strange and wonderful fiction
Explore a curated list of strange and wonderful fiction books that will captivate your imagination. Discover unique tales, odd adventures, and extraordinary worlds in these must-read novels.
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The Saskiad
by Brian Hall
A 13-year-old, enriched by her knowledge of Golden Age mythologies but burdened with the pressures of family history and contemporary life, comes of age in this engaging novel.
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The Liars' Club
by Mary Karr
#4 on The New York Times’ list of The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years The New York Times bestselling, hilarious tale of a hardscrabble Texas childhood that Oprah.com calls the best memoir of a generation “Wickedly funny and always movingly illuminating, thanks to kick-ass storytelling and a poet’s ear.” —Oprah.com The Liars’ Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr’s comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger’s—a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. This unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as “funny, lively, and un-put-downable” (USA Today) today as it ever was.
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The Earth Witch
by Louise Lawrence
A young boy falls in love and nearly loses his life because the girl he loves is the Earth Witch.
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Magic for Beginners
by Kelly Link
All-new collection of magical stories from slapstick comedy to Gothic horror.
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The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
by Jan Potocki
A literary masterpiece by a Polish traveller, aristocratic adventurer, political activist, ethnographer and publisher Alphonse, a young Walloon officer, is travelling to join his regiment in Madrid in 1739. But he soon finds himself mysteriously detained at a highway inn in the strange and varied company of thieves, brigands, cabbalists, noblemen, coquettes and gypsies, whose stories he records over sixty-six days. The resulting manuscript is discovered some forty years later in a sealed casket, from which tales of characters transformed through disguise, magic and illusion, of honour and cowardice, of hauntings and seductions, leap forth to create a vibrant polyphony of human voices. Jan Potocki (1761-1812) used a range of literary styles - gothic, picaresque, adventure, pastoral, erotica - in his novel of stories-within-stories, which, like the Decameron and Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, provides entertainment on an epic scale. 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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The Dancers at the End of Time
by Michael Moorcock
The Eternal Champion series continues with "The Dancers at the End of Time", a monumental science-fiction epic blending humor and romance in a story that spans all of space and time. Can love blossom the a millennia? In world where "conscience" and "morality" are meaningless? In a multiverse that is collapsing and racing toward the brink of destruction? This tenth volume of the Eternal Champion series makes the complete omnibus of this incredible story available in paperback for the first time.
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The Third Policeman
by Flann O'Brien
With the publication of The Third Policeman, Dalkey Archive Press now has all of O'Brien's fiction back in print.
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Odile
by Raymond Queneau
First published in France in 1937, this brilliant, moving novel is about the devastating psychological effects of war, about falling in love, about politics subverting human relationships, and about life in Paris during the early 1930s amid intellecturals and artists whose activities range from writing for radical magazines to conjuring the ghost of Lenin in seances. Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) has been one of the most powerful forces in shaping the direction of French fiction in the past fifty years. His other novels includes The Last Days, Pierrot Mon Ami, and Saint Glinglin.
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4
by Daniel Pinkwater
Four-fantastic-books-in-one by the popular author of The Hoboken Chicken Emergency: Borgel Yobgorgle The Worms of Kukumlima The Snarkout Boys & the Baconburg Horror