8021-3921-3)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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- Essential Acker: ISBN 0802139213 (0-8021-3921-3)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
Exercises in Style
by Raymond Queneau

ISBN 0811207897 (0-8112-0789-7)
Softcover, New Directions

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- Exercises in Style: ISBN 0811207897 (0-8112-0789-7)
  Softcover, New Directions
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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers

ISBN 1568959095 (1-56895-909-5)
Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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Book summary:
Dave Eggers is a terrifically talented writer; don't hold his cleverness against him. What to make of a book called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story? For starters, there's a good bit of staggering genius before you even get to the true story, including a preface, a list of "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book," and a 20-page acknowledgements section complete with special mail-in offer, flow chart of the book's themes, and a lovely pen-and-ink drawing of a stapler (helpfully labeled "Here is a drawing of a stapler:").
But on to the true story. At the age of 22, Eggers became both an orphan and a "single mother" when his parents died within five months of one another of unrelated cancers. In the ensuing sibling division of labor, Dave is appointed unofficial guardian of his 8-year-old brother, Christopher. The two live together in semi-squalor, decaying food and sports equipment scattered about, while Eggers worries obsessively about child-welfare authorities, molesting babysitters, and his own health. His child-rearing strategy swings between making his brother's upbringing manically fun and performing bizarre developmental experiments on him. (Case in point: his idea of suitable bedtime reading is John Hersey's Hiroshima.)
The book is also, perhaps less successfully, about being young and hip and out to conquer the world (in an ironic, media-savvy, Gen-X way, naturally). In the early '90s, Eggers was one of the founders of the very funny Might Magazine, and he spends a fair amount of time here on Might, the hipster culture of San Francisco's South Park, and his own efforts to get on to MTV's Real World. This sort of thing doesn't age very well--but then, Eggers knows that. There's no criticism you can come up with that he hasn't put into A.H.W.O.S.G. already. "The book thereafter is kind of uneven," he tells us regarding the contents after page 109, and while that's true, it's still uneven in a way that is funny and heartfelt and interesting.
All this self-consciousness could have become unbearably arch. It's a testament to Eggers's skill as a writer--and to the heartbreaking particulars of his story--that it doesn't. Currently the editor of the footnote-and-marginalia-intensive journal McSweeney's (the last issue featured an entire story by David Foster Wallace printed tinily on its spine), Eggers comes from the most media-saturated generation in history--so much so that he can't feel an emotion without the sense that it's already been felt for him. What may seem like postmodern noodling is really just Eggers writing about pain in the only honest way available to him. Oddly enough, the effect is one of complete sincerity, and--especially in its concluding pages--this memoir as metafiction is affecting beyond all rational explanation. --Mary Park [via]
More editions of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius:
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: ISBN 1568959095 (1-56895-909-5)
  Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc
Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
by Wolfgang Iser

ISBN 0521328071 (0-521-32807-1)
Hardcover, Cambridge Univ Pr

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- Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy: ISBN 0521328071 (0-521-32807-1)
  Hardcover, Cambridge Univ Pr
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Life & Opinions of Tristam Shandy
by Sterne

ISBN 014024204X (0-14-024204-X)
Softcover, Penguin Uk

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- Life & Opinions of Tristam Shandy: ISBN 014024204X (0-14-024204-X)
  Softcover, Penguin Uk
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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
by Laurence Sterne

ISBN 1404314709 (1-4043-1470-9)
Hardcover, Indypublish.Com

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Book summary:
The comic masterpiece Tristram Shandy is often regarded as a progenitor of the twentieth century novel. Within the resolutely tangled strands of this narrative is the life, from conception, of a gentleman cursed at birth with the name Tristram. Though everything occurs between parlor and garden, Tristram's excitable father, bewildered mother, and Uncle Toby provide ample opportunity for the digressions and madcap events that structure this seminal novel.

@ACockAndBallsStory Ive just been born, and I had a tragic accident. A windowpane fell on me, and flattened my dic NOSE. My nose! That was almost embarrassing.

Chapter XIX: I dont feel like tweeting today.

From Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less
[via]
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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
by Lawrence Sterne

ISBN 1846376262 (1-84637-626-2)
Softcover, Echo Library

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Book summary:
With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex Laurence Sterne s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a huge literary paradox, for it is both a novel and an anti-novel. As a comic novel replete with bawdy humour and generous sentiments, it introduces us to a vivid group of memorable characters, variously eccentric, farcical and endearing. As an anti-novel, it is a deliberately tantalising and exuberantly egoistic work, ostentatiously digressive, involving the reader in the labyrinthine creation of a purported autobiography. This mercurial eighteenth-century text thus anticipates modernism and postmodernism. Vibrant and bizarre, Tristram Shandy provides an unforgettable experience. We may see why Nietzsche termed Sterne the most liberated spirit of all time . [via]
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Lighthouses
by Virginia Woolf, Valerie E. Kenney

ISBN 1586631489 (1-58663-148-9)
Hardcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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Book summary:
A visual celebration of the magnificent and romantic structures that have guided seafarers for generations. Introduction by the founder of the Lighthouse Preservation Society. 75 photos. [via]
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- Lighthouses: ISBN 1586631489 (1-58663-148-9)
  Hardcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc
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Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable
by Samuel Beckett, Gabriel Josipovici

ISBN 0375400702 (0-375-40070-2)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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Book summary:
Samuel Beckett's brilliance as a dramatist--as the creator of Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, and that despairing pas de deux Endgame--has tended to overshadow his gifts as a novelist. Yet he's unmistakably one of the great fiction writers of our century. As a young man he took dictation (literally) from James Joyce, and absorbed everything that myopic maestro had to offer when it came to Anglo-Irish prosody. Still, Beckett's instincts would ultimately steer him away from Joyce's delirious play with high and low diction, toward a more concentrated, even compulsive style. His earlier novels, like Murphy or Watt, give us a taste of what was to come. But Beckett truly hit his stride with a trilogy of early-1950s masterpieces: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Here he dispenses with all the customary props of contemporary fiction--including exposition, plot, and increasingly, paragraphs--and turns his attention to consciousness itself. Nobody has ever evoked the pain of existence, or the steady slide toward nonexistence, with such poetic, garrulous accuracy. And once you've attuned yourself to the epistemological vaudeville of Beckett's prose, he turns out to be the funniest writer on the planet--ever.
None of the three entries in the trilogy is exactly amenable to summary. It's fair to say, though, that Molloy is the easiest to read, with at least a bare-bones narrative and an abundance of comical set pieces. In one famous episode, the narrator spends page after page figuring out how to vary the sucking stones he carries in his pockets:
And while I gazed thus at my stones, revolving interminable martingales all equally defective, and crushing handfuls of sand, so that the sand ran through my fingers and fell back on the strand, yes, while thus I lulled my mind and part of my body, one day suddenly it dawned on the former, dimly, that I might perhaps achieve my purpose without increasing the number of my pockets, or reducing the number of my stones, but simply by sacrificing the principle of trim. The meaning of this illumination, which suddenly began to sing within me, like a verse of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, I did not penetrate at once, and notably the word trim, which I had never met with, in this sense, long remained obscure.
This nutty ratiocination goes on for much, much longer, until the narrator loses patience and throws the stones away. And that's a fair encapsulation of Beckett's philosophy: he argues for the essential pointlessness of life--the solitary, wretched splendor of human existence--but does so in a comic rather than a tragic register, which ends up softening or even overpowering the bleakness of his initial premise. So Malone Dies opens with a typically morbid mood-lifter ("I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of it all") and then makes endless comedic hay out of Malone's failure to keel over. And by the time we hit The Unnamable, we're forced to wonder whether the narrator actually exists: "I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on." Happily, Beckett worried these same questions and hypotheses to the end of his career, with increasingly minimalistic gusto. But he never topped the intensity or linguistic brilliance of this mind-bending three-part invention. --James Marcus [via]
More editions of Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable:
- Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable: ISBN 0375400702 (0-375-40070-2)
  Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
by Mark Leyner

ISBN 0679745793 (0-679-74579-3)
Softcover, Vintage Books

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More editions of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist:
- My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist: ISBN 0517575795 (0-517-57579-5)
  Hardcover, Harmony Books
- My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist: ISBN 0679745793 (0-679-74579-3)
  Softcover, Vintage Books
My Mother
by Kathy Acker

ISBN 0802134033 (0-8021-3403-3)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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- My Mother: ISBN 0802134033 (0-8021-3403-3)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
My Mother : Demonology
by Kathy Acker

ISBN 0679403493 (0-679-40349-3)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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- My Mother : Demonology: ISBN 0679403493 (0-679-40349-3)
  Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Nightwood
by Djuna Barnes, Cheryl J. Plumb

ISBN 1564780805 (1-56478-080-5)
Hardcover, Dalkey Archive Pr

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Book summary:
Nightwood is not only a classic of lesbian literature, but was also acknowledged by no less than T. S. Eliot as one of the great novels of the 20th century. Eliot admired Djuna Barnes' rich, evocative language. Lesbian readers will admire the exquisite craftsmanship and Barnes' penetrating insights into obsessive passion. Barnes told a friend that Nightwood was written with her own blood "while it was still running." That flowing wound was the breakup of an eight-year relationship with the lesbian love of her life. [via]
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Nova Express
by William S. Burroughs

ISBN 0802133304 (0-8021-3330-4)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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Book summary:
Nova Express takes William S. Burroughss nightmarish future one step beyond The Soft Machine. The diabolical Nova criminals have gained control and plan on wreaking untold destruction. Its up to Inspector Lee of the Nova Police to attack and dismantle the word-and-imagery machine of these control addicts before its too late.
[via]
More editions of Nova Express:
- Nova Express: ISBN 0802133304 (0-8021-3330-4)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
The People of Paper
by Salvador Plascencia

ISBN 1932416218 (1-932416-21-8)
Hardcover, McSweeney's Publishing

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- The People of Paper: ISBN 1932416218 (1-932416-21-8)
  Hardcover, McSweeney's Publishing
The Place of Dead Roads
by William S. Burroughs

ISBN 0805015418 (0-8050-1541-8)
Softcover, Holt & Company, Henry

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Book summary:
A good old-fashioned shoot-out in the American West of the frontier days serves as the springboard for this hyperkinetic adventure in which gunslingers lead by Kim Carson fight for galactic freedom.AUTHORBIO: William S. Burroughs was born in St. Louis in 1914.His many other works include NAKED LUNCH and JUNKY.Described by Norman Mailer as one of Americas few writers genuinely possessed by genius, he died in 1997.
[via]
More editions of The Place of Dead Roads:
- The Place of Dead Roads : A Novel: ISBN 0805039546 (0-8050-3954-6)
  Softcover, Holt & Company, Henry
- The Place of Dead Roads: ISBN 0805015418 (0-8050-1541-8)
  Softcover, Holt & Company, Henry
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Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
by Samuel Beckett

ISBN 071451053X (0-7145-1053-X)
Softcover, Riverrun Pr

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Book summary:
Fiction. The Trilogy has always been considered the central work of Samuel Beckett's fiction (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1969), the three novels that have been most admired and have received the greatest amount of critical comment, just as Waiting for Godot written in the same period of concentrated creativity between 1947 and 1949, is central to Beckett's drama. "Beckett's oeuvre towers above that of most of his peers, as of his forebears and followers, because it's such a model of integrity: the beauty that is truth" -- Michail Howowitz. [via]
More editions of Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot:
- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: ISBN 071451053X (0-7145-1053-X)
  Softcover, Riverrun Pr
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The Sound and the Fury: A Rock's Backpages Reader, 40 Years of Classic Rock Journalism
by Barney Hoskins

ISBN 1582342822 (1-58234-282-2)
Softcover, St Martins Pr

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Book summary:
Longtime music writer and editor Barney Hoskyns decided to build an archive of articles by his favorite rock writers - like Al Aronowitz, Jon Savage, Greil Marcus, Will Self, Lenny Kaye, Mary Harron, and Nick Hornby. Thus was born the website Rock's Backpages (www.rocksbackpages.com), home to thousands of brilliant reviews and rants, interviews and overviews, that helped define music journalism over the last four decades. The Sound and the Fury is the best of this remarkable collection. With contemporary and retrospective articles on the Beatles, Otis Redding, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, ABBA, Madonna, Ice Cube, Nirvana, Morrissey, and many, many more.
[via]
More editions of The Sound and the Fury: A Rock's Backpages Reader, 40 Years of Classic Rock Journalism:
- The Sound and the Fury: A Rock's Backpages Reader, 40 Years of Classic Rock Journalism: ISBN 1582342822 (1-58234-282-2)
  Softcover, St Martins Pr
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The Third Policeman
by Flann O'Brien

ISBN 156478214X (1-56478-214-X)
Softcover, Dalkey Archive Pr

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Book summary:
A comic trip through hell in Ireland, as told by a murderer, The Third Policeman is another inspired bit of confusing and comic lunacy from the warped imagination and lovably demented pen of Flann O'Brien, author of At Swim-Two-Birds. There's even a small chance you'll figure out what's going on if you read the publisher's note that appears on the last page. [via]
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- The Third Policeman: ISBN 156478214X (1-56478-214-X)
  Softcover, Dalkey Archive Pr
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This Is Not a Novel
by David Markson

ISBN 1582431337 (1-58243-133-7)
Softcover, Counterpoint

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Book summary:
"I don't know where to put the man-and for this I am glad.... Magnificent, a compilation that so exceeds the scatter of its parts that one must take some time to ponder why this should be. ... it's almost impossible to stop turning pages ... we realize: This is not a novel. It's a poem. ... When I reached the final pages, I felt, as all too seldom, sectioned off from the daily tyranny, released, as in a happy dream, into a kind of referential fugue-the afterlife of reading." Sven Birkerts, The New York Observer
"A cultural history of the Western world cast as a bricolage of decontextualized anecdotes, quotations, and facts. ... A lifetime's reading boiled down to sentences that have the terse clarity of epitaphs. ... This rigorously experimental work, of the sort that one tends to slog through dutifully, reads as addictively as an airport thriller." James Gibbons, BookForum
"The book does, as Writer hopes, seduce the reader into turning pages. ... Those with investigative proclivities can trace Writer's gloomy preoccupations through the items about how various notables died (and which states of financial destitution). Other items are more enigmatic (why did Henry James hide behind a tree to avoid Ford Madox Ford?), and a handful have an evocative, lovely melancholy: 'When and where did the last person die who still believed in the existence of Zeus?'" Laura Miller, The New York Times Book Review
This Is Not a Novel is a "novel" like none ever written, with the possible exception of David Markson's own Reader's Block (1996), which Ann Beattie has labeled "a work of genius."
This Is Not a Novel is a highly inventive work which drifts "genre-less," somewhere in between fiction, nonfiction, and psychological memoir. In the opening pages of the "novel," a narrator, called only "Writer," announces that he is tired of inventing characters, contemplating plot, setting, theme, and conflict. Yet the writer is determined to seduce the reader into turning pages-and to "get somewhere," nonetheless.
What follows are pages crammed with short lines of astonishingly fascinating literary and artistic anecdotes, quotations, and cultural curiosities. This Is Not a Novel is leavened with Markson's deliciously ironic wit and laughter, so that when the writer does indeed finally get us "somewhere" it's the journey will have mattered as much as the arrival. [via]
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- This Is Not a Novel: ISBN 1582431337 (1-58243-133-7)
  Softcover, Counterpoint
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Three Novels by Samuel Beckett
by Samuel Beckett

ISBN 0802150918 (0-8021-5091-8)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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Book summary:
Samuel Beckett's brilliance as a dramatist--as the creator of Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, and that despairing pas de deux Endgame--has tended to overshadow his gifts as a novelist. Yet he's unmistakably one of the great fiction writers of our century. As a young man he took dictation (literally) from James Joyce, and absorbed everything that myopic maestro had to offer when it came to Anglo-Irish prosody. Still, Beckett's instincts would ultimately steer him away from Joyce's delirious play with high and low diction, toward a more concentrated, even compulsive style. His earlier novels, like Murphy or Watt, give us a taste of what was to come. But Beckett truly hit his stride with a trilogy of early-1950s masterpieces: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Here he dispenses with all the customary props of contemporary fiction--including exposition, plot, and increasingly, paragraphs--and turns his attention to consciousness itself. Nobody has ever evoked the pain of existence, or the steady slide toward nonexistence, with such poetic, garrulous accuracy. And once you've attuned yourself to the epistemological vaudeville of Beckett's prose, he turns out to be the funniest writer on the planet--ever.
None of the three entries in the trilogy is exactly amenable to summary. It's fair to say, though, that Molloy is the easiest to read, with at least a bare-bones narrative and an abundance of comical set pieces. In one famous episode, the narrator spends page after page figuring out how to vary the sucking stones he carries in his pockets:
And while I gazed thus at my stones, revolving interminable martingales all equally defective, and crushing handfuls of sand, so that the sand ran through my fingers and fell back on the strand, yes, while thus I lulled my mind and part of my body, one day suddenly it dawned on the former, dimly, that I might perhaps achieve my purpose without increasing the number of my pockets, or reducing the number of my stones, but simply by sacrificing the principle of trim. The meaning of this illumination, which suddenly began to sing within me, like a verse of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, I did not penetrate at once, and notably the word trim, which I had never met with, in this sense, long remained obscure.
This nutty ratiocination goes on for much, much longer, until the narrator loses patience and throws the stones away. And that's a fair encapsulation of Beckett's philosophy: he argues for the essential pointlessness of life--the solitary, wretched splendor of human existence--but does so in a comic rather than a tragic register, which ends up softening or even overpowering the bleakness of his initial premise. So Malone Dies opens with a typically morbid mood-lifter ("I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of it all") and then makes endless comedic hay out of Malone's failure to keel over. And by the time we hit The Unnamable, we're forced to wonder whether the narrator actually exists: "I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on." Happily, Beckett worried these same questions and hypotheses to the end of his career, with increasingly minimalistic gusto. But he never topped the intensity or linguistic brilliance of this mind-bending three-part invention. --James Marcus [via]
More editions of Three Novels by Samuel Beckett:
- Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: ISBN 039417299X (0-394-17299-X)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
- Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: ISBN 0802150918 (0-8021-5091-8)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
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To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf

ISBN 140679239X (1-4067-9239-X)
Softcover, Read Books

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To the Lighthouse is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels. It is based on her own early experiences, and while it touches on childhood and children's perceptions and desires, it is at its most trenchant when exploring adult relationships, marriage and the changing class-structure in the period spanning the Great War. [via]
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To the Lighthouse
by Susan Dick

ISBN 0802055249 (0-8020-5524-9)
Hardcover, Univ of Toronto Pr

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More editions of To the Lighthouse:
- To the Lighthouse: ISBN 0802055249 (0-8020-5524-9)
  Hardcover, Univ of Toronto Pr
Trilogy
by Samuel Beckett

ISBN 1857152360 (1-85715-236-0)
Hardcover, Everyman's Library Ltd

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More editions of Trilogy:
- Trilogy: ISBN 1857152360 (1-85715-236-0)
  Hardcover, Everyman's Library Ltd
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Tristram Shandy
by Laurence Sterne, Howard Anderson

ISBN 0393950344 (0-393-95034-4)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

Introduction by Peter Conrad [via]
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U. S. A.
by John DOS Passos, Daniel Aaron, Townsend Ludington

ISBN 1883011140 (1-883011-14-0)
Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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Unique for its epic scale and panoramic social sweep, Dos Passos' masterpiece comprises three novels--"The 42nd Parallel," "1919," and "The Big Money"--which create an unforgettable collective portrait of modern America. This one-volume edition includes detailed notes and a chronicle of the world events which serve as a backdrop. [via]
More editions of U. S. A.:
- U. S. A.: ISBN 1883011140 (1-883011-14-0)
  Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
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The Whalestoe Letters
by Mark Z. Danielewsk, Pelafina H. Lievre, Walden D. Wyrhta

ISBN 0375714413 (0-375-71441-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Between 1982 and 1989, Pelafina H. Lièvre sent her son, Johnny Truant, a series of letters from The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute, a psychiatric facility in Ohio where she spent the final years of her life. Beautiful, heartfelt, and tragic, this correspondence reveals the powerful and deeply moving relationship between a brilliant though mentally ill mother and the precocious, gifted young son she never ceases to love.

Originally contained within the monumental House of Leaves, this collection stands alone as a stunning portrait of mother and child. It is presented here along with a foreword by Walden D. Wyhrta and eleven previously unavailable letters. [via]
More editions of The Whalestoe Letters:
- The Whalestoe Letters: ISBN 0375714413 (0-375-71441-3)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead
by William S. Burroughs

ISBN 0802133312 (0-8021-3331-2)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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Book summary:
The Wild Boys is a futuristic tale of global warfare in which a guerrilla gang of boys dedicated to freedom battles the organized armies of repressive police states. Making full use of his inimitable humor, wild imagination, and style, Burroughs creates a world that is as terrifying as it is fascinating.
[via]
More editions of The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead:
- The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead: ISBN 0394475860 (0-394-47586-0)
  Hardcover, Grove Press
- The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead: ISBN 0802133312 (0-8021-3331-2)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
Wild Boys a Book of the Dead
by W. S. Burroughs

ISBN 039417819X (0-394-17819-X)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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More editions of Wild Boys a Book of the Dead:
- Wild Boys a Book of the Dead: ISBN 039417819X (0-394-17819-X)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
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William Faulkner's the Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner

ISBN 1555460429 (1-55546-042-9)
Hardcover, Facts on File

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The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner's fourth novel, is his first attempt at a wholly self-conscious style. Faulkner's willingness to experiment affords his readers no stable perspective from which to comprehend the decline of the Compson family.
The title, William Faulkners The Sound and the Fury, part of Chelsea House Publishers Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on William Faulkners The Sound and the Fury through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on William Faulkner, a chronology of the authors life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. [via]
More editions of William Faulkner's the Sound and the Fury:
- William Faulkner's the Sound and the Fury: ISBN 1555460429 (1-55546-042-9)
  Hardcover, Facts on File