My favorite off-beat books

Discover a curated list of favorite off-beat books that stand out from the mainstream. Explore unique reads and hidden literary gems for unconventional book lovers.

Purple America Cover
Book

Purple America

by Rick Moody

On the occasion of the paperback release of Demonology, Back Bay Books takes pleasure in making all four of Rick Moody's acclaimed earlier works of fiction available in handsome new paperback editions.
Hotel World Cover
Book

Hotel World

by Ali Smith

BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • Forget room service: this is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration of colliding worlds, and a spirited defense of love. Blending incisive wit with surprising compassion, Hotel World is a wonderfully invigorating, life-affirming book. Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall things she never knew. And one night all five women find themselves in the smooth plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates make for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.
Item Not Found
ID: 3462028340
(Type: books)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Cover
Book

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

by Mark Haddon

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic—both poignant and funny—about a boy with autism who sets out to solve the murder of a neighbor's dog and discovers unexpected truths about himself and the world. “Disorienting and reorienting the reader to devastating effect.... Suspenseful and harrowing.” —The New York Times Book Review Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow. This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years.
Slaughterhouse-five, Or, The Children's Crusade Cover
Book

Slaughterhouse-five, Or, The Children's Crusade

by Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier captured by the Germans, witnesses firebombing and destruction in Dresden. Launched in November, Dell's Kurt Vonnegut reissue program continues with one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.
Lolita Cover
Book

Lolita

by Vladimir Nabokov

The novel that first established Nabokov's reputation with a large audience tour-de-force of comic satire on sex and the American ways of life.
Item Not Found
ID: 0451137094
(Type: books)
Cat's Cradle Cover
Book

Cat's Cradle

by Kurt Vonnegut

“A free-wheeling vehicle . . . an unforgettable ride!”—The New York Times Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat’s Cradle is one of the twentieth century’s most important works—and Vonnegut at his very best. “[Vonnegut is] an unimitative and inimitable social satirist.”—Harper’s Magazine “Our finest black-humorist . . . We laugh in self-defense.”—Atlantic Monthly