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Not since On the Road has a book been more thoroughly of the road. Unlike Kerouac's novel, however, this book was literally written on the road in Gudding's own car, on pad and paper while driving. Rhode Island Notebook is the handwritten account of one driver's journey to happiness in the face of grief. This book-length poem chronicles the break-up of a family and the separation of a father and daughter, while at the same time recording the rise of jingoism in the United States in the moments before and during the invasion of Iraq.

A madman's intense soliloquy in a slim, powerful volume by French author Salvayre (Everyday Life, 2006, etc.).The novel opens in a courtroom, where a former museum tour guide stands trial for murder. The accused engages in one-sided debates with his judge, prison guard, lawyer and psychiatrist. The nameless voice remains the novel's sole speaker, and though his rants prove that he is not only neurotic but mentally unbalanced, he is surprisingly eloquent and darkly humorous. We soon learn that the narrator's childhood haunts him: Abused by his angry father, he grew up in a house of violence, fear and hatred. He came to find a father figure in his museum boss, but was crushed when his mentor didn't understand and eventually refused to tolerate his erratic behavior. He is obsessed with his selfless, protective, now-dead mother, and is unable to love any other woman. He had a malfunctioning relationship with his wife, verbally and physically abusive, yet she continued to love him - a fact that irritated him to no end. The condemned man's mocking descriptions of social norms and everyday actions (sex, sneezing) is humorous, and his tone, lacking fear and timidity, can be captivating. The accused may be neurotic, self-involved, snobbish and unlikable, but the questions he raises are universal. What is pre-ordained and what is self-willed? How does one "gain a foothold in the void"? How much sympathy does one owe his fellow man? Well-composed and provocative. (Kirkus Reviews)

Presents the story of how a child becomes a monster: of how Red the boy becomes Red the Fiend. With an absent father who turns up only to drunkenly berate his son, and a grandmother whose aggression crescendos to a daily beating, Red can only escape by turning his hatred outward, by being as cruel and bitter as his young life has been.

Rather than trying to compel or convince the reader to accept his beliefs, the author describes how religion functions in the modern world.

A man lies sleepless in a foul-smelling room while raucous noises come from next door, and women past and present, real or imagined pass through his mind.

From his birth in rural Kentucky during the Great Depression to his suicide in Manhattan in 1985, Coleman Dowell played many roles. He was a songwriter and lyricist for television. He was a model. He was a Broadway playwright. He served in the U.S. Army, both abroad and at home. And most notably, he was the author of novels that Edmund White, among others, has called "masterpieces." But Dowell was deeply troubled by a depression that hung over him his entire life. Pegged as both a Southern writer and a gay writer, he loathed such categorization, preferring to be judged only by his work. Fever Vision describes one of the most tormented, talented, and inventive writers of recent American literature, and shows how his eventful life contributed to the making of his incredible art.

Ricardo is making himself sick over his obsession with the girl next door and Elias is hopelessly infatuated with a local prostitute. One lives in the bustle of Mexico City, the other in the quiet of a tiny Baja California town. They both find themselves in a world dominated by desire where "love begins to wither from the moment it takes root".

Set during the US occupation following WWII, this is a novel of conflict - between Western and Eastern traditions, between a husband and his wife, between ideals and reality. Miwa Shunsuke and his wife are trapped in a strained marriage. When his wife has an affair, he is forced to come to terms with the disintegration of their relationship.

Dorothy Nelson's first book to be published in the United States focuses on a demented, dysfunctional Irish family. The Crawford family is dominated by Da (Joe), a manic-depressive thief and liar who has spent two years in prison for exposing himself in the woods to young children and couples. Ma is a weak and downtrodden victim of her husband's violent temper who occasionally flirts with her son Benjee, an overly-sensitive boy with little hope for future happiness. As the narrative passes back and forth between the members of the family (in a style reminiscent of Ann Quinn), a compelling portrait of abuse and its consequences is constructed, one that contains both horror and humor in the sexual and social sickness of the characters.

First published in 1923, Knight's Move is a collection of articles and short critical pieces that Viktor Shklovsky, no doubt the most original literary critic and theoretician of the twentieth century, wrote for the newspaper The Life of Art between 1919 and 1921. With his usual epigrammatic, acerbic wit and genius, Shklovsky pillories the bad writers, artists, and critics of his time, especially those who used art as a political or social tool. And at no time is Shklovsky better than when he insists with indignation and outrage that "Art has always been free of life. Its flag has never reflected the color of the flag that flies over the city fortress." As fresh and revolutionary today as they were when written nearly a century ago, these pieces promise to infuriate an English-speaking readership as much as the Russian one of the 1920s.

A quintessential Elkin protagonist, Ellerbee is a good husband, a good employer, a good sport who cares greatly about his fellow human beings-until he is killed during a senseless liquor-store hold-up. Suddenly smote by a deity as indifferent as history, Ellerbee is off on a whirlwind tour of a distressingly familiar theme-park Heaven and inner-city Hell-to learn, along with his late coworkers and a marvelously vivid cast of characters, that much of what they've always heard about God's love, God's wrath, and the afterlife is, unfortunately, quite true.

"Splendidly ambitious . . . A brilliant, enthralling spread of story-telling and high-velocity reflections. In her indignation and in her sorrow Ugresic speaks for many people, many experiences. She is a writer to follow. A writer to be cherished." Susan Sontag

At the City Hall in a small town in the South of France, one man starts his campaign to correct the ills that have overtaken his proud nation by lecuring the town's inhabitants on the art of conversation. In the narrator's opinion, "coversation is a specialty that is most eminently French," an art that should be nurtured and practiced, and can help repair France's reputation. Not to mention being a good conversationalist is extremely useful for seducing women, which is how the narrator managed to attract Lucienne, his "superbly lumpish" wife who died two months before giving this lecture. One of the oddest characters in contemporary fiction, the lecturer in this novel can't help but digress about his sad life in the midst of his speech, giving the reader a view of a self-centered man trying to turn one of his greatest faults into a virtue to be forced on everyone else. By turns ironic, hilarious, pathetic, and mortifying, Salvayre's The Lecture is an exuberant example of the exciting fiction being written in France.

In this widely acclaimed translation, Dominic DiBernardi expertly captures Celine's trademark style of prose which has served as inspiration to such American writers as Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller.

A contemporary version of Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain, Curtis White's new novel begins with Mann's "unassuming young man," Hans Castorp, visiting his cousin at a health retreat. In this book though, the retreat is a spa for recovering alcoholics, totally unlike all other rehab centers. Rather than encouraging their patients to free themselves of their addiction, the directors of The Elixir believe that sobriety isn't for everyone, that you must let alcohol work its way on you. Filled with many compelling, outrageous, and comic voices, White's novel is disturbing, charming, and biting. It is about a weird and unlikely world that, nevertheless, is quite recognizable as our own.

Focusing on the experiences of one particular family living in one particular house during these historic events, Ayse Kulin mixes fact and fiction, soap opera and Tolstoy, to bring to light the effects of such political upheaval on a nominally comfortable and affluent household: the monied and intellectual class who find that their stake in Turkish life and culture is far more precarious than they could have guessed.

Annihilation is about a day in the life of a Polish-Jewish town shortly before World War II and the Holocaust, a town that soon will be annihilated by Nazi atrocities. With grace, wit, and love for the people and place that will be destroyed, Piotr Szewc creates a hymn to the victims of the Holocaust, as well as a literary masterpiece whose brilliance is evidenced on every page.