He becomes a vagabond and philosopher, struggling with mortality and meaning.In the basement of a Boston bookstore, Firmin is born in a shredded copy Finnegans Wake, nurtured on a diet of Zane Grey, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Jane Eyre (which tastes a lot like lettuce). While his twelve siblings gnaw these books obliviously, for Firmin the words, thoughts, deeds, and hopes—all the literature he consumes—soon consume him. Emboldened by reading, intoxicated by curiosity, foraging for food, Firmin ventures out of his bookstore sanctuary, carrying with him all the yearnings and failings of humanity itself. It’s a lot to ask of a rat—especially when his home is on the verge of annihilation.A novel that is by turns hilarious, tragic, and hopeful, Firmin is a masterpiece of literary imagination. For here, a tender soul, a vagabond and philosopher, struggles with mortality and meaning—in a tale for anyone who has ever feasted on a book…and then had to turn the final page. First published by Coffee House Press in 2006. Republished by Delta, a division of Random House, in 2009.

    Through the eyes, ears and voice of Brautigan's youthful protagonist the reader is gently led into a small-town tale where the narrator accidentally shoots dead his best friend with a gun. The novel deals with the repercussions of this tragedy and its recurring theme of 'What if...' fuels anguish, regret and self-blame as well as some darkly comic passages of bitter-sweet romance and despair. Taken with the recently discovered, "An Unfortunate Woman", these two late Brautigan novels are a fitting epitaph to a complex, contradictory and often misunderstood genius.

    At the center of this outlandishly funny, fiercely intelligent novel is the bewitching heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio. Lenore’s great-grandmother has disappeared with twenty-five other inmates of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home. Her beau, and boss, Rick Vigorous, is insanely jealous, and her cockatiel, Vlad the Impaler, has suddenly started spouting a mixture of psycho-babble, Auden, and the King James Bible. Ingenious and entertaining, this debut from one of the most innovative writers of his generation brilliantly explores the paradoxes of language, storytelling, and reality.

    We observe the sisters over four decades, watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart, settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates's classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family's past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal.

    On the verge of adolescence, young Richie Stowe grapples to make sense of these events and their consequences, and seeks solace in the church. As the family attempts to mend itself and move forward, its members are forced to reconcile their feelings of betrayal with their enduring love for one another. Masterfully related from the alternating perspectives of its six main characters, Dubus's richly drawn novella recounts a family's failure to abide by those laws divined and decreed, and its path to redemption via understanding and forgiveness.

    Brought to America at the age of two. Eighteen or 20 books of prose and poetry. Bukowski, after publishing prose in Story and Portfolio stopped writing for ten years. He arrived in the charity ward of the Los Angeles County General Hospital, hemorrhaging as a climax of a ten-year drinking bout. Some say he didn't die. After leaving the hospital he got a tyewriter and began writing again - this time, poetry. He later returned to prose and gained some fame with his column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, which he wrote mainly for the paper, Open City. After 14 years in the Post Office he resigned at age 50, he says, to keep from going insane. He now claims to be unemployable and eats typewriter ribbons. Once married, once divorced, many times shacked, he has a seven-year-old daughter.These dirty and immortal stories appeared mainly in Underground newspapers, with Open City and Nola Express leading in the publication of them. Others have appeared in Evergreen Review, Knight, Pix, Berkeley Barb, Adam, and Adam Reader.With Bukowski, the votes are still coming in. There seems to be no middle ground - people seem either to love him or hate him. Tales of his own life and doings are as wild and weird as the very stories he writes. In a sense, Bukowski is a legend in his time...a madman, a recluse, a lover...tender, vicious...never the same...these are exceptional stories that come pounding out of his violent and depraved life...horrible and holy...you cannot read them and ever come away the same again.

    The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college - as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete's critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.The agency of Kepesh's undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous, humblingly beautiful twenty-four-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged helplessly into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling the themes of eros and mortality, licence and repression, freedom and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.

    Written as a diary, Myra Breckinridge, someone determined not to be possessed by any man, recounts her day as she lives it out in the Hollywood of the '60s. Feminism, transsexuality, and a host of cinematic jokes abound.

    It was made into a play, a Broadway as well as a Hollywood musical, and a fabulous movie starring Rosalind Russell. Since then, Mame has taken her rightful place in the pantheon of Great and Important People as the world's most beloved, madcap, devastatingly sophisticated, and glamorous aunt. She is impossible to resist, and this hilarious story of an orphaned ten-year-old boy sent to live with his aunt is as delicious a read in the twenty-first century as it was in the 1950s.

    It chronicles one day in the life of Todd Andrews, a day on which he makes a very important decision. It was Barth's first novel.

    Riveting, compulsively readable, and ferociously sexual, Endless Love tells the story of David Axelrod and his overwhelming love for Jade Butterfield. David's and Jade's lives are consumed with each other; their rapport, their desire, their sexuality take them further than they understand. And when Jade's father suddenly banishes David from the house, he fantasizes the forgiveness his rescue of the family will bring and he sets a "perfectly safe" fire to their house. What unfolds is a nightmare, a dark world in which David's love is a crime and a disease, a world of anonymous phone calls, crazy letters, and new fears — and the inevitable and punishing pursuit of the one thing that remains most real to him: his endless love for Jade and her family.

    But when he fails to make the grade as a college footballer, and takes a job with the local farmers' co-operative, it seems he has finally settled into the rhythm and routine of everyday life. Outward appearances can be deceptive, however, as Jack proves: returning from a weekend conference with a new wife in tow, then leaving her behind and skipping town with a bundle of other folk's money.Nearly a decade later, no one has forgiven or forgotten, and when Jack reappears, resentment runs high. Once again though, it is Jack whose presence - even more than his eight-year absence - proves the most devastating.

    Pushing the bounds of fiction and form, Barthelme subverts the classic tale, prompting The New York Times to call him “a splendid practitioner at the peak of his power” and inspiring a new generation of authors including Charles Baxter, Dave Eggers, and David Gates.

    

    Among them is Zoyd Wheeler who is preparing for his annual act of televised insanity (for which he receives a government stipend) when an unwelcome face appears from out of his past.An old nemesis, federal prosecutor Brock Vond, storms into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed strike force. Soon Zoyd and his daughter, Prairie, go into hiding while Vond begins a relationship with Zoyd's ex-wife and uses Prairie as a pawn against the mother she never knew she had.Part daytime drama, part political thriller, Vineland is a strange evocation of a twentieth-century America headed for a less than harmonic future.