I’ve always been an outsider and empathized with people on the fringe. Being a first-generation-born Chicano gave me a different experience of growing up in the US that permanently shifted my perspective. I felt most comfortable around other creatives and intellectuals whose views were subversive. So, naturally, I began focusing on characters at the bottom of the social ladder. My writing style, “Gutter Surrealism,” combines elements of hard street culture with the supernatural to portray a viewpoint most readers have never considered.
This was the first book for me that framed violent street culture inside a dystopian context. Burgess broke the rules. An intelligent writer didn’t have to be some egghead nerd. This was enlightening for me, because throughout my life I’ve had experiences with people who were gang-affiliated. Burgess inspired me to embrace violence and antisocial elements in my storytelling.
In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends' intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess's introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."
I was in a bookstore while visiting Tokyo and knew I had to buy a book by one of their guys. Always judge a book by its cover, especially the title. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was my introduction to Japanese literature. It blew my mind. Haruki combined elements of noir, cyberpunk, and surrealism. The book was so cool. I wanted to write something like him.
A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami's international following.
Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy.
After I published Blubber Island, I received messages from readers telling me BI was one of the best Splatterpunk books they’ve read. The funny part was I had no idea the genre existed. In order to sample a range, I ordered Sammon’s anthology. These guys were hardcore! They are what makes slasher movies awesome and hilarious. No apologies, no prisoners taken. With pornographic levels of hyper-violence, SP’s collects writers who found the edge and flew over it on dirt bikes.
This book is ultra-fast-paced. Reading it is like taking a hit of crystal meth then watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Die Hard, and the History Channel at the same time on fast forward. This book is 100% politically incorrect. It guts every culture for a comic book effect. In Stephenson's future, we exist as extreme stereotypes for survival the same way prison gangs separate races.
A liberal dose of head slicing, rocket launching, machine gun blasting, and getaway action has your brain stomping for the breaks. This is pure cyberpunk.
The “brilliantly realized” (The New York Times Book Review) breakthrough novel from visionary author Neal Stephenson, a modern classic that predicted the metaverse and inspired generations of Silicon Valley innovators
Hiro lives in a Los Angeles where franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the autonomous city-states, where law-abiding citizens don’t dare leave their mansions.
Hiro delivers pizza to the mansions for a living, defending his pies from marauders when necessary with a matched set of samurai swords. His home is a shared 20 X 30…
An ex-nuclear researcher takes his mentally handicapped son out of school because he fails to convince the teachers and parents that the children should be trained in combat for when society inevitably decides to kill all handicapped children in Japan. So, naturally, they set off on a divine mission concerning warring student political factions, an atomic bomb, terrorism, and a shadowy mastermind named Big Shot. Their adventure is absolutely absurd, a demented dark comedy. Yet Ōe uses his profound ability to write with dire seriousness, which results in a mind-bending story.
When neuroscientist Elis Davidson removed a dream from his mind and captured it inside a receptacle, an inter-dimensional tear opened to cosmic annihilation. A cast of metaphysical entities and urban misfits struggle for control over the amputated dream as reality disintegrates.
Blubber Island is a psychedelic adventure into Gutter Surrealism, a dark comedy with philosophical depth and a Splatterpunk attitude. Guillermo Galvan is a controversial Chicano writer who is busy reloading.
I always want to be where I am not. This was why I read sci-fi and fantasy as a child. This was why I left the country of my birth and became a professional nomad. This is why I am spellbound by mountains I will never climb and oceans I will never dive into. Imagination can take you everywhere. It took me to the academy, where speculative literature became my scholarly field, and to the publishing world, where I am now getting ready for the launch of my eighth novel. When you are at home nowhere, you are at home everywhere–including on the summits of impossible mountains.
In Svetlana's country, it’s a felony to break a mirror. Mirrors are conduits of the Voice, the deity worshiped by all who follow Light. The Voice protects humans of MotherLand from the dangers that beset them on all sides: an invading army of wolf-headed men on their borders and the infectious, ever-evolving, zombie-like Enemy that plagues them at home. When Svetlana meets Andrei, a traumatized and amnesiac soldier from another war, she embarks on a harrowing journey of adventure and self-discovery that leads her to question everything she was taught to…
A voice through Svetlana's mirror guides her beloved MotherLand from behind its' electric tower. The war with Wulfstan is not going as well as Sveta and her parents hope, but Sveta trusts the Voice. When her best friend Tattie goes missing, and Sveta saves Andrei, a soldier in summer uniform in the dead of winter, it takes Sveta through a crucible of Light, doubt, and back to the altar of true belief. Girl of Light unravels Sveta's beloved MotherLand in a war-torn adventure through monsters, missing eyes and broken mirrors.
