My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist


Mark Leyner - 1990
    It is voiced in first-person by an anonymous narrator often using jargon, broken grammar and punctuation with a poetry-like structure. The narration shifts quickly from random idea to idea with little to no connectivity between them, typically giving vivid descriptions of abstract situations. The narrative styles in the book vary significantly as well, with no apparent solid identity to the narrator itself. Some characters and ideas emerge suddenly and disappear without explanation.Within this form incorporate elements of science fiction, cyberpunk, tabloid journalism, and advertising slogans. Due to its use of pop-culture references (e.g. to kung-fu films) and literary allusions it requires knowledge of (then) current affairs. Leyner resorts to irony and humor as a means of interplay with traditional realism.-Wikipedia

The Heaven of Mercury


Brad Watson - 2002
    Having “caught hold of some loose line in her that would attach itself to stray wildness” and never let go, he’s loved her for some eighty years: through their marriages to other people, through the mysterious early death of Birdie’s womanizing husband, Earl, and through all the poisonous accusations against Birdie by Earl’s no-good relatives. All during Mercury’s evolution from a sleepy backwater to a small city, Finus (reporter, radio host, and obit writer) has aimed to have the last word on its inhabitants, from obsequious undertaker Parnell Grimes to Euple Scarbrough, local encyclopedia of useless knowledge, and Vish, a real oldtime medicine woman. But ever loyal to Birdie, Finus won’t rush to unravel the mystery of her husband’s untimely passing—not until Birdie herself has entered Mercury’s heaven.A gorgeous portrayal of lifelong friendship, restless passion, marital discord accommodation, aging and remembrance, death and afterlife, The Heaven of Mercury is inscribed in prose so eerily fine it is one of life’s true pleasures.

A Fan's Notes


Frederick Exley - 1968
    This fictional memoir, the first of an autobiographical trilogy, traces a self professed failure's nightmarish decent into the underside of American life and his resurrection to the wisdom that emerges from despair.

Witz


Joshua Cohen - 2010
    By the following Passover, however, only one is still alive: Benjamin Israelien; a kindly, innocent, ignorant man-child. As he finds himself transformed into an international superstar, Jewishness becomes all the rage: matzo-ball soup is in every bowl, sidelocks are hip; and the only truly Jewish Jew left is increasingly stigmatized for not being religious. Since his very existence exposes the illegitimacy of the newly converted, Israelien becomes the object of a worldwide hunt . . .Meanwhile, in the not-too-distant future of our own, “real” world, another last Jew—the last living Holocaust survivor—sits alone in a snowbound Manhattan, providing a final melancholy witness to his experiences in the form of the punch lines to half-remembered jokes.

Tender Buttons


Gertrude Stein - 1914
    Stein's strong influence on 20th-century literature is evident in this 1915 work of highly original prose rendered in thought-provoking experimental techniques.

Tales of Ordinary Madness


Charles Bukowski - 1967
    Lawrence, Chekhov and Hemingway, Bukowski's writing is passionate, extreme and has attracted a cult following, while his life was as weird and wild as the tales he wrote. This collection of short stories gives an insight into the dark, dangerous lowlife of Los Angeles that Bukowski inhabited.From prostitutes to classical music, Bukowski ingeniously mixes high and low culture in his 'tales of ordinary madness'. These are angry yet tender, humorous and haunting portrayals of life in the underbelly of Los Angeles.A .45 to pay the rent --Doing time with public enemy no. 1 --Scenes from the big time --Nut ward just east of Hollywood --Would you suggest writing as a career? --The great Zen wedding --Reunion --Cunt and Kant and a happy home --Goodbye Watson --Great poets die in steaming pots of shit --My stay in the poet's cottage --The stupid Christs --Too sensitive --Rape! Rape! --An evil town --Love it or leave it. A dollar and twenty cents --No stockings --A quiet conversation piece --Beer and poets and talk --I shot a man in Reno --A rain of women --Night streets of madness --Purple as an iris --Eyes like the sky --One for Walter Lowenfels --Notes of a potential suicide --Notes on the pest --A bad trip --Animal crackers in my soup --A popular man --Flower horse --The big pot game --The blanket

The Bell Jar


Sylvia Plath - 1963
    Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.

The Things They Carried


Tim O'Brien - 1990
    In this, his second work of fiction about Vietnam, O'Brien's unique artistic vision is again clearly demonstrated. Neither a novel nor a short story collection, it is an arc of fictional episodes, taking place in the childhoods of its characters, in the jungles of Vietnam and back home in America two decades later.

Television


Jean-Philippe Toussaint - 1997
    With his research completed, all he has left to do is sit down and write. Unfortunately, he can't decide how to refer to his subject—Titian, le Titien, Vecellio, Titian Vecellio—so instead he starts watching TV continuously, until one day he decides to renounce the most addictive of twentieth-century inventions.As he spends his summer still not writing his book, he is haunted by television, from the video surveillance screens in a museum to a moment when it seems everyone in Berlin is tuned in to Baywatch.One of Toussaint's funniest antiheroes, the protagonist of Television turns daily occurrences into an entertaining reflection on society and the influence of television on our lives.

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.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas


Hunter S. Thompson - 1971
    It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken.

Go


John Clellon Holmes - 1952
    Published two months before Kerouac began On the Road, Go is the first and most accurate chronicle of the private lives the Beats lived before they became public figures. In lucid fictional prose designed to capture the events, emptions and essence of his experience, Holmes describes an individualistic post-World-war II New York where crime is celebrated, writing is revered, and parties, booze, discussions, drugs and sex punctuate life.

Westward Ha!


S.J. Perelman - 1948
    Perelman's companion is cartoonist Al Hirschfield, whose drawings capture the very essence of Perelmania.

Locos: A Comedy of Gestures


Felipe Alfau - 1936
    Alfau's "comedy of gestures" - a mercurial dreamscape of the eccentric, sometimes criminal, habitues of Toledo's Cafe of the Crazy - was written in English and first published in 1936, favorably reviewed for "The Nation" by Mary McCarthy, as she recounts here in her Afterword, then long neglected.

The Trees


Conrad Richter - 1940
    Toward the close of the eighteenth century, the land west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River was an unbroken sea of trees. Beneath them the forest trails were dark, silent, and lonely, brightened only by a few lost beams of sunlight. Here, in the first novel of Conrad Richter's Awakening Land trilogy, the Lucketts, a wild, woods-faring family, lived their roaming life, pushing ever westward as the frontier advanced and as new settlements threatened their isolation. This novel gives an excellent feel for America's lost woods culture, which was created when most of the eastern midwest was a vast hardwood forest---virtually a jungle. The Trees conveys settler life, including conflicts with Native Americans, illness, hunting, family dynamics, and marriage.