Noelle Kocot

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Iowa

Noelle Kocot describes a break with reality in vivid, raw language, one word per line. The resulting slender columns are sharply focused and intense. There's a cult following for her unique imagination, self-professed in a poem as "filled with pulchritude and peopleness." The Singing Language Around The Life Noelle Kocotis the author of six collections of poetry. Her poems were included in theBest American Poetryanthologies for 2001, 2012, and 2013, as well as in theNorton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. She currently lives in New Jersey.

Phantom Pains of Madness

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Library stamp inside page - book has some wear from usage 

Texas

An Evaluation of Modern Evolutionary Thought from a Biblical Perspective 

The Case for Creation 

Kathryn Scanlan

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Illinois

A heartrending reassemblage of a life in its waning moments Fifteen years ago, Kathryn Scanlan found a stranger’s diary at an estate auction in a small town in Illinois. The owner of the diary was eighty-six years old when she began recording the details of her life in the small book, a gift from her daughter and son-in-law. The diary was falling apart—water-stained and illegible in places—but magnetic to Scanlan nonetheless. She became obsessed with the object. After reading and rereading the diary, studying and dissecting it, for the next fifteen years she played with the sentences that caught her attention, cutting, editing, arranging, and rearranging them into the composition that became Aug 9—Fog (she chose the title from a note that was tucked into the diary). “Sure grand out,” the diarist writes. “That puzzle a humdinger.” Followed by, “A letter from Lloyd saying John died the 16th.” A whole state of mourning reveals itself in “2 canned hams.” The result of Scanlan’s collaging is an utterly compelling, deeply moving meditation on life and death. In Aug 9—Fog, Scanlan’s spare, minimalist approach has a maximal emotional effect, haunting the reader long after the book ends. It is an unclassifiable work from a visionary young writer and artist—a singular portrait of a life that so easily could have been forgotten.

Aug 9 - Fog

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Miranda Popkey

🗨️ BOTM Hardcover January 2020 Edition (Sold Out)
🗨️ Debut
🗨️ Literary Fiction / Experimental
🗨️ 2000 - 2017, Italy; Michigan; California
🗨️ Psychological | Female Friendships | Cerebral | Salacious

Maryland

BOTM

For readers of Rachel Cusk, Lydia Davis, and Jenny Offill--a compact tour de force about sex, violence, and self-loathing from a ferociously talented new voice in fiction Miranda Popkey's first novel is about desire, disgust, motherhood, loneliness, art, pain, feminism, anger, envy, guilt--written in language that sizzles with intelligence and eroticism. The novel is composed almost exclusively of conversations between women--the stories they tell each other, and the stories they tell themselves, about shame and love, infidelity and self-sabotage--and careens through twenty years in the life of an unnamed narrator hungry for experience and bent on upending her life. Edgy, wry, shot through with rage and despair, Topics of Conversation introduces an audacious and immensely gifted new novelist.

Topics of Conversation

73b085ad-aa67-4b15-9c5d-758fef95e289-1

W. G. Sebald

page yellowing, otherwise clean copy, like new; this book is auf deutsch 

New York

Eine englische Wallfahrt

Die Ringe des Saturn

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page yellowing, but otherwise like new; we have an English translation of this novel available, too 

(Vertigo, English title); this book is auf deutsch

Schwindelartige Gefühle der Irritation - in den vier durch wiederkehrende Motive und literarische Anspielungen kunstvoll miteinander verwobenen, geheimnisvollen Geschichten überkommen sie den Erzähler immer dann, wenn sich zwischen Erinnerung und Wirklichkeit eine bedrohliche Kluft auftut. Neben dem französischen Romancier Henri Beyle alias Stendhal ist es vor allem Franz Kafka, dem sich der Autor über die literarische Bewunderung hinaus verbunden fühlt und dessen ruheloser, lebendigtoter Jäger Gracchus durch alle vier Geschichten geistert. Es ist die Melancholie, die Sebald an diesen beiden Autoren interessiert und seinen eigenen Erfahrungen gegenüberstellt, denn wie der Erzähler selbst wurden auch Stendhal und Kafka von Eingebungen getrieben, von Träumen, Ahnungen und -'Schwindelgefühlen' geplagt.

Schwindel. Gefühle. 

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Mickey Z.

Chuck Gregory

Riding Shotgun in the Land of Denial

No Innocent Bystanders is a manifesto in fractals. Transcending labels and political parties, it gets to the heart of our planet's rapid decline using a blend of facts, humor, vignettes, and relevant quotes and lists. On the liner notes for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album, it's stated that the song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" was written during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. "A desperate kind of song," Dylan called it. "Every line in it is actually the start of a whole song," he explained. "But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn't have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one." No Innocent Bystanders has been created in that spirit.

No Innocent Bystanders

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#paperback #anthology #avantpop #postmodern #experimental #markleyner #williamgibson #dondelillo #brucesterling #paulauster

The Avant-Pop Anthology

Some of the hottest writers of the 90's shared a subversive aesthetic sensibility, "avant-pop," that drew on the forms, images, slogans, characters, and narrative archetypes of our multidimensional, information-dense culture--cartoons, films, music videos, advertising, and rock music--to explore and critically examine that culture.
 
Each of these thirty-two works delves into the deeper metaphorical implications of this pop cultural imagery to convey a turn toward overstimulation and hyper-consumption in American life, and to explore issues of personality and identity. This provocative, stylistically experimental work is truly literature for the twenty-first century.

After Yesterday's Crash

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1st Edition, Book cover in fair condition, book in good condition. 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

California

Primer of Experimental Poetry: Volume I, 1870-1922

Kate Greenstreet

Always feel free to message me about bundling if you'd like a selection of books from my shop!

Nebraska

Poetry. Winner of the 2012 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. "This is a wizard's handiwork.... SONNETS TO THE HUMANS stands as one unstoppered bottle for a host of genii, lightning-Nimrods, angel-demons, AEnglisch as demotic, ash as egg. It's a brilliant, intimate, intricate, careening, calibrating, strangely moving collection of 49 poems--pieces introduced and linked by patches of the prose narration of 'a fictional poet who lived in the 21st century' and bore the name of Vishvamitra.... Thus we embark, in part, on an old story--but one re-generated here in ways unheralded, unheard-of. It becomes a futuristic lover's lyrical lament and a recapitulation (or enactment) of the Babel tale; (even thus largely to restrict its scope can only be reductive: it's a book with a very long half-life)."--Heather McHugh, judge of the 2012 Sawtooth Poetry Prize

Young Tambling

96402b67-278f-4a42-a136-996b40a518c2-0

Florida

Encyclopedia

Michael Hulse

We have a German copy of this novel available, too. See "Schwindel. Gefühle." 

A unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again the readers' guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid the restless literary ghosts of Kafka, Stendhal, and Casanova. Now in paperback, "Vertigo" is the marvelous first novel of W.G. Sebald, the acclaimed European writer.

Vertigo

Italo Calvino

Italy's most brilliant modern writer shows that the novel is capable of endless mutations If on a winter's night a traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another. They are the true heroes of the novel, for what would writing be without readers?

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

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3 lives

Lance Olsen

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Theories of Forgetting is concerned with how words matter, the materiality of the page, and how a literary work might react against mass reproduction and textual disembodiment in the digital age--right from its use of two back covers (one "upside down" and one "right-side up") that allow the reader to choose which of the novel's two narratives to privilege. Theories of Forgetting is a narrative in three parts. The first is the story of Alana, a filmmaker struggling to complete a short documentary about Robert Smithson’s famous earthwork, The Spiral Jetty, located where the Great Salt Lake meets the desert. Alana falls victim to a pandemic called The Frost, whose symptoms include an increasing sensation of coldness and growing amnesia. The second involves Alana’s husband, Hugh, owner of a rare-and-used bookstore in Salt Lake City, and his slow disappearance across Jordan while on a trip both to remember and to forget Alana’s death. The third involves marginalia added to Hugh’s section by his daughter, Aila, an art critic living in Berlin. Aila discovers a manuscript by her father after his disappearance and tries to make sense of it by means of a one-sided “dialogue” with her brother, Lance. Each page of the novel is divided in half. Alana’s narrative runs across the top of the page, from back to front, while Hugh’s and his daughter’s tale runs “upside down” across the bottom of the page, from front to back. How a reader initially happens to pick up Theories of Forgetting determines which narrative is read first, and thereby establishing the reader’s meaning-making of the novel.

Theories of Forgetting

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#paperback #absurd #mentalillness #suicide #literary #experimental #JoeMeno #PunkPlanet

In the twilight of a mysterious childhood full of wonder, Billy Argo, boy detective, is broken-hearted to find that his younger sister and crime-solving partner, Caroline, has committed suicide. Ten years later, Billy, age 30, returns from an extended stay at St Vitus' Hospital for the mentally ill to discover the world full of unimaginable strangeness. Billy finds the companionship of two lonely, extraordinary children and, with a nearly forgotten bravery, he falls in love and confronts the nearly impossible solution to the mystery of his sister's death.

The Boy Detective Fails

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Mickey Hess

Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory

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Virginia

J. A. Tyler

As they travel from cage to bars to glass, over all the fake landscapes of the zoo, Jonah wonders about his mom and dad, what they've done and haven't for him, and what he has and hasn't done in return. He realizes, as he goes, the complexities of growing up.

The Zoo, a Going

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Richard Flanagan

In the early nineteenth century, forger and thief William Buelow Gould lands in prison in Australia, where the prison doctor utilizes his painting talents to create an illustrated taxonomy of the country's exotic sea creatures.

Gould's Book of Fish

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Dick Teresi

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

The Omni Future Medical Almanac

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Alejandro Zambra

Megan McDowell

A "brilliant, innovative, beautiful" (The Guardian) book from the acclaimed author of Chilean Poet

"Dazzling . . . a work of parody, but also of poetry." --The New York Times Book Review

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR, THE GUARDIAN, AND THE IRISH TIMES

"Latin America's new literary star" (The New Yorker), Alejandro Zambra is celebrated around the world for his strikingly original, slyly funny, daringly unconventional fiction. Now, at the height of his powers, Zambra returns with his most audaciously brilliant book yet.

Written in the form of a standardized test, Multiple Choice invites the reader to respond to virtuoso language exercises and short narrative passages through multiple-choice questions that are thought-provoking, usually unanswerable, and often absurd. It offers a new kind of reading experience, one in which the reader participates directly in the creation of meaning, and the nature of storytelling itself is called into question. At once funny, poignant, and political, Multiple Choice is about love and family, authoritarianism and its legacies, and the conviction that, rather than learning to think for ourselves, we are trained to obey and repeat. Serious in its literary ambition and playful in its execution, it confirms Alejandro Zambra as one of the most important writers working in any language.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE MILLIONS, VOX, LIT HUB, THE BBC, THE GUARDIAN AND PUREWOW

Multiple Choice

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Noor Naga

Indiana

A Novel

Winner of the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, a lush experimental novel about love as a weapon of empire.

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a café in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic daughter of immigrants "returning" to a country she's never been to before, teaching English and living in a light-filled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love and he moves in. But soon their desire--for one another, for the selves they want to become through the other--takes a violent turn that neither of them expected.

A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating perspectives, Noor Naga's experimental debut examines the ethics of fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved . . . and vice versa. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, what are the new faces (and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to tell about it?

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Save this search

Noelle Kocot

Phantom Pains of Madness

Wayne Frair and P. William Davis

The Case for Creation

Kathryn Scanlan

Aug 9 - Fog

Miranda Popkey

Topics of Conversation

W. G. Sebald

Die Ringe des Saturn

W. G. Sebald

Schwindel. Gefühle.

Mickey Z.; Chuck Gregory

No Innocent Bystanders

Larry McCaffery (Editor)

After Yesterday's Crash

Edited by Edward Lucie-Smith

Primer of Experimental Poetry: Volume I, 1870-1922

Kate Greenstreet

Young Tambling

Richard Horn

Encyclopedia

W. G. Sebald; translated by Michael Hulse

Vertigo

Italo Calvino

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Gertrude Stein

3 lives

Lance Olsen

Theories of Forgetting

Joe Meno

The Boy Detective Fails

Mickey Hess

Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory

Kathryn Scanlan

Aug 9 - Fog

J. A. Tyler

The Zoo, a Going

Richard Flanagan

Gould's Book of Fish

Dick Teresi

The Omni Future Medical Almanac

Alejandro Zambra; Megan McDowell

Multiple Choice

Noor Naga

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

Italo Calvino

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler