Some of the best in innovative fiction and criticism
Explore groundbreaking works in innovative fiction and cutting-edge literary criticism. Discover top books that redefine storytelling and critical thought in contemporary literature.
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The Vicious Circulation of Dr. Catastrope
by Kane X. Faucher
A bitter doctor unfairly accused and sent to prison, an old and ornery Frenchman in Louisiana who just wants people to leave him and his lawn alone, a paranoid ex-crooner trying to mount a comeback in the age of human jukeboxes, a dis-gruntled academic whose career is being sabotaged, and a Rabelaisian narrator who has united them all in a tavern tale. Delight in the satirical volleys of vitriol and angry, streaming fury from the mouthiest, most opinionated, and disillusioned old men in a book that surreptitiously draws the essence of polemic in the history of literature and expresses the most outlandish statements with a double donkey punch of humour and shock. This is certainly not a book for the delicate.
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The Unwelcome Guest Plus Nin and Nan
by Eckhard Gerdes
Fan-favorite novelist Eckhard Gerdes is back, and this time with both barrels loaded! These two novels tackle modern life's complexities as only the twelve-gauge pen of Eckhard Gerdes can. The Unwelcome Guest is the story of one man's flight from paranoia, and Nin & Nan features a gender-ambiguous couple who take on the entire federal government. Both novels are richly humorous, but at the core of each is the pressing concern that modern concerns are pressing on us too much. Twice a top-ten finisher in the Preditors and Editors annual readers' poll of the best novels of the year, Gerdes is certain to delight his legion of loyal literati with his legendary legerdemain in this new double offering . Sit down, relax, and take off your socks-you'd laugh them off anyway as you read The Unwelcome Guest and Nin and Nan.
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Gravity's Rainbow (Classics Deluxe Edition)
by Thomas Pynchon
A Penguin Classic Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force. This Penguin Classics deluxe edition features a specially designed cover by Frank Miller along with french claps and deckle-edged paper. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Journey to the End of the Night
by Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line
Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.
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North
by Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line
A desperate man frantically flees France in the closing months of World War II.
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The Book of Dave
by Will Self
Dave Rudman, a disgruntled East End taxi driver, writes down his woes, frustrations, and pet peeves and buries them, only to have them discovered five hundred years later and used as the sacred text for a religion that has taken hold in the flooded remnants of London. Reprint.
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Labyrinths
by Jorge Luis Borges
Readers are invited to take a new look at "Labyrinths," the classic by Latin America's finest writer of the 20th century--a true literary sensation--with a new introduction by cyber-author William Gibson.
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Collected Fictions
by Jorge Luis Borges
For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called “the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century” collected in a single volume “An event, and cause for celebration.”—The New York Times A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paper For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story—from his 1935 debut with A Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeare’s Memory—Jorge Luis Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, he took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books. Bringing together for the first time in English all of Borges’s magical stories, and all of them newly rendered into English in brilliant translations by Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume compendium for all who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master’s work for all who have yet to discover this singular genius. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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The Aleph and Other Stories
by Jorge Luis Borges
Twenty fictional pieces survey the depth and range of the distinguished Argentine writer's forty-year career as he journeys inside the minds of an unrepentant Nazi, an imprisoned Maya priest, fanatical Christian theologians, a man awaiting his assassin, and a woman plotting vengeance on her father's "killer."
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Anti-Oedipus
by Gilles Deleuze
An "introduction to the nonfascist life" (Michel Foucault, from the Preface) When it first appeared in France, Anti-Oedipus was hailed as a masterpiece by some and "a work of heretical madness" by others. In it, Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari set forth the following theory: Western society's innate herd instinct has allowed the government, the media, and even the principles of economics to take advantage of each person's unwillingness to be cut off from the group. What's more, those who suffer from mental disorders may not be insane, but could be individuals in the purest sense, because they are by nature isolated from society. More than twenty-five years after its original publication, Anti-Oedipus still stands as a controversial contribution to a much-needed dialogue on the nature of free thinking.
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Of Grammatology
by Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida's revolutionary theories about deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, first voiced in the 1960s, forever changed the face of European and American criticism. The ideas in De la grammatologie sparked lively debates in intellectual circles that included students of literature, philosophy, and the humanities, inspiring these students to ask questions of their disciplines that had previously been considered improper. Thirty years later, the immense influence of Derrida's work is still igniting controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Spivak's translation, which captures the richness and complexity of the original. This corrected edition adds a new index of the critics and philosophers cited in the text and makes one of contemporary criticism's most indispensable works even more accessible and usable.
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Great Expectations
by Kathy Acker
Using postmodern form, Kathy Acker's Great Expectations moves her narrator through time, gender, and identity as it examines our era's cherished beliefs about life and art.
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Beyond Good and Evil
by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil is an important philosophical writing by Friedrich Nietzsche, in which he attempts to deliver his philosophy to be interpreted by the masses who read his work. The goal of this work is to give the reader a comprehensive view of Friedrich Nietzsche's thought and style. This work should not be passed up by anybody who either studies or is interested in writings and works of philosophy.
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Two Novels
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Jealousy: "In a tropical jungle overlooking a banana plantation, a jealous husband is obsessed by his suspicion of adultery between his wife and his neighbor. Robbe-Grillet's handling of the devastating effect on the tormented husband and his subsequent violence gives us one of the most disturbing treatment of jealousy in contemporary fiction."--Publisher description
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Voices
by Kyle Muntz
Taking place in a kind of "internal space," populated by living ideas, Voices utilizes broken typography within the context of an equally broken narrative to examine an existence in which identity and self have become, themselves, imaginary, but have allowed human thought and feeling to reshape the very nature of perceptual reality. Language is given a new, unfamiliar shape: complete freedom to explore the framework of an intricate semiotic landscape.
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The Tupperware Blitzkrieg
by Anthony Metivier
In this hallucinatory novel, plastic surgery, psychoanalysis, and the pornography of American politics provide the hellish tableau in which Doctor Umbilico executes biomorphical atrocities that radically transform an eerily Bush-like apocalyptic president.
