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In a Small Motel
John D. MacDonald - 2017
She owns a small motor-inn motel on a major highway in South Georgia. The summer heat is still strong in the waning days of October, and she is tired from a long summer season. As the evening progresses, Ginny’s motel begins to fill-up. There is Johnny Benton, a strange motel guest who insists on parking his car behind the motel, a would-be suitor named Don Ferris, a guest that is the catalyst for a long and frightening night, and then there is the dead husband whose long shadow is cast across Ginny’s life like a long heavy rain...
Howard Who?
Howard Waldrop - 1986
R. Martin The first paperback (and twentieth anniversary) edition of a landmark debut collection. Howard Waldrop's encyclopedic knowledge of superheroes, baseball players, world wars, long-dead film stars, Mexican wrestlers, pulp serials, fairy tales, and extinct species is put to good use in these sophisticated re-combinations of our pop-culture dreams.Contents:The Ugly Chickens (1980)Der Untergang des Abendlandesmenschen (1976)Ike at the Mike (1982)Dr. Hudson's Secret Gorilla (1977)"...The World as We Know't." (1982)Green Brother (1982)Mary Margaret Road-Grader (1976)Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me (1976)Horror, We Got (1979)Man-Mountain Gentian (1983)God's Hooks! (1982)Heirs of the Perisphere (1985)
Meditations in Green
Stephen Wright - 1983
It is a kaleidoscopic collage that whirls about an indelible array of images and characters: perverted Winky, who opted for the army to stay off of welfare; eccentric Payne, who’s obsessed with the film he’s making of the war; bucolic Claypool, who’s irrevocably doomed to a fate worse than death. Just to mention a few. And floating at the center of this psychedelic spin is Spec. 4 James Griffin. In country, Griffin studies the jungle of carpet bomb photos as he fights desperately to keep his grip on reality. And battling addiction stateside after his tour, he studies the green of household plants as he struggles mightily to get his sanity back. With mesmerizing action and Joycean interior monologues, Stephen Wright has created a book that is as much an homage to the darkness of war as it is a testament to the transcendence of art.
The Magic Wagon
Joe R. Lansdale - 1986
Narrator Buster Fogg's family is wiped out by a twister in an early sequence described with surreal verve. Buster hitches on with Billy Bob Daniels, a patent-medicine pusher and trick shooter who claims to be the illegitimate son of Wild Bill Hickock, joining an entourage consisting of a kindly ex-slave named Albert, and Rot Toe, the wrestling ape. Adventures on the road, which include swiping the mummified remains of Billy Bob's "pa" and swindling settlers with their concoction of watered-down whiskey, stoke personal tensions that only aggravate troubles when their wagon rolls into Mud Creek and Billy Bob is called out by Texas Jack, a dime-novel desperado who, legend says, intimidated even Wild Bill.Lansdale's affection for the classic western is never in doubt, although he spends much of the novel skillfully deflating the romance of heroic reputations made as much by luck and exaggeration as by skill with a gun. The true charm of the story, though, is in its telling, which melds laconic humor, colorful colloquialisms and outrageous figures of speech into a Twainesque tall tale. This novel endures as a modern western classic. Published in a small print run with limited distribution.- From Publisher's Weekely
Galaxies
Barry N. Malzberg - 1975
Malzberg . . . In a genre that, with one hand, claimed to be the ultimate storehouse of innovation, and with the other, leveled strict rules for writing and codes of narrative conduct onto its authors, Malzberg stuck out like a forked tongue, composing works of bona fide literature that dwarfed the efforts of his contemporaries and established him as one of science fiction's most dynamic enfant terribles. Originally published in 1975, GALAXIES is a masterwork of the Malzberg canon, which includes over fifty novels and collections. Metafictional, absurdist and sardonic, the book mounts a concerted attack against the market forces that prescribed SF of the 1970s and continue to prescribe it today. At the same time, the book tells a story of technology and cyborgs, of bureaucracy and tachyons, of love and hate and sadness . . . Despite his deviant literary antics, Malzberg could not be ignored by the SF community. In 1973, he won the first annual John W. Campbell Memorial Award, which is presented to the best SF novel of the year by a distinguished committee of SF experts, authors and critics. Thereafter he received nominations for the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards, among others. Nonetheless his writing has not received the attention it so profoundly deserves. GALAXIES is among the works listed in acclaimed SF editor David Pringle's SCIENCE FICTION: THE 100 BEST NOVELS, published in 1985. With an introduction by Jack Dann, this special paperback edition ushers Malzberg's genius into the twenty-first century.
Zod Wallop
William Browning Spencer - 1995
"Gotta get moving," Rock said. A couple of hundred million years went by. A rock is always slow to take action. A rock watches an oak grow from a sapling to a towering tree, and it's a flash and a dazzle in the mind of a rock. What was that? Rock thinks. Or maybe, Huh?That's how Zod Wallop starts. Harry Gainesborough wrote and drew the story three years ago, before his daughter drowned. Now he writes nothing. Raymond Story read Zod Wallop while he was a patient at Harwood Psychiatric. Now the book means everything to him - so much so that he'd like to meet its author and live out its events. In fact, Zod Wallop means so much to Raymond that he has taken great pains to escape the institution and is now journeying to Harry Gainesborough's house with his young wife, Emily, in tow.These odd doings alone would be enough to unsettle Harry, but they're compounded by other coincidences. Bizarre coincidences. Occurrences that lead Harry to believe that Zod Wallop is actually happening.
Son of Man
Robert Silverberg - 1971
This classic, now finally back in print, sweeps us--and Clay, the main character--into Earth's far-away future. It's a time when no one has heard of Shakespeare, Mozart, or Darwin, and when the planet is inhabited by beings of great intelligence, ambivalent sexuality, and extraordinary powers. Clay embarks on a panoramic journey, encompassing a billion years, and comes to understand that the era from which he came is nothing more than a minute fiber in the band of time.
Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego, and the Twilight Zone Case
Stephen Farber - 1988
But on July 23, 1982, a spectacular explosion on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie knocked a helicopter out of the sky and into the path of two small children and veteran actor Vic Morrow, crushing one child and decapitating Morrow and the other youngster.How could this tragedy occur? Was anyone to blame? Outrageous Conduct reveals the facts behind the accident, when skilled movie-makers exceeded the bounds of safety; the anxiety, when Hollywood closed ranks to protect its own; and the raucous and very public trial, when countercharges of "outrageous conduct" flew between the attorney and the furious film director, John Landis.Here are the intimate stories of the people behind the headlines: Landis, the driven young director of Animal House and other hits; Steven Spielberg, the superstar co-producer; Deputy District Attorney Lea D'Agostino, who accused Landis of manslaughter, but would have preferred a charge of murder; Vic Morrow, the fading star who would risk everything to salvage his career; and Renee Chen, six, and Myca Lee [sic], seven, whose parents had emigrated to the United States in search of a better life only to lose their children in a "make-believe" war. Here too are the opinions of top Hollywood professionals, forced to choose sides in a legal battle that tore the movie world apart.Outrageous Conduct probes the boundaries between art and safety, daring and responsibility. Like Indecent Exposure and Final Cut, it exposes the excesses and hubris of the world's most glamorous and seductive profession.STEPHEN FARBER was the film critic for New West magazine. He has also written for The New York Times, Esquire, and Film Comment.MARC GREEN was the film critic for Books and Arts and has written for California Magazine. He and Stephen Farber have reported on the Hollywood scene for almost twenty years and are the authors of Hollywood Dynasties.
Passages
Ann Quin - 1969
The form of the novel, reflecting the schizophrenia of the characters, is split into two sections--a narrative, and a diary annotated with those thoughts that provoked the entries.
Monkey on a Stick: Murder, Madness and the Hare Krishnas
John Hubner - 1988
Two investigative journalists, John Hubner and Lindsey Gruson, masterfully document the staggering number of crimes tied to the Hare Krishnas and the work of the dedicated cop determined to see justice in this fascinating and terrifying true crime story.Description from Google Books
Crucifax
Ray Garton - 1988
Garton has a way with teenage boredom, atmospheric small town isolation, incest, drug abuse, and over the top violence and he has managed to create a modern remake of the story of the Pied Piper with a sinister character, Mace (who wears a crucifax around his neck a crucifix with an axlike blade on it) appearing on the scene, seducing mixed up kids with his siren song of pleasure, power, and indulgence, all leading to a horrifically unsettling climax of death and destruction. And then there are the ratlike things that do the piper s bidding . . .
The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa - 2001
The heteronyms launch movements and write manifestos, and one of them attempts to break up Pessoa's only known romantic relationship. Also included is a generous selection from Pessoa's masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, freshly translated by Richard Zenith from newly discovered materials. The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa is an important record of a crucial part of the literary canon.
Whispers: The Voices of Paranoia
Ronald K. Siegel - 1994
Delusions and hallucinations feed on each other, flourishing with amazing speed. Locked in a new mode of thinking the paranoid views life as from a cell. In a dozen case studies Dr. Ronald Siegel takes us on a chilling but mesmerizing journey into the dark mysteries of the human mind.We meet a woman who hears her teeth whispering; a beautiful ballet dancer who is in love with a shadow; a UCLA student who believes Hitler is speaking to him through a stolen computer program; and a cocaine addict for whom the invasion of imaginary bugs was strong enough to drive him to commit murder.A dedicated and compassionate scientist, Dr. Siegel follows his patients into the shadowlands where paranoia flourishes--drug addiction, prison, organized crime, and terrorism often at risk to himself. He explores mild cases of patients who vaguely believe something is stalking them to serious cases of patients with apocalyptic visions so intense that they shake the foundations of an entire community. Fascinating, enlightening, and immersive, "reading Whispers is like reading about an exotic and dangerous travel adventure" (The Washington Post).
The Devil's Advocate
Taylor Caldwell - 1952
All he had to do was sacrifice that fragile thing called integrity. Instead Andrew Durant chose a different path. Against him were ranged the mighty forces of the Establishment. At stake was all he was and could ever hope to be. Here, from the magnificent pen of one of the greatest and most spellbinding storytellers of our days, is one of her most unforgettable novelistic triumphs - the searing, soaring story of an idealistic man in a world of corruption, battling to save both himself and the beautiful woman who had become a helpless pawn in a gigantic game of power and perveristy.