As a former librarian I have long been fascinated with Borges’s view of books: their metaphysical shape and their tendency to open into the uncanny and the infinite. Illness early in life drove me to books, to their particular isolation. Since then, I’ve found that worlds can open almost anywhere in literature by way of a mood, a patina of language, a vision, a set of images completely beyond the control of the writer. Now, I read these books to remind me of what fiction can do, the places it can go, the worlds it will open.
In a city far in the future, retired lecturer Wiggins moves from window to window in a museum, intricately describing each scene. Whales gliding above a shipwreck and a lost cup and saucer. An animatronic forest twenty stories tall. A line of mosquitoes in uniforms and regalia, honored as heroes of the last great war. Bit by bit, Wiggins unspools the secrets of his world—the conflict that brought it to the brink, and the great thinker, Michaux, who led the diorama revolution, himself now preserved under glass.
In this hybrid novel—part essay, part prose poem, part travel narrative—Blair Austin brings us nose to the glass with our own vanishing world, what we preserve, and at what cost.
I can’t name what so destroyed me about this book; it speaks to a level of pain for which there’s no language.
I believe a book’s hidden subject will chase a writer down: a fear, a state of mind. Barnes had to write it in order to survive her experience.
A loose group of outcasts appears in Nightwood: a gay doctor, logorrheic, poetic, desperate, witty, alone. A woman obsessed with another woman whom has left her and whom she’ll never reach, never understand.
Dancers and circus performers all in the baroque shimmer of a prose so fascinating it becomes clear almost by virtue of its density. What comes through is the tragedy of what it is to be alive.
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (Times Literary Supplement). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna-a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.
The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction-there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the…
Samuel R. Delaney’s masterpiece, Dhalgren, is set in a city in the Midwest that has been emptied by an unnamed catastrophe.
A sense of freedom, violence and disaster hang everywhere as the hero – Kidd, Kid, or the kid, a man with no memory and of ambiguous race (he remembers his mother was Native American) – gains entry into the subcultures that remain behind: parties, high-rise poetry readings with older white people, gun fights, gangs, graphic sex.
Time and perspective seem fluxive, inconstant, and looping.
This is beautiful, destabilized world building. Dhalgrenanswers no questions yet evokes a time, place, and milieu that shifts as you read.
I first found it when I was working as a librarian in a prison out on the plains. I didn’t last in prison.
Nebula Award Finalist: Reality unravels in a Midwestern town in this sci-fi epic by the acclaimed author of Babel-17. Includes a foreword by William Gibson.
A young half–Native American known as the Kid has hitchhiked from Mexico to the midwestern city Bellona—only something is wrong there . . . In Bellona, the shattered city, a nameless cataclysm has left reality unhinged. Into this desperate metropolis steps the Kid, his fist wrapped in razor-sharp knives, to write, to love, to wound.
So begins Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany’s masterwork, which in 1975 opened a new door for what science fiction could mean.…
I stumbled on this book in a free box outside a bookstore when I was a teenager and the family I had moved across the country to be with had collapsed.
My sisters and stepmother moved out of state, my brother moved to California, and my dad, after borrowing my student loan money for truck driving school, went over the road.
Bloodsport was rain-rippled—with a gigantic, dried fly smashed flat in the middle, sliding like a secret toy over the page.
An entire world opened up. I felt no less alone, but the experience changed my understanding of realism, the mythic, and the surreal: a book of immense oddness about a father and son journey up an apocalyptic river, toward Ratnose, the leader of a motorcycle gang.
Welcome to the wilderness of masculinity, where anything goes-where women throw themselves unreservedly at men and games are played to the death. This is the outdoor paradise of the Hassayampa, a legendary river whose bank is overrun with prehistoric and mystical creatures prime for hunting and whose water is said to turn honest men into liars. Here a father takes his prepubescent son on an unforgettable adventure, a rite-of-passage quest that starts as an innocent fishing trip and soon turns into a bizarre Homeric journey. In turn comic and brutal, Blood Sport is more than just the ultimate cult outdoor…
A good friend of mine with whom I’ve lost contact recommended this book.
The narrator is on a quest to find his palm-wine tapster who is dead in Deads' Town so that the tapster can return and keep tapping the trees that produce palm-wine (a sap that ferments to 4 percent alcohol in two hours).
There are endless quests within quests, rich and mysterious, in landscapes half dream, half real; they stay in the mind: an utterly unique vision, the sound of one voice creating a hybrid world.
I don’t know if I’ll ever find my friend and regain contact, but I will always think of him when I read this book. Sometimes, books are not enough.
This classic novel tells the phantasmagorical story of an alcoholic man and his search for his dead palm-wine tapster. As he travels through the land of the dead, he encounters a host of supernatural and often terrifying beings - among them the complete gentleman who returns his body parts to their owners and the insatiable hungry-creature. Mixing Yoruba folktales with what T. S. Eliot described as a 'creepy crawly imagination', The Palm-Wine Drinkard is regarded as the seminal work of African literature.
'Brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching.' Dylan Thomas, Observer
'Tutuola's art conceals - or rather clothes - his purpose,…
Borges loved this 29-volume “book” and consulted it with near religious fascination.
Through all the volumes flows the colonial mind of the British Empire. Its desire to gather “all knowledge” and present it with an index.
What comes forth now are the fascinating, individual voices of the writers (whose work has been used to build Wikipedia) sounding out of the void.
The thing is, they’re all different. Some are clear and calm, some youthful and manic, others stodgy, snobbish. Maps of the States in 1906 have almost no highways, only topography.
A full-page plate, under “Cats,” where no cats appear, only their skins, showing the different patterns of their stripes.
This is a work of world-building, a terraforming “real” fiction. Repulsive, time-folding, fascinating.
When Miranda’s fiancé, Russ, is being vetted for his dream job in the U.S. attorney’s office, the couple joke that Miranda’s parents’ history as antiwar activists in the Sixties might jeopardize Russ’s security clearance. In fact, the real threat emerges when Russ’s future employer discovers that Miranda was arrested for felony kidnapping seven years earlier—an arrest she’d never bothered to tell Russ about.
Miranda tries to explain that she was only helping her best friend, in the midst of a nasty custody battle, take her daughter to visit her parents in Israel. As Miranda struggles to prove that she’s not a criminal, she stumbles into other secrets that will challenge what she thought she knew about her own family, her friend, Russ—and herself.
When Miranda’s fiancé, Russ, is being vetted for his dream job in the U.S. attorney’s office, the couple joke that Miranda’s parents’ history as antiwar activists in the Sixties might jeopardize Russ’s security clearance. In fact, the real threat emerges when Russ’s future employer discovers that Miranda was arrested for felony kidnapping seven years earlier—an arrest she’d never bothered to tell Russ about.
Miranda tries to explain that she was only helping her best friend, in the midst of a nasty custody battle, take her daughter to visit her parents in Israel. As Miranda struggles to prove that she’s not…
