Experimental Fiction
Discover the best experimental fiction books, from George Saunders' Pastoralia to Gertrude Stein's Selected Writings. Explore curated reads by Amy Hempel, Ben Marcus, Diane Williams, and more—perfect for fans of innovative storytelling and literary boundary-pushing.
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Carrying the Body
by Dawn Raffel
Elise, a young woman with a mysteriously ill son, returns to her childhood home years after running away with a lover. Now destitute, she begins to search for an object hidden somewhere in the house, which has been in a state of disrepair since her mother's untimely death. Her father, who fled political terror in in his youth, is frail and often dreaming. So it falls to Elise's older sister, who has never left home, to maintain family order. Unraveled by alcohol and her own longing for escape, "Aunt," as Elise's sister is simply known, is further disturbed by the child's illness and his mother's irresponsibility. To placate the child, she turns to the bedtime tale of the Three Little Pigs, which becomes increasingly corrupted with each telling. As Aunt struggles to take care of the child, she recalls -- with a mixture of jealousy and resentment -- the day her sister left home. Meanwhile, Elise continues her search, with consequences that will alter Aunt's life irrevocably. A writer of "obvious and extreme talent" (Los Angeles Times), Raffel uses starkly beautiful, stunningly precise language to etch this compelling portrait of a family torn apart by longing, miscommunication, and misdirected love. Meticulously crafted and utterly absorbing, Carrying The Body is ultimately about the inescapable emotional legacies passed from generation to generation, and our dreams of refuge and release.
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In the Year of Long Division
by Dawn Raffel
"Dawn Raffel's debut delivers us to the wild spaces of a youth in the Midwest and to the blank terrors of the heart. There is a cold wind blowing through these stories, whose sentences come to us as a rebuke to anything felt. In her flight from sentiment, Raffel masterfully reifies the new will to absence that marks the moral and emotional bearing of her generation. The result is not just an acknowledgment of all our long divisions - the divide between impulse and the means to apprehend it, between desire and entrapment - but of the final sweet concession that we must each of us make to the futility of even the smallest mending. In the Year of Long Division gives us the triumph of craft over the obstinance of expression and the installation of a writer certain to be cited in the continuing reinvention of the American short story."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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Loverboy
by Victoria Redel
A mother's obsession with her only child, a son named Paul conceived in a loveless one-night stand, puts his life in danger. A first novel. Reprint.
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The Border of Truth
by Victoria Redel
At 41, single professor Sara Leader decides to create a family by adopting a child. After the adoption agency asks for details about her background, Sara reluctantly begins to probe her father's secret history — in particular, his flight as a 17–year–old Holocaust refugee aboard a ship denied entry into America. The more she learns about her father's past, the more Sara feels the need to question him about what happened — and the more she realizes how her father's secrets have shaped her own life. Alternating between a teenage boy's energetic letters to Eleanor Roosevelt and a daughter's sifting through the fragments of her father's traumatic wartime choices, Victoria Redel brilliantly imbues her characters with not only bravery and strength but with the humor to survive the pain of the past and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.
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Where the Road Bottoms Out
by Victoria Redel
Where the Road Bottoms Out delivers us to the scenes of a young woman's battles against the various forces that would rob her of her freedom -- the relations that define her apart from how she would define herself. These are stories of what it means to be embedded in the multiform drama of parent and child: here a mother buries her children; there daughters watch grieving fathers and fathers scamming. Punctuated by dislocation and loss, this drama often turns on the inevitable moment that intimacy and love overlap with something that feels like violence, or at the point when a new kind of awareness is achieved as the solitary voice of one daughter dissolves into a "we" of sisters. Redel's charged and lyrical fictions enact a movement both away from a life and toward taking possession of a life. Over mountains, from hotel to hotel, in cars, on foot, we follow her determined journey to record her adventures as a first-generation American and as a writer of English prose. Here is a striking debut. Sixteen stories that combine an uncompromising and definitive "No!" with an astonishing tenderness.
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Trailer Girl and Other Stories
by Terese Svoboda
“I talk like a lady who knows what she wants” is how the vagrant begins her story in “Trailer Girl”. As she struggles to rescue what she says is a wild girl hiding in the gully, the neighbors become more certain than ever that the child is imaginary--until there’s a murder. Stark and disturbing, “Trailer Girl” is the story of cycles of child abuse and the dream to escape them. In “Psychic”, a clairvoyant knows she’s been hired by a murderer, in “Leadership” a tiny spaceship lands between a boy and his parents, in “Venice”, a woman performs the Heimlich maneuver on an ex-husband, then flees by gondola, and in “White”, a grandfather explains to his grandson how a family is like a collection of chicken parts. Frequently violent, always passionate, these often short short stories are full-strength, as strong and precise as poetry.
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The Ice at the Bottom of the World
by Mark Richard
With a distinctive and original voice, Mark Richard's stories capture characters on the fringe of society, and illuminate the goodness at the heart of their Southern, down-and-out lies. Full of startling images and harrowing epiphanies, The Ice at the Bottom of the World is a collection by a true master of his craft. In these ten stories, Mark Richard, winner of the 1990 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award, emerges as the heir apparent to Mark Twain, Flannery O'Connor, and William Faulkner.
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The Spectacle of the Body
by Noy Holland
A debut in fiction by a writer from Alabama. In Winter Bodies, a man shaves off the body hair of his ailing wife, The Change in Union City follows the decline of a small town, and in Orbit, two children describe how their father abandoned their mother.
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What Begins with Bird
by Noy Holland
"What Begins with Bird is both an investigation of family relationships and a sophisticated study of language and rhythm. Holland creates an exhilarating tension between the satisfactions of meaning and the attenuated beauty of lyric, making her fiction felt as deeply as it is understood. Holland's prose invokes a dreamscape, a panorama enclosing barns and men and guns and a mother trudging the cold hills in her nightgown."--BOOK JACKET.
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Pastoralia
by George Saunders
A stunning collection including the story "Sea Oak," from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo and the story collection Tenth of December, a 2013 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction. One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Hailed by Thomas Pynchon as "graceful, dark, authentic, and funny," George Saunders gives us, in his inventive and beloved voice, this bestselling collection of stories set against a warped, hilarious, and terrifyingly recognizable American landscape.
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The Age of Wire and String
by Ben Marcus
"A rare, genius-struck achievement . . . filled with great beauties, high themes, enormous sorrows." Kirkus Reviews
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The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
by Amy Hempel
With her trademark compassion and wit, Hempel takes readers into the marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation in an uneasy America.
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The Way the Family Got Away
by Michael Kimball
This is the way the family got away. They packed everything they could fit into the car, placed the body of their dead brother in the toy box and put him in the boot. Then theyy left Minola and headed towards mid-America. This is the story seen through the eyes of the family's surviving children.
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Undone
by Michael Kimball
In Maine, a man fakes his death to avoid repaying a two-million-dollar loan. He suffers a "heart attack" and with the help of a doctor and an undertaker is buried with enough oxygen until his wife digs him up. Unfortunately, in the meantime the wife has decided she has a better plan.
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The Believer, Issue 61
by Heidi Julavits
The Believer monthly books and culture magazine is three-time finalist for National Magazine Awards in General Excellence and Design. An amiable yet rigorous forum for books and book criticism, The Believer provides an alternative to the plot summary that has increasingly become synonymous with "book review," extending the ever-shortening shelf life of new books, reviving interest in books long overlooked, and stressing the interconnectivity of books to pop culture, politics, art, and music. To that end, each issue includes essays on these topics, as well as lengthy interviews with philosophers, politicians, and poets. Nick Hornby has a widely celebrated monthly books column, and Amy Sedaris (and well-known guest-columnists) offers an advice column comprised of hilariously bad advice. The celebrated graphic novelist Charles Burns illustrates the cover each month, and the magazine is littered with illustrations by a wide range of established and emerging artists, with regulars like Tony Millionaire, Marcel Dzama, and others.
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Excitability
by Diane Williams
Excitability collects the best of Diane Williams's bold, often hilarious, stories of love, sex, child-rearing, death, and space aliens -- stories that are (in the words of Bradford Morrow) "wry, sensuous, spiritual, wise, raunchy, familial... alive to the contradictory nuances which define our lives."
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Florida
by Christine Schutt
Placed in the care of relatives at a young age, Alice Fivey struggles to adapt within numerous homes and eventually finds refuge in books, a childhood that leads her to discover her own promise as a writer. A first novel. By the author of Nightwork. Reader's Guide available. Reprint.
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Nightwork
by Christine Schutt
A collection of stories on relations between parents and children. In What Have You Been Doing? a mother teaches her son open-mouth kissing, while Daywork is on the guilt of two sisters disposing of their sick mother's possessions before she is even dead.
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Dear Mr. Capote
by Gordon Lish
Gordon Lish's first novel tells the story of a serial killer who wants Truman Capote to write his biography. In the letter the killer writes to Capote, the details of his life and his modus operandi are revealed.
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Mourner at the Door
by Gordon Lish
A collection of stories captures the significance of the trivial details and everyday experiences that often add up to create the majority of an individual's memory
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The Road: Pulitzer Prize Winner (Vintage International)
by McCarthy, Cormac
No summary available.
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Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein
by Gertrude Stein
"This collection, a retrospective exhibit of the work of a woman who created a unique place for herself in the world of letters, contains a sample of practically every period and every manner in Gertrude Stein's career. It includes The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in its entirety; selected passages from The Making of Americans; "Melanctha"from Three Lives; portraits of the painters Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso; Tender Buttons; the opera Four Saints in Three Acts; and poem, plays, lectures, articles, sketches, and a generous portion of her famous book on the Occupation of France, Wars I Have Seen.
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The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake
by William Blake
Since its first publication in 1965, this edition has been widely hailed as the best available text of Blake's poetry and prose. Now revised, if includes up-to-date work on variants, chronology of poems and critical commentary by Harold Bloom. An "Approved Edition" of the Center for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association.
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All Things are Labor
by Katherine Arnoldi
The enigmatic stories in this haunting collection deal with individuals striving to live outside the dominant American culture--people who do not want to be incorporated, appropriated, or consumed. Their battles are waged on interior and external landscapes, pitting clarity against confusion, faith against fear, the marginalized against the powerful, the passive against the aggressive. In one story, a Mennonite mother leaves her alcoholic husband and moves with her three children into an abandoned house and back to a life of faith, though a new faith, one of her own making. In another story, a teenager living in the darkness of a failing rust-belt city holds before her the only light she sees, her child, to guide the way as she moves across the border and beyond. A young artist in New York City pursues a simple life, a passive life, the yielding life of a Mennonite, even as she immerses herself in the gritty urban culture of the East Village. Another woman, given a short time to live, sets up ant farms on her stoop in Alphabet City and is determined to discover how worlds are made by watching the ants and only the ants. A Vietnam veteran finds meaning as a dishwasher at the Catholic Worker, where he circles on his stump of a leg, aware that the thing that is missing, that cannot be seen, is most present. Many of these stories experiment with the form of writing itself. They reflect the vision of an artist who remains separate--in the world, but not of the world--and whose goal is not to dazzle or entertain, but simply, humbly to be present for each word.
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Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers
by Stanley Elkin
"This imagination of Elkin's sneaks up, tickles, surprises, shocks and kills. It makes stories that are deadly funny." The New York Times
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Cathedral
by Raymond Carver
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • Twelve short stories that mark a turning point in the work of “one of the true American masters" (The New York Review of Books). “A writer of astonishing compassion and honesty … His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart.” —The Washington Post Book World A remarkable collection that includes the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another. These twelve stories “overflow with the danger, excitement, mystery and possibility of life.” —The Washington Post Book World
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Tin God
by Terese Svoboda
Tin God takes us on a hilarious trip through the weird heart of the Midwest, a journey that passes across centuries and burrows into the unexplainable mysteries of what it means to be alive on this very strange planet.
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The Complete Stories
by Flannery O'Connor
Winner of the National Book Award The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find. O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her death—is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.
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Correction of Drift
by Pamela Ryder
It was called the crime of the century, and it was front-page news: the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Correction of Drift imagines the private lives behind the headlines of the case, and examines the endurance, and demise, of those consumed by the tragedy. Every character brings a different past life to the event, be it a life of celebrity, or of misfortune and obscurity. There is Anne Morrow Lindbergh-daughter of a millionaire, the shy poet who married a national hero.
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The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
by Gertrude Stein
Stein's most famous work; one of the richest and most irreverent biographies ever written.
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The Lover
by Marguerite Duras
A modern classic and international bestseller with more than one million copies in print, The Lover has been celebrated by critics and readers across the globe since its first publication in 1984. Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras's childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover. In spare yet luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins of Saigon in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts. This edition of The Lover includes a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen that looks back at Duras's iconic work, winner of France’s Prix Goncourt, as it approaches its fortieth anniversary in print.
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Collaborators
by Janet Kauffman
A stunning, poetic novel about a nearly overpowering relationship, from the author of the acclaimed short story collection, Places in the World a Woman Could Walk.
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Rot
by Janet Kauffman
Tracks a father who's a Mennonite, a pacifist, who's determined to redefine power, rethink what it is to be good.
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Places in the World a Woman Could Walk
by Janet Kauffman
""Places in the World a Woman Could Walk" is deeply felt and bitingly precise. The author's dual professions of farmer and poet give the stories two gifts: an intimate, gritty sense of life on the land and a skill with language that amounts to alchemy."--Anne Tyler The women in Janet Kauffman's spirited stories are unafraid to look closely at their flawed lives. Burdened by the struggles of a rural existence, they are determined to embrace the simplest pleasures with a true heart. Whether slaughtering a favorite cow or leaving a violent husband, these characters make tough choices and live with the consequences. "A distinctive voice both quirky and down-to-earth, totally unsentimental and capable of rendering reality's baffling undertones."--"Library Journal"
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Ways of Dying
by Zakes Mda
A professional mourner, Toloki is reunited with Noria, a woman from his village, at the funeral of a young boy, and joins forces with her to heal the pain of the past and build new lives for themselves in post-apartheid South Africa. Original.