Book picks similar to
Ray of the Star by Laird Hunt


fiction
novels
mfa-books
contemporary

The Love Song of Monkey


Michael S.A. Graziano - 2008
    Part magic realism, part science fiction, part theater of the absurd, and part over-the-top, unrepentant spoof, this novel packs more into its few short pages than do most epic trilogies. Graziano has fabricated the rare kind of tale that the reader can honestly say ends much too quickly. Perfectly woven, self-enclosed, multifaceted . . . Kosinski’s Being There sprinkled with a strong dose of Frankenstein . . . the kind of simplicity that speaks volumes.”—Michael Mirolla, author of The Formal Logic of Emotion“An amalgam of fairy tale, satire, science fiction, medical thriller, and soap opera. . . . It is difficult to fathom that a novel so brief can be so epic in scope. Inventive and deftly crafted, The Love Song of Monkey is a tale no reader will soon forget.”—Eric Linder, Yellow Umbrella Books, Chatham, MassachusettsIn a surreal exile on the floor of the Atlantic, a young man faces his own death and his wife’s infidelity. The Love Song of Monkey is a meditation on the simple, inexplicable, and lasting power of love, cast in the metaphor of a journey to the depths of the ocean floor. Precise and beautifully crafted, this modern fable is rich with humor and deep thought.Michael S. A. Graziano, professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, is the author of the novella Hiding Places (New England Review), The Seclusion Zone (2007 fi nalist in the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition), and The Intelligent Movement Machine (2008, Oxford University Press).

A Jello Horse


Matthew Simmons - 2009
    When his new roommate's brother dies tragically, the unnamed narrator of A JELLO HORSE offers to drive him home to the Midwest. Feeling anxious and displaced, he embarks on another roadtrip to visit the bizarre attractions and quirky museums in America's heartland. Matthew Simmons has found a beautiful and extraordinary way to tell a story about the sweetness of sadness and the aloneness of loneliness--Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody.

The Human War


Noah Cicero - 2003
    "A terse, polemical and often violent book that follows Mark, a disaffected American everyman, through the trailer parks, bedrooms, dive bars and strip joints of humdrum Youngstown, Ohio during the final two hours leading up to the dawn of America's supposed 'War on Terror.'... America's finest literary pariah? You bet"--Dazed & Confused. "This alarmingly well written book is a new voice that has rankled more than enough people back home in America. This vitriolic stance against Bush, God and War is just the book we should be reading in today's climate"--Scarecrow.

Destruction Myth: Poems


Mathias Svalina - 2009
    Expanding the palette of contemporary surrealism while harkening back to the stories and prayers at the origin of poetry, DESTRUCTION MYTH is a series of absurdist myths of creation and destruction that are at times both inventively silly and surprisingly emotionally direct. This book attempts the world again and again, only to find that even the most ridiculous of creations contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Shadowbahn


Steve Erickson - 2017
    To the hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands drawn to the American Stonehenge including Parker and Zema, siblings on their way from L.A. to visit their mother in Michigan the Towers seem to sing, even as everybody hears a different song. A rumor overtakes the throng that someone can be seen in the high windows of the southern structure. On the ninety-third floor, Jesse Presley the stillborn twin of the most famous singer who ever lived suddenly awakes, driven mad over the hours and days to come by a voice in his head that sounds like his but isn't, and by the memory of a country where he survived in his brother's place. Meanwhile, Parker and Zema cross a possessed landscape by a mysterious detour no one knows, charted on a map that no one has seen. Haunting, audacious, and undaunted, Shadowbahn is a winding and reckless ride through intersections of danger, destiny, and the conjoined halves of a ruptured nation.

Notable American Women


Ben Marcus - 2002
    With Notable American Women he goes well beyond that first achievement to create something radically wonderful, a novel set in a world so fully imagined that it creates its own reality.On a farm in Ohio, American women led by Jane Dark practice all means of behavior modification in an attempt to attain complete stillness and silence. Witnessing (and subjected to) their cultish actions is one Ben Marcus, whose father, Michael Marcus, may be buried in the back yard, and whose mother, Jane Marcus, enthusiastically condones the use of her son for (generally unsuccessful) breeding purposes, among other things. Inventing his own uses for language, the author Ben Marcus has written a harrowing, hilarious, strangely moving, altogether engrossing work of fiction that will be read and argued over for years to come.

Waste


Eugene Marten - 2008
    A spare and chilling account of the day-to-day experience of Sloper, a janitor in a big-city office building, WASTE explores the import of the discarded--for those who generate it, those who dispose of it, and those who are themselves discarded. From the humble prospect of his station, Sloper uncovers ominous possibility in lives he barely brushes. Brian Evenson says, "Only Eugene Marten can keep a reader enthralled with the minutiae of a janitorial existence.... Precisely and exquisitely detailed, WASTE is a stark little masterpiece." And Dawn Raffel writes, "[P]itch-perfect. WASTE wastes nothing--not a syllable, a beat, a ragged breath." And Sam Lipsyte writes, "There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Marten's prose."

The Revisionist


Miranda Mellis - 2007
    The title character of THE REVISIONIST conducts covert surveillance on a city whose inhabitants are subject to uncanny transformations as a result of catastrophic weather, political corruption, invasive technologies and environmental degradation. Hired to spin, or "revise," the facts, the revisionist's perceptions in turn become detached and distorted--inevitably unreliable yet all the same, revealing. This civil scientist of a narrator sardonically observes a distressed landscape inhabited by mutant children, a seeing-eye dog, a centenarian with iguanas and constellations beneath her dress, brooding frigate birds, insurance love clones, a terrorist curator, a private investigator, and a little girl who's discovered the world's largest conch. "THE REVISIONIST is at once a beautifully simple fable and a wonderfully lyrical apocalyptic tale"--Brian Evenson.

Other Electricities


Ander Monson - 2005
    While our dad was upstairs broadcasting something to the world, and we were listening in, or trying to find his frequency and listen to his voice . . . we would give up and go out in the snow with a phone rigged with alligator clips so we could listen in on others’ conversations. There’s something nearly sexual about this, hearing what other people are saying to their lovers, children, cousins, psychics, pastors. . . .The cumulative effect of this stunningly original collection seems to work on the reader in the same way—we follow glimpses of dispossessed lives in the snow-buried reaches of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, where nearly everyone seems to be slipping away under the ice to disappear forever. Through an unsettling, almost crazed gestalt of sketches, short stories, lists, indices and radio schematics, Monson presents a world where weather, landscape, radio waves and electricity are characters in themselves, affecting a community held together by the memories of those they have lost.Ander Monson is the editor of DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press. He teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives in Michigan. Tupelo Press recently published his poetry collection, Elegies for Descent and Dreams of Weather.

Self-Portrait Abroad


Jean-Philippe Toussaint - 1999
    Tales of a cosmopolitan at home in a strangely familiar world, Self-Portrait Abroad casts the entire globe in a cool but playful light, reminding us that, wherever we go,we take our own eyes with us...

Tracer


Frederick Barthelme - 1985
    Martin, in the middle of a divorce, is seeking solace. But settles in for some rest and rehabilitation with his soon-to-be ex-sister-in-law.

In the Devil's Territory


Kyle Minor - 2008
    A preacher bathes his ill and elderly mother, not knowing that she has mistaken him for the long-lost cousin she watched murder his brother in her father’s tobacco field. In six stories that read like novels in miniature, Kyle Minor plumbs the depths of human mystery, where they meet our kindnesses and our cruelties, our generosities and our pettiness.Kyle Minor’s work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, among them Best American Mystery Stories 2008, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Surreal South, and Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers: The Best New Voices of 2006. His work has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Kyle received his MFA from Ohio State University and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Toledo.

Popisho


Leone Ross - 2021
    Everyone in Popisho was born with a little something… The local name for it was cors. Magic, but more than magic. A gift, nah? Yes. From the gods: a thing that felt so inexpressibly your own.Somewhere far away-- or maybe right nearby-- lies an archipelago called Popisho. A place of stunning beauty and incorrigible mischief, destiny and mystery, it is also a place in need of change.Xavier Redchoose is the macaenus of his generation, anointed by the gods to make each resident one perfect meal when the time is right. Anise, his long lost love, is on a march toward reckoning with her healing powers. The governor’s daughter, Sonteine, is getting married, her father demanding a feast out of turn. And graffiti messages from an unknown source are asking hard questions. A storm is brewing. Before it comes, before the end of the day, this wildly imaginative narrative will take us across the islands, their history, and into the lives of unforgettable characters.

Welfare


Steve Anwyll - 2017
    A high school student leaves his parents' home to live on his own with friends and with the help of government aid. The narrator becomes your best friend on the first page.

Second Nature


Alice Hoffman - 1994
    As Robin impulsively draws this beautiful, uncivilized man into her world-meanwhile coping with divorce and a troubled teenage son-she begins to question her wisdom and doubt her own heart, and ultimately she changes her ideas about love and humanity.