As avant-garde novelist Antony Lamont struggles to write a "new wave murder mystery," his frustrating emotional and sexual life wreaks havoc on his work-in-progress. As a result, his narrative (the very book we are reading) turns into a literary "stew": an uproariously funny melange of journal entries, erotic poetry, parodies of all kinds, love letters, interviews, and lists - as Hugh Kenner in Harper's wrote, "for another such virtuoso of the List you'd have to resurrect Joyce." Soon Lamont's characters (on loan from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flann O'Brien, James Joyce, and Dashiell Hammett) take on lives of their own, completely sabotaging his narrative.

    Now comes his final work of fiction, a subtle, concentrated culmination of his art and ideas. For more than fifty years Gaddis collected notes for a book about the mechanization of the arts, told by way of a social history of the player piano in America. In the years before his death in 1998, he distilled the whole mass into a fiction, a dramatic monologue by an elderly man with a terminal illness. Continuing Gaddis's career-long reflection on those aspects of corporate technological culture that are uniquely destructive of the arts, Agape Agape is a stunning achievement from one of the indisputable masters of postwar American fiction.

    Written in the 1940s but left unpublished until 1990, it anticipated the fictional inventiveness of the writers who were to come along - Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Sorrentino, and Gaddis. Chromos is the American immigration novel par excellence. Its opening line is: "The moment one learns English, complications set in." Or, as the novel illustrates, the moment one comes to America, the complications set in. The cast of characters in this book are immigrants from Spain who have one leg in Spanish culture and the other in the confusing, warped, unfriendly New World of New York City, attempting to meld two worlds that just won't fit together. Wildly comic, Chromos is also strangely apocalyptic, moving towards point zero and utter darkness.

    Combining elements of classic McElroy with tantalizing stories pointing the way ahead (the spare and dangerous “No Man’s Land,” the lush and mischievous “The Campaign Trail”), Night Soul and Other Stories presents a wide range of work from a monumental artist.

    Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles, and the weather are some of the recycled elements in Marcus's first collection—part fiction, part handbook—as familiar objects take on markedly unfamiliar meanings. Gradually, this makeshift world, in its defiance of the laws of physics and language, finds a foundation in its own implausibility, as Marcus produces new feelings and sensations—both comic and disturbing—in the definitive guide to an unpredictable yet exhilarating plane of existence.

    But it would be unfair to the reader to reveal what happens when a gang of professional crooks gets wind of the scheme and moves to muscle in on this bettors' dream of a long-odds situation.

    It is the story of a woman who is convinced, and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well, that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy. And as she contemplates aspects of the troubled past which have brought her to her present state, so too will her drama become one of the few certifiably original fictions of our time.

    Repulsing and fascinating him at the same time, she becomes a mirror in which he not only sees himself but through which he is forced to face his own demons. Not only does she inadvertently supply him with material for his columns, she represents all Eugene considers to be wrong with contemporary America - a garish and dunce-filled Babylon that Theroux scorches with relentless satire.

    Though many of the stories gathered here were published separately, there are several themes common to them all, giving them new meaning in the context of this collection.

    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.

    He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems.This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition includes an introduction from author and professor Luc Sante, as well as a pulp novel-inspired cover from Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers.

    People, places, offhand memories, and imaginary things drift in and out of Ava's consciousness and weave their way through the narrative. The voices of her three former husbands emerge: Francesco, a filmmaker from Rome; Anatole, lost in the air over France; Carlos, a teenager from Granada. The ways people she loved expressed themselves in letters or at the beach or at the moment of desire return to her. There is Danilo, her current lover, a Czech novelist, and others, lovers of one night, as she sings the endless, joyous, erotic song cycles of her life, because "Dusk and the moment right before shapes are taken back is erotic. And the dark."The voices of her literary loves as well are woven into the narrative: Woolf, Eliot, Nabokov, Beckett, Sarraute, Lorca, Frisch, among others. These writers comment on and help guide us through the text. We hear the voices of her parents, who survived the Treblinka death camp, and of her Aunt Sophie, who did not. War permeates the text, for on Ava Klein's last day Iraq has invaded Kuwait. And above all we hear Ava's voice. Hers is the voice of pleasure, of astonishment, the voice of regret, the voice of gratitude as she moves closer and closer to the "music that is silence."AVA is an attempt, in the words of French feminist philosopher Helene Cixous, "to come up with a language that heals as much as it separates." The fragments of the novel are combined to make a new kind of wholeness, allowing environments, states of mind, and rhythms not ordinarily associated with fiction to emerge. AVA's theme is the poignancy of mortality, the extraordinary desire to live, the inevitability of death&amp—the things never done, never understood, the things never said, or said right, or said enough. Ava yearns and the reader yearns with her, struggling to hold on to all that slips away.

    Breaking the law in a foolhardy attempt to accommodate his customers, unscrupulous department store owner Leo Feldman finds himself in jail and at the mercy of the warden, who tries to break Leo of his determination to stay bad.

    Newly wedded Zachary McCaltex (a librarian in Miami) and Twang Panattapam (originally from the Southeast-Asian country of Pan-Nam, but residing in Italy) try to trace the whereabouts of a treasure supposedly lost off the coast of Florida in the sixteenth century, while navigating a relationship separated by an ocean as well as their different cultures. In the end, the postal service may be responsible for what gets lost (including Zachary's sanity) along the way.

    Vollmann has established himself as one of the most fascinating and unconventional literary figures on the scene today. Named one of the twenty best writers under forty by the New Yorker in 1999, Vollmann received the best reviews of his career for The Royal Family, a searing fictional trip through a San Francisco underworld populated by prostitutes, drug addicts, and urban spiritual seekers. Part biblical allegory and part skewed postmodern crime novel, The Royal Family is a vivid and unforgettable work of fiction by one of today's most daring writers.