You know that poem that instructs us to "see a world in a grain of sand?" I've done that, friend. It turns out that the world you see in a closely-examined grain of sand is largely covered with sand, each grain of which contains another world. For reasons that I can't explain (well, the Autism Spectrum Disorder might have something to do with it), I'm compelled to write novels that explore and exploit, obliquely or otherwise, the sub-worlds lurking within the grains of sand that are scattered across the American High Plains.
This book is brilliant. I have never finished reading it. Not because I disliked it, but because, by the time I'd reached the halfway mark, I'd fallen so in love with Sterne's plotless, digressive discourse that I had to quit reading and immediately begin writing Zebra Skin Shirt, a novel whose meandering nature owes a great debt to Sterne's 18th-century yarn. What's so special about Shandy? Here's a clue: it's so caught up in its own sub-sub-sub plots that our hero--the awkwardly-named Tristram Shandy--does not exit his mother's birth canal until the third volume.
Endlessly digressive, boundlessly imaginative and unmatched in its absurd and timeless wit, Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is edited with an introduction by Melvin New and Joan New, and includes a critical essay by Christopher Ricks in Penguin Classics.
Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it, with a rich metafictional narrative that might classify it as the first 'postmodern' novel. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter,…
In the books-that-take-half-a-year-to-read category, I had to choose between this and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. While Gravity's Rainbow gets docked a point because its plot is marginally more coherent than that of Infinite Jest--by the time I finished GR, I actually had a vague idea of what had happened--it ultimately wins out because it contains:
A) A multi-page, lovingly-described journey of a solitary man's journey down a toilet drain.
B) A multi-page, lovingly-described history of an immortal light bulb.
Hailed by many as the major experimental nov el of the post-war period, Gravity''s Rainbow is a bizarre co mic masterpiece in which linguistic virtuosity creates a who le other world. '
As a young doctor, Carl Holman has experienced the horrors of World War I and the death of his lover, a fellow officer. Back home after the War, he befriends a young jazz musician who he hopes will become a companion he can share his life with. But this is…
Another book that takes forever to read, and another book that I haven't yet finished. Why this particular edition? Because, in addition to the fragmentation that is inherent to all versions of The Bible, the NOABWA has footnotes. Enough footnotes to make the previously-mentioned Infinite Jest look like a half-assed high school research paper. Those footnotes ensure that, even when a plot threatens to show itself, the reader will be immediately distracted by a reminder that nobody actually knows how long a cubit is. If a book that hasn't even defined the value of its base units can become a bestseller, then, by gum, I can write a novel in which the concept of time is stretched and folded like the crust of a croissant. And so can you!
For over 50 years students, professors, clergy, and general readers have relied on The New Oxford Annotated Bible as an unparalleled authority in Study Bibles. This fifth edition of the Annotated remains the best way to study and understand the Bible at home or in the classroom. This thoroughly revised and substantially updated edition contains the best scholarship informed by recent discoveries and anchored in the solid Study Bible tradition.
* Introductions and extensive annotations for each book by acknowledged experts in the field provide context and guidance. * Introductory essays on major groups of biblical writings - Pentateuch, Prophets,…
Remember how disappointed you were when you first tried to read Tolkien's The Silmarillion? You'd just devoured The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and you needed more Middle Earth, and you asked for The Silmarillian for your birthday and you received it! And it was just a bunch of half-baked fleshless ideas! Well, there's nothing half-baked about Masters of Atlantis! Masters of Atlantis is my least favorite book by my most favorite author! Why did I choose it for this list over Portis's other four novels? Because, for the vast majority of its 300-plus pages, it reads like a hurried summary of a tangled web of bizarro characters negotiating an interwoven freak-o-system of conspiratorial cults!
Lamar Jimmersan, an American doughboy in 1917 France, learns that his life's purpose is to administer the brotherhood of the Gnomons, preservers of the wisdom of the lost city of Atlantis, and Gnomonism risesand eventually fades awayin America. Reprint.
Me and The Times offers a fresh perspective on those pre-internet days when the Sunday sections of The New York Times shaped the country’s political and cultural conversation. Starting in 1967, Robert Stock edited seven of those sections over 30 years, innovating and troublemaking all the way.
Cormac McCarthy is pretty good at describing decay. One could argue that he's just a touch too good. After reading three of his novels, I'd had my fill of fetid ponds, gangrenous characters, and all other manners of entropy-in-natural-as-metaphor-for-human-fecundity. But then someone gave me The Road. I finished it in one sitting. Don't get me wrong, the book has its share of rot and evil--there's a cannibalistic barbeque scene!--but what it doesn't have is a plot. Well, there is a plot: a man and a boy walk from point A to point B, and then the man dies. Thereby did The Road inspire my first novel, East of Denver, wherein a man and a boy walk around in circles, and then the man flies.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle).
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if…
From Colorado Book Award-winning author Gregory Hill comes Zebra Skin Shirt, a delightfully mad novel in which Narwhal Slotterfield, a corrupt, faux-intellectual basketball referee, becomes time-stuck on the unlikely landscape of the Colorado High Plains. With the clocks permanently stopped, and trapped in an immobile universe, Narwhal has the miraculous choice to either focus myopically on himself or, as an unlikely superhero referee, to right the wrongs of the world. He manages to do both.
Bold, funny, and shockingly honest, Ambidextrous is like no other memoir of 1950s urban childhood.
Picano appears to his parents and siblings to be a happy, cheerful eleven-year-old possessed of the remarkable talent of being able to draw beautifully and write fluently with either hand. But then he runs into…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
