Three slaves infected with Dysaethesia Aethipica (a term coined in the nineteenth century for the disease that makes Negroes run away) escape from Virginia. Not satisfied with leaving slavery halfway, one of the trio has vowed to go the whole distance to Canada; his master, Arthur Swille, determined to recover his property, pursues, hot on Raven Quickskill's trail.With his myth-bending ingenuity, Reed merges history, fantasy, political reality, and high comedy as he parodies the fugitive slave narrative: the slave-poet Quickskill flees to Canada on a nonstop jumbo jet; Abe Lincoln waltzes through slave quarters to the tune of "Hello Dolly"; the plantation mistress lies in bed watching the Beecher Hour on TV. Flight to Canada's preposterous episodes leap out from the pages of history to reveal a keen sense of America past and present.

    "Roth is better than he's ever been before.... The prose is electric." (The Atlantic)Gil Gamesh is the only pitcher who ever tried to kill the umpire, and John Baal, The Babe Ruth of the Big House, never hit a home run sober. But you've never heard of them -- or of the Ruppert Mundys, the only homeless big-league ball team in American history -- because of the communist plot and the capitalist scandal that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory.

    His is the tale of a disordered pilgrimage to H. Roivas (Heavenly Savior) in which the deranged responses of individuals point up the outer madness from which they derive in a more imaginative way that social protest generally allows.Like Camus, Kenneth Patchen is anti-cool, anti-hip, anti-beat.

    Enticing the reader to follow both victims and celebrants of romantic love on their hypertextual voyage of folly and lust-through movie posters, upside-down pages, the Kamasutra: Game of Love board game, and even a proposed CD-ROM, Love in a Dead Language exposes the complicities between the carnal and the intellectual, the erotic and the exotic and, in the end, is an outrageous operatic portrayal of romantic love. "Rare is the book that makes one stop and wonder: Is this a literary masterpiece or do I need my head examined? But such is the alternately awe-inspiring and goofy thrall cast by Lee Siegel's Love in a Dead Language. . . . His work stands out as a book that is not simply a novel but its own genus of rollicking, narrative scholarship . . . it is just the cerebral aphrodisiac we need." —Carol Lloyd, Salon"Immensely clever and libidinously hilarious. . . . [T]he most astonishing thing about Love in a Dead Language is its ingenious construction. Insofar as any printed volume can lay claim to being a multimedia work, this book earns that distinction." —Paul di Filippo, Washington Post Book World"Now along comes Lee Siegel, who mixes a bit of Borges with some Nabokov and then adds an erotic gloss from the Kama Sutra to write Love in a Dead Language, a witty, bawdy, language-rich farce of academic life. . . . Whether it is post-modern or not, Love in a Dead Language is pulled off with such unhinged élan by Mr. Siegel that it is also plain good fun, a clever, literate satire in which almost everything is both travestied and, strangely, loved by its author." —Richard Bernstein, The New York Times"Love in a Dead Language deserves space on the short, high shelf of literary wonders." —Tom LeClair, New York Times Book Review1999 New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

    And it really isn't about his getting this, like, social illness-- --The one where... Come on: it's impossible to become allergic to lying-- --Exactly -- the book isn't about that at all...One of the best novels of the decade... The magic of his writing and what he accomplishes through it is...manifested in how mesmerizing, hypnotic and just plain readable Evan Dara is. --The Quarterly ConversationIt's good to know that writers like Dara exist, capable of bravely carrying the flame [with this] very intricately crafted and grandly conceived postmodern novel. --The Review of Contemporary FictionRecalls David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: both books offer a jigsaw puzzle of different styles, and construct a remarkably clever and complex plot with many mysteries embedded for the reader to discover after multiple readings. --American Book Review, Stephen J. BurnIf there is any literary justice [The Easy Chain] will appear sometime around 2050 in a New York Review of Books Classics edition with a forward by the aging Dave Eggers. --Conversational ReadingIn a just world, this would be the literary event of the year. --The Reading ExperienceJust brilliant...a testament to [Dara's] incredible skill. This is, without a doubt, my favorite book of the year. This is a great book. --Triple R Radio (Melbourne, Australia)This masterpiece left us drooling for days on end. We couldn't put it down. --Lowdown Magazine (Germany/UK)Uncommon and outstanding. As surely as there will always be an avant-garde, Dara will be there and whatever new guard emerges, they will be sure to have read his books. --The Front Table

    Every day he gets up before dawn, makes a cup of coffee in the dark, lights a fire with one wooden match, and thinks. What Emmett thinks about is the subject of this wise and closely observed novel, which covers vast distances while moving no further than Emmett’s hearth and home. Nicholson Baker’s extraordinary ability to describe and celebrate life in all its rich ordinariness has never been so beautifully achieved.

    Con-man, filmmaker (currently working on producing "Jesus 2001", what he calls the religious equivalent of The Godfather, best known for his movie "The Clap That Took Over the World"), descendent of a wealthy and prestigious New York family whose wealth and prestige are on a sharp decline, racist and anti-Semite (though Simon dislikes all ethnic groups equally), possessor of never-satisfied appetites (food, women, drink, but most of all, money and more money), and the fastest talker since Falstaff, Simon is on a quest that goes backwards.Through the course of this 600-page novel, Simon loses, one by one, all of his senses (taste is lost when trying to siphon off gasoline for his roving, broken-down production van), ending in a state of complete debilitation in which he is being made ready for eternity and salvation.As energy packed as a William Gaddis novel and as rich in language as a Shakespearean play, Take Five is a modern masterpiece that is at once a celebration of life and a morality play on excess, as though anticipating the self-indulgent "me generation" of the decade.

    Reminiscent of Raymond Roussel and Harry Mathews, Krusoe has combined an eccentric character and an outlandish plot to create an unforgettable book.

    As a memorial, Edwin's bestfriend, Jeffrey Cartwright, decides that the life of this great American writer must be told. He follows Edwin's development from his preverbal first noises through his love for comic books to the fulfillment of his literary genius in the remarkable novel, Cartoons.

    She abruptly vanishes.In snowy Pittsburgh, her American translator Emma hears the news and, against the wishes of her boyfriend and Beatriz's two grown children, flies immediately to Brazil. There, in the sticky, sugary heat of Rio, Emma and her author's children conspire to solve the mystery of Yagoda's curious disappearance and staunch the colorful demands of her various outstanding affairs: the rapacious loan shark with a zeal for severing body parts, and the washed-up and disillusioned editor who launched Yagoda's career years earlier.

    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.

    As the novel's perspective shifts to each of the four primary characters, four discrete stories take form, stories that Sorrentino further enriches by using a variety of literary methods--fantasies, letters, a narrative question-and-answer, fragments of dialogue and memory. Combining humor and feeling, balancing the details and the rhythms of experience, Aberration of Starlight re-creates a time and a place as it captures the sadness and value of four lives.

    (Hilarity and disaster -- of a sort peculiar to the tropics -- ensue.)It's the novel in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such acclaimed and bestselling novels as The Caine Mutiny and War and Remembrance draws on his own experience (Wouk and his family lived for seven years on an island in the sun) to tell a story at once brilliantly comic and deeply moving.

    Making matters even worse are the threatening letters: Dear Sir: Only for the moment are we saying nothing. Yours, etc., Present Associates.Despite such precautions as a two-inch-thick surgical steel door and a bullet-proof limousine, Smith remains worried. So he undertakes to build a giant mausoleum, complete with plumbing, in which to live. Hunter S. Thompson called reading this book “like sitting down to an evening of good whisky and mad laughter in a rare conversation somewhere on the edge of reality.”

    It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between criminals and outlaws, examines the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism, and paints a portrait of contemporary society that includes powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleaders. It also deals with the problem of redheads.