America, America


Elia Kazan - 1961
    Nothing can stand in his way. AMERICA, AMERICA is about immigration, the tyranny of our ancestors' homelands and the obsessive drive that brought our families to this country. It is difficult for us to imagine the realities of our heritage, but Elia Kazan shows us how the America we know today emerged from our forefathers' drive for a life of greater freedom and opportunity.

Pepsi Cola Addict


June Alison Gibbons - 1982
    Preston Wildey-King, 14, lives in Malibu with his widowed mother and sister. He is literally addicted to Pepsi, to the point that all his thoughts and fantasies are focused on it. When he's not drinking it he's dreaming about it, even creating art and poetry based on it. It amounts to his religion (Preston could have written "Breathtaking Design Strategy", the 2009 corporate document elevating Pepsi and its logo to metaphysical glory). He is deeply in love with Peggy, but she dumps him after an argument over his Pepsi habit. His friend Ryan is bisexual and desires him. His math tutor seduces him, and when he's sent to juvie after robbing a convenience store (mesmerized by a crate of Pepsi, of course, he sits down and drinks some instead of running) he's molested by a guard. Preston's choices and misfortunes are chronicled with that distinctive Gibbons flair, full of elegant metaphors, quirky slang and over- and undercurrents of emotion that take on a life of their own. Good luck finding it. Only five libraries are known to have it, but apparently bootleg copies exist.

Architects Are Here


Michael Winter - 2007
    As the journey progresses, secrets are unveiled, a friendship is tested, and there is a run-in with the Hurley family, a family both men have feared since childhood. In The Architects Are Here, Winter’s fifth and most emotionally resonant novel to date, he explores the nature of grief and friendship in unwaveringly powerful prose, and sheds light on who we are and how we go on when the future seems uncertain.

The Storyteller


Mario Vargas Llosa - 1987
    He is overcome with the eerie sense that he knows this man...that the storyteller is not an Indian at all but an old school friend, Saul Zuratas. As recollections of Zuratas flow through his mind, the writer begins to imagine Zuratas's transformation from a modern to a central member of the unacculturated Machiguenga tribe. Weaving the mysteries of identity, storytelling, and truth, Vargas Llosa has created a spellbinding tale of one man's journey from the modern world to our origins, abandoning one in order to find meaning in both.

Satan's Diary


Leonid Andreyev - 1920
    Fearlessly and mercilessly he hurled the falsehoods and hypocrisies into the face of life. He portrayed Satan coming to this earth to amuse himself and play. Having assumed the form of an American multi-millionaire, Satan set out on a tour through Europe in quest of amusement and adventure. Before him passed various forms of spurious virtues, hypocrisies, the ruthless cruelty of man and the often deceptive innocence of woman. Within a short time Satan finds himself outwitted, deceived, relieved of his millions, mocked, humiliated, beaten by man in his own devilish devices.

English Music


Peter Ackroyd - 1992
    In post-World War I London, on the stage of the out-of-the-way Chemical Theatre, Clement Harcombe and his young, motherless son, Timothy, perform acts of spiritual healing, their visionary skills lifting the weight of despair and failure from the shoulders of their small band of followers. For Timothy, a boy with remarkable psychic gifts, it is a thrilling apprenticeship, a wonderful life with an adored father. But in the eyes of the larger world, it is a wayward existence with a suspect parent. And when Timothy is abruptly removed from his father's side, from the familiar twilit world of phantoms and ghosts, and thrust into the simple world of his grandparents' home in the country, he is not too young to feel 'bereft of his past'. Yet nothing can remove him from the realm of his visions. And as he passes from a difficult childhood into a troubled adulthood - his father slipping in and out of his life - it is this other, private world that provides him with his only certainty. In his visions - unanticipated and wholly enveloping - Timothy is drawn into the creations of Charles Dickens and William Blake, Thomas Malory and Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Gainsborough and J.M.W. Turner. Accompanied by Merlin or Miss Havisham, William Byrd or William Hogarth, Crusoe's Friday or Wonderland's Alice, Timothy is swept across time and history. And as his mysterious journeys begin to illuminate the ideas that have shaped them, Timothy comes to discern the power of the writer over his characters, the composer over what is heard, the painter over what is perceived - learns, finally, to hear the 'English music' his father described to him as a child. It is the workings of the

Listen, Little Man!


Wilhelm Reich - 1946
    Written in 1946 in answer to the gossip and defamation that plagued his remarkable career, it tells how Reich watched, at first naively, then with amazement, and finally with horror, at what the Little Man does to himself; how he suffers and rebels; how he esteems his enemies and murders his friends; how, wherever he gains power as a "representative of the people," he misuses this power and makes it crueler than the power it has supplanted.Reich has us to look honestly at ourselves and to assume responsibility for our lives and for the great untapped potential that lies in the depth of human nature.

Cyberpunk Handbook:: The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook


St. Jude - 1995
    Jude and R.U. Sirius--consummate insiders and co-founders of the revolutionary Mondo 2000 magazine, and co-authors of Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge--both definitive source guides for members of the electronic underground. Includes Cyberpunk cryptic crossword puzzles and a hipness checklist, plus a true/false "final exam."

Sotah


Naomi Ragen - 1992
    Ninety three weeks on the best-seller list.Sotah introduces a family with three daughters approaching the age of marriage: Devorah, Dina and Chaya Leah. In the strict orthodoxy of their world, a Sotah is a wife suspected of infidelity who can be tried by ordeal to prove she is guiltless. Which sister could be capable of such a thought, let alone the act? Into the pious world of strict chaperoning and modest clothing, where a married woman's hair must never be seen by a man other than her husband--insinuates this serpent suggestion of evil. Ragen's powerful tale of three sisters spins endless questions: Which one? Could she? Did she? What changes could come into this orderly world because of unthinking actions?

The Devil in the Hills


Cesare Pavese - 1949
    Fascinated with their wealthy acquaintance, Poli, they soon find themselves embedded in his world—his cocaine addiction, his blasphemy, and his corrupt circle of friends.

On the River Styx and Other Stories


Peter Matthiessen - 1989
    Since the 1950s Peter Matthiessen has written fiction and nonfiction of elemental power and moral vision, including the acclaimed novels At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga and works of naturalism and exploration like the National Book Award-winning The Snow Leopard.This stunning collection of short stories, available for the first time in paperback, spans more than three decades of writing by one of the most acclaimed literary voices of our time.

The Traitor's Niche


Ismail Kadare - 1978
    Here, the sultan displays the severed heads of his adversaries. People flock to see the latest head and gossip about the state of the empire: the province of Albania is demanding independence again, and the niche awaits a new trophy…Tundj Hata, the imperial courier, is charged with transporting heads to the capital – a task he relishes and performs with fervour. But as he travels through obscure and impoverished territories, he makes money from illicit side-shows, offering villagers the spectacle of death. The head of the rebellious Albanian governor would fetch a very high price.The Traitor’s Niche is a surreal tale of rebellion and tyranny, in a land where armies carry scarecrows, state officials ban entire languages, and the act of forgetting is more complicated than remembering.

October Ferry To Gabriola


Malcolm Lowry - 1971
    It is not a completed novel, however. According to Margerie Lowry, the author's widow, this published version is her "sorting out" of numerous drafts of chapters, paragraphs and even sentences that Lowry began to write in 1946.

Older Brother


Mahir Guven - 2017
    The eldest son is a driver for an app-based car service, which comically puts him at odds with his father, whose very livelihood is threatened by this new generation of disruptors. The younger son, shy and serious, works as a nurse in a French hospital. Jaded by the regular rejections he encounters in French society, he decides to join a Muslim humanitarian organization to help wounded civilians in the war in Syria. But when he stops sending news home, the silence begins to eat away at his father and brother who wonder what his real motivations were. When younger brother returns home, he has changed. Guven alternates between an ironic take on contemporary society and the gravity of terrorist threats. He explores with equal poignancy the lives of “Uberized” workers and actors in the global jihad.

Chronicle of a Blood Merchant


Yu Hua - 1995
    His visits become lethally frequent as he struggles to provide for his wife and three sons at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Shattered to discover that his favorite son was actually born of a liaison between his wife and a neighbor, he suffers his greatest indignity, while his wife is publicly scorned as a prostitute. Although the poverty and betrayals of Mao's regime have drained him, Xu Sanguan ultimately finds strength in the blood ties of his family. With rare emotional intensity, grippingly raw descriptions of place and time, and clear-eyed compassion, Yu Hua gives us a stunning tapestry of human life in the grave particulars of one man's days.