I find the experience of being at large in the world without a definite goal or obligationâthat is, the state of driftingâto be a profound and intense way of communing with yourself and the place youâre in. If youâre hurrying someplace, or caught up in internal worries, you miss something about the world that only becomes clear if you let yourself drift, no matter how scary that can be.
The Driver's Seat is one of the most powerful and tightly-wound books I've ever read about being alone in a strange city, unraveling both within and without at the same time. The fever pitch that grows throughout this short text is unmatched in my readingâit strikes a tone entirely unto itself.
Driven mad by an office job, Lise flies south on holiday - in search of passionate adventure and sex. In this metaphysical shocker, infinity and eternity attend Lise's last terrible day in the unnamed southern city that is her final destination.
This book is an obvious choice perhaps, but one that can't be omitted. The tragicomic frustration of the surveyor who can't complete the job he's been sent to do no matter how hard he tries is massively influential for a number of very good reasons. Also, the way that the castle is both a literal place and a potent metaphor is crucialâas ever in Kafka, it's never just a metaphor, just as it's neverjust a dream, but rather a dream or a metaphor that also develops out of and into a very concrete situation. This is crucial writing advice for anyone interested in working with dreamlike or surreal elements.
'He is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him' Vladimir Nabokov
The story of K. and his arrival in a village where he is never accepted, and his relentless, unavailing struggle with authority in order to gain entrance to the castle that seems to rule it. K.'s isolation and perplexity, his begging for the approval of elusive and anonymous powers, epitomises Kafka's vision of twentieth-century alienation and anxiety.
Zach, a young veteran, contemplates suicide after a horrific tour in Afghanistan when Ernest Hemingway appears and stops him. He enrolls in college, where he falls in love with Jessica, a young woman from a wealthy family. Her love stabilizes him, and Hemingwayâs appearances become less frequent until she doesnâtâŚ
There are several Beckett books that belong on my list, as Beckett I think is one of the great authors about vagrants and castoffs, but Molloy is ground zero for me in terms of my relation to Beckett's work. The strangeness of Molloy's solitary relation to the world, and to the room he's confined in, was a big influence on my books as well.
Molloy, the first of the three masterpieces which constitute Samuel Beckettâs famous trilogy, appeared in French in 1951, followed seven months later by Malone Dies (Malone meurt) and two years later by The Unnamable (LâInnommable). Few works of contemporary literature have been so universally acclaimed as central to their time and to our understanding of the human experience.
The Famished Road is an epic novel about a West African "spirit-child" who can traverse the boundary between life and death, a kind of drifting that's truly profound and eerie to contemplate. I love the idea of life and death not necessarily being an either/or situation, but actually being an open-ended space where all kinds of transgressions and reversals can occur.
Winner of the Man Booker Prize: âOkri shares with GarcĂa MĂĄrquez a vision of the world as one of infinite possibility. . . . A masterpieceâ (The Boston Sunday Globe).
Azaro is a spirit child, an abiku, existing, according to the African tradition, between life and death. Born into the human world, he must experience its joys and tragedies. His spirit companions come to him often, hounding him to leave his mortal world and join them in their idyllic one. Azaro foresees a trying life ahead, but he is born smiling. This is his story.
In the bigoted milieu of 1945, six days after the official end of World War II, Bess Myerson, the daughter of poor Russian immigrants living in the Bronx, remarkably rises to become Miss America, the first âand to date onlyâ Jewish woman to do so. At stake is a $5,000âŚ
This is a great novel about the romance of drifting and the danger (and perhaps also the necessity) of trying to bring your drifting to an end. The story "The Hate Room" in this collection is partly an homage to Mishima's delicate balance of beauty and brutality, as well as my own time in Japan (although it was nothing like that of the characters in the story!).
A band of savage 13-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'objectivity'. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard this disallusionment as an act of betrayal on his part - and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.
Collecting a decade's worth of stories by acclaimed author David Leo Rice, Drifter is a wild trip through the occult and surreal undercurrents of contemporary life. Ever in pursuit of illumination and unholy opportunity, the characters in these stories roam from blighted Western settlements to eerie New England circuses, from the backwoods of Austria to the remotest reaches of Japan, and from seedy Caribbean islands to the shadow of the Swiss Alps.
Blessed and cursed with the freedom to transgress all boundaries-between waking and dreaming, home and exile, even life and death. Rice's Drifters operate in the shadows of our world, revealing how frayed the fabric of reality has become.
To Do Justice is the first book in the White Winter Trilogy. The other books are To Love Kindness and To Walk Humbly. The Trilogy follows the same set of characters through eight tumultuous years in their lives and in the history of the world. To Do Justice startsâŚ
The Road from Belhaven is set in 1880s Scotland. Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven Farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small girl that she can see the future. But she soon realises that she must keep her gift a secret. While she can sometimes glimpseâŚ