Odd tales (both real and fiction)
Explore a captivating collection of odd tales—both real and fiction. Discover bizarre stories, strange books, and mysterious narratives that will intrigue and entertain. Dive into the weird and wonderful!
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I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me
by Trevor Paglen
Shown here for the first time, these 60 patches reveal a secret world of military imagery and jargon, where classified projects are known by peculiar names (Goat Suckers', 'None of Your Fucking Business', 'Tastes Like Chicken') and illustrated with occult symbols and ridiculous cartoons. Although the actual projects represented here (such as the notorious Area 51) are classified, these patches - which are worn by military units working on classified missions - are precisely photographed, hinting at a world about which little is known.'
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Anti-Christ
by Matthew Moses
What began as a minor dispute between Matthew Ford and Jesus has escalated into a feud that threatens to undermine a Cold War that has existed between Heaven and Hell for two millennia. The question is.what will happen next?
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Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the relationship of art and obscenity, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume—that contains final-draft typescripts, numerous unpublished contemporaneous writings by Burroughs, his own later introductions to the book, and his essay on psychoactive drugs—is a valuable and fresh experience of a novel that has lost none of its relevance or satirical bite.
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Vurt
by Jeff Noon
A cyberpunk novel with a difference, a rollicking, dark, yet humorous examination of a future in which the boundaries between reality and virtual reality are as tenuous as the brush of a feather.
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Breakfast of Champions
by Kurt Vonnegut
“Marvelous . . . [Vonnegut] wheels out all the complaints about America and makes them seem fresh, funny, outrageous, hateful and lovable.”—The New York Times In Breakfast of Champions, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most beloved characters, the aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. What follows is murderously funny satire, as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth. “Free-wheeling, wild and great . . . uniquely Vonnegut.”—Publishers Weekly
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If Chins Could Kill
by Bruce Campbell
Chronicles the life of actor Bruce Campbell from his childhood in Detroit through his time spent making the film Evil Dead to his days in Hollywood.
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Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
by Charles Mackay
First published in 1841, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is often cited as the best book ever written about market psychology. This Harriman House edition includes Charles Mackay's account of the three infamous financial manias - John Law's Mississipi Scheme, the South Sea Bubble, and Tulipomania.Between the three of them, these historic episodes confirm that greed and fear have always been the driving forces of financial markets, and, furthermore, that being sensible and clever is no defence against the mesmeric allure of a popular craze with the wind behind it.In writing the history of the great financial manias, Charles Mackay proved himself a master chronicler of social as well as financial history. Blessed with a cast of characters that covered all the vices, gifted a passage of events which was inevitably heading for disaster, and with the benefit of hindsight, he produced a record that is at once a riveting thriller and absorbing historical document. A century and a half later, it is as vibrant and lurid as the day it was written.For modern-day investors, still reeling from the dotcom crash, the moral of the popular manias scarcely needs spelling out. When the next stock market bubble comes along, as it surely will, you are advised to recall the plight of some of the unfortunates on these pages, and avoid getting dragged under the wheels of the careering bandwagon yourself.
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Child of God
by Cormac McCarthy
In this taut, chilling novel, Lester Ballard--a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape--haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.
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Razor Wire Pubic Hair
by Carlton Mellick, III
The surreal tale of a multi-gendered screwing toy purchased by a razor dominatrix and brought into her nightmarish world of bizarre sex and mutilation.
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Cosmicomics
by Italo Calvino
Enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. “Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?” Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
Book
Valis
by Philip K. Dick
Horselover Fat begins receiving what he considers to be divine revelations that imply extraterrestrial forces are interfering in the affairs of the Earth.
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The Ticket that Exploded
by William S. Burroughs
Inspector Lee and the Nova Police engage the Nova Mob in a decisive battle for the planet. Scientists and combat troops, ad men and con men whose deceitful language has spread like an incurable disease, create terror.
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Crash
by J. G. Ballard
In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an internationally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting-edge fiction, Crash explores both the disturbing implications and horrific possibilities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.
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The Trial
by Franz Kafka
A brilliant translation of one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, revealing a tale that is as full of energy and power as it was when it was first written. From the author of The Metamorphosis. Written in 1914, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers. This new edition is based upon the work of an international team of experts who have restored the text, the sequence of chapters, and their division to create a version that is as close as possible to the way the author left it.
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Our Gang
by Philip Roth
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral comes a brilliantly indignant response to the phenomenon that was Richard M. Nixon. • “Disturbing, logical...and very funny.... In short, a masterpiece" —The New York Times Book Review In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth shows us a man who outdoes the severest cynic, a peace-loving Quaker and believer in the sanctity of human life who doesn’t have a problem with killing unarmed women and children in self-defense. A master politician with an honest sneer, he finds himself battling the Boy Scouts, declaring war on Pro-Pornography Denmark, all the time trusting in the basic indifference of the voting public.
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Lost Girls
by Alan Moore
Can pornography be art? Can an erotic graphic novel have literary merit? Can both men and women enjoy explicit images? Moore and Gebbie set out to answer these difficult and ambitious questions in Lost Girls, a 240-page fully painted story that has been in the works for over a decade. Like he did in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore revisits characters from Victorian fiction, this time children's literature. The three protagonists are fictitiously based on the familiar faces from Wonderland, Oz, and Neverland, who meet as grown women in a mysterious hotel in 1913 England. There, they embark on a journey through an erotic fantasy world of their own conjuring, all rendered in Gebbie's beautifully painted, full-color art.
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The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
A Magical love story that is as sad as it is joyous.
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Let the Right One In
by John Ajvide Lindqvist
Let the Right One In Takes Top Honors at Tribeca Film Festival and is now an Award-winning movie in both the U.S. and Sweden! It is autumn 1981 when inconceivable horror comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenager is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at long last---revenge for the bullying he endures at school, day after day. But the murder is not the most important thing on his mind. A new girl has moved in next door---a girl who has never seen a Rubik's Cube before, but who can solve it at once. There is something wrong with her, though, something odd. And she only comes out at night. . . .Sweeping top honors at film festivals all over the globe, director Tomas Alfredsson's film of Let the Right One In has received the same kind of spectacular raves that have been lavished on the book. American and Swedish readers of vampire fiction will be thrilled! Following the success in Sweden, this movie was remade starring Kodi Smit Mcpheem, Chloe Grace Moretz and Richard Jenkins under the new title Let Me In. The story has continued to reach new viewers in a London Musical and the book remains a vampire favorite among its readers.
