After publishing five books of poems, I found myself writing a long work I had no way of classifying. It involved the extensive use of facts but was also fiction. It read in part like a novel but was also lyrical. I decided to just write it and not worry about what genre it belonged to. It became A Monster’s Notes. I suspect in our internet age, the emergence of unclassifiable work is going to become more and more common. You can already see it happening. The web isn’t divided into sections the way a bookstore is; instead, it’s more like a spider’s web—you can follow this thread or that, but somehow they’re all connected.
What if Mary Shelley had not invented Frankenstein’s monster but had met him as a child of eight, sitting by her mother’s grave, and he came to her unbidden? What if he is still alive in the 21st century, and taking notes on everything from robotics to genetic privacy, John Cage, and the earth seen from outer space? In this riveting mix of fact and poetic license, Laurie Sheck’s genre-breaking novel gives us “the monster” in his own words as he recalls his life and reads Mary’s diary and letters, pondering the tragic tale of the Shelleys, and wondering about this strange race that created him yet fears and shuns him, as he tries to find his own freedom of mind.
This short, engaging book mixes fact and fiction, prose and poetry, documents and photographs, to tell the story of Billy the Kid, from the time Pat Garrett sets out to hunt him down to his killing. At times it is beautifully hallucinatory as it gets inside Billy’s mind, showing his dreams and visions. But it is also very lucid and attentive to detail, vividly depicting how Billy is always protecting and exercising his left hand—the hand he shoots with—as well as showing Billy’s interactions with his fellow outlaws. This is Ondaatje’s earliest and most experimental novel.
Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own prodigious fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje's visionary novel traces the legendary outlaw's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880 New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth by a writer who brings us back to our familiar legends with a renewed sense of wonder.
Markson had early success writing traditional novels (one was even made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra) but his real body of work came after when he started writing novels that were criticized for not being novels. The first of these, This is Not a Novel, is narrated by a writer who asks whether it is possible to have a novel with no plot, no main character etc. In a form that visually resembles about 150 pages of tweets (but written before Twitter existed), Markson takes a spirited, enjoyable romp through the history of art, literature, and philosophy, with a sharp eye focused on how various creative people lived and loved, but especially on how they died.
David Markson was a writer like no other. In his novels, which have been called "hypnotic," "stunning," and "exhilarating" and earned him praise from the likes of Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace, Ann Beattie and Zadie Smith. Markson created his own personal genre. With crackling wit distilled into incantatory streams of thought on art, life, and death, Markson's work has delighted and astonished readers for decades.
Now for the first time, three of Markson's masterpieces are compiled into one page–turning volume: This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel. In This Is Not a Novel, readers…
Though recently made into a TV series, the real genius of this book lies in its language. Part prank, part autofiction, part essay, and art criticism, I Love Dick tells the story of the main character, Chris Kraus, and her husband Sylvere, as they join together to write love letters from Chris to an art historian named Dick who she has a crush on but barely knows. It is all based on fact and plays with the blurred line between fact and fiction. It is that rare book that is at once sexy and intellectual.
When Chris Kraus, an unsuccessful artist pushing 40, spends an evening with a rogue academic named Dick, she falls madly and inexplicably in love, enlisting her husband in her haunted pursuit. Dick proposes a kind of game between them, but when he fails to answer their letters Chris continues alone, transforming an adolescent infatuation into a new form of philosophy.
Blurring the lines of fiction, essay and memoir, Chris Kraus's novel was a literary sensation when it was first published in 1997. Widely considered to be the most important feminist novel of the past two decades, I Love Dick is…
When the graphic novel, Maus, was first published it landed on the New York Times best-seller list in the fiction category. After a letter from the author protesting this designation, it was shifted to the non-fiction list. It is also the first graphic novel to have won a Pulitzer Prize. This metafiction includes within its pages depictions of the author interviewing his father, a holocaust survivor, and creating the book’s pages. All the characters are visually depicted as animals, but their speech is deeply human. Meticulously researched, Maus is historically accurate and heartbreakingly vivid as it traces the plight of Spiegelman’s parents during the Nazi era, as well as Art’s own struggles as the child of survivors, and his mother’s suicide years after they escaped and settled in New York City.
The first and only graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize, MAUS is a brutally moving work of art about a Holocaust survivor -- and the son who survives him
'The first masterpiece in comic book history' The New Yorker
Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Approaching the unspeakable through the diminutive (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), Vladek's harrowing story of survival is woven into the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father.
This slim book is a series of numbered sections, all contemplating the color blue. It’s full of interesting facts, some of them quite funny or surprising, as it looks into blue stones, blue movies, blue feelings (sadness), the blues (music), and much more, from self-help books to artists and philosophers. But part of what makes it moving is that it is also a love story of sorts as the speaker charts her struggle to come to terms with being left by her lover. There is another story embedded in the book as well—the story of her close friend who becomes paralyzed after a tragic accident. Lively and spare, it is intimate and beautifully written.
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color ...A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the…
Tiny Tales is a collection of 365 bite-sized stories and poems, written each day of 2023 to a one-word prompt created by one of the official #vss365 (very short story, 365 days a year) ambassadors on Twitter ("X").
Tweet-sized (280 characters or fewer) storytelling (aka "Twitterature") inspires experimentation and variety, and that is exactly what you'll find in this collection of compositions ranging from true stories to playful limericks, romantic fiction to war-inspired tales, wistful observations from a long-ago childhood to fantastical imaginings of a distant future.
Whether you want to read a story a day or use the prompts (included in their original order at the end of the book) as a springboard to jumpstart your own writing, Tiny Tales will keep you entertained and inspired throughout the year. It is a perfect gift to yourself or for any aspiring or avid writer in your life.
Tiny Tales is a collection of 365 bite-sized stories and poems, written each day of 2023 to a one-word prompt created by one of the official #vss365 (very short story, 365 days a year) ambassadors on Twitter ("X"). Tweet-sized (280 characters or fewer) storytelling (aka "Twitterature") inspires experimentation and variety, and that is exactly what you'll find in this collection of compositions ranging from true stories to playful limericks, romantic fiction to war-inspired tales, wistful observations from a long-ago childhood to fantastical imaginings of a distant future.
Whether you want to read a story a day or use the prompts…
