Barnes's affectionate lampoon of the expatriate lesbian community in Paris was privately printed in 1928. Arranged by month, it records the life and loves of Dame Evangeline Musset (modeled after sal
Fire the Bastards! is a scorching attack on the book-review media using the critical reception of William Gaddis's 1955 novel The Recognitions as a case study. Although this monumental novel is now g
A postmodern fairy tale might best describe Jacques Roubaud's delightful book The Princess Hoppy, or The Tale of Labrador. How else to describe a novel that reads like an Arthurian romance as rewritt
History and literature seem to be losing ground to the brave new world of electronic media and technology, and battle lines are being drawn between the humanities and technology, the first world and
Written for general readers rather than scholars and first published in 1938, The March of Literature is a working novelist's view of what is valuable in literature, and why. Convinced that scholars
Subtitled "a romance," Sabbatical is the story of Susan Rachel Allan Seckler, a sharp young associate professor of early American literature - part Jewish, part Gypsy, and possibly descended from Edg
In this spellbinding, utterly unconventional fiction, an aging author who is identified only as Reader contemplates the writing of a novel. As he does, other matters insistently crowd his mind - lite
The Last Days is Raymond Queneau's autobiographical novel of Parisian student life in the 1920s: Vincent Tuquedenne tries to reconcile his love for reading with the sterility of studying as he hopes t
London life just after World War I, devoid of values and moving headlong into chaos at breakneck speed - Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay, like Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, portrays a world of lost souls
Gilbert Sorrentino is one of the most accomplished innovators in twentieth-century fiction, a position that is everywhere confirmed in this trilogy of novels, Odd Number, Rose Theatre, and Misterioso
An anthology of writing by members of the group known as Oulipo, among them Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews, Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, and Raymond Queneau. They reject inspiration, experience, self
From her hospital bed on this, her last day on earth, she makes one final ecstatic voyage. People, places, offhand memories, and imaginary things drift in and out of Ava's consciousness and weave the
The late Severo Sarduy was one of the most outrageous and baroque of the Latin American Boom writers of the sixties and seventies, and here bound back to back are his two finest creations. Cobra (197
Joy Stone, a 27-year-old drama teacher, has come undone. Suffering from a deep depression, the problems of everyday living accumulate and begin to torture her, and she attributes her difficulties not
Wildly comic, erotic, and perverse, Rikki Ducornet's dazzling novel, Phosphor in Dreamland, explores the relationship between power and madness, nature and its exploitation, pornography and art, inno
The Poor Mouth relates the story of one Bonaparte O'Coonassa, born in a cabin in a fictitious village called Corkadoragha in western Ireland equally renowned for its beauty and the abject poverty of
The Red Shoes consists of tatters of a half-dozen tales (The Glass Shoe, The Gingerbread Variations, The Little Match Girl, Don Juan Is a Woman, and the title story, among others), sewn together into
Aldous Huxley spares no one in his ironic, piercing portrayal of a group gathered in an Italian palace by the socially ambitious and self-professed lover of art, Mrs. Aldwinkle. Here, Mrs. Aldwinkle
