Fiction that Screams off the page
Discover gripping fiction that screams off the page! Explore our curated list of intense, page-turning books that will keep you hooked from start to finish.
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Dancing After Hours
by Andre Dubus
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year From a genuine hero of the American short story comes a luminous collection that reveals the seams of hurt, courage, and tenderness that run through the bedrock of contemporary American life. In these fourteen stories, Dubus depicts ordinary men and women confronting injury and loneliness, the lack of love and the terror of actually having it. Out of his characters' struggles and small failures--and their unexpected moments of redemption--Dubus creates fiction that bears comparison to the short story's greatest creators--Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor. "A master of the short story...It's good to have Andre Dubus back. More than ever, he is an object of hope."--Philadelphia Inquirer "Dubus's detailed creation of three-dimensional characters is propelled by his ability to turn a quiet but perfect phrase...[This] kind of writing raises gooseflesh of admiration."--San Francisco Chronicle
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Finding a Girl in America
by Andre Dubus
Set in Dubus's largely coastal New England world, these short works focus on the residual anguish and momentary elation of deep emotional attachments--between lovers, between parent and child, and between estranged spouses.
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Ask the Dust
by John Fante
Ask the Dust is a virtuoso performance by an influential master of the twentieth-century American novel. It is the story of Arturo Bandini, a young writer in 1930s Los Angeles who falls hard for the elusive, mocking, unstable Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress. Struggling to survive, he perseveres until, at last, his first novel is published. But the bright light of success is extinguished when Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears . . . and Bandini forever rejects the writer's life he fought so hard to attain.
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Kafka Was the Rage
by Anatole Broyard
What Hemingway's A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s, this charming yet undeceivable memoir does for Greenwich Village in the late 1940s. In 1946, Anatole Broyard was a dapper, earnest, fledgling avant-gardist, intoxicated by books, sex, and the neighborhood that offered both in such abundance. Stylish written, mercurially witty, imbued with insights that are both affectionate and astringent, this memoir offers an indelible portrait of a lost bohemia. We see Broyard setting up his used bookstore on Cornelia Street—indulging in a dream that was for him as romantic as “living off the land or sailing around the world” while exercizing his libido with a protegee of Anais Nin and taking courses at the New School, where he deliberates on “the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis.” Along the way he encounters Delmore Schwartz, Caitlin and Dylan Thomas, William Gaddis, and other writers at the start of their careers. Written with insight and mercurial wit, Kafka Was the Rage elegantly captures a moment and place and pays homage to a lost bohemia as it was experienced by a young writer eager to find not only his voice but also his place in a very special part of the world.
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Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
by David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. The series of stories from which this exuberantly acclaimed book takes its title is a sequence of imagined interviews with men on the subject of their relations with women. These portraits of men at their most self-justifying, loquacious, and benighted explore poignantly and hilariously the agonies of sexual connections.
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Stripper Lessons
by John O'Brien
The protagonist is a lonely, middle-aged law clerk whose only joy is a striptease joint where a dollar or two will win him affection. One day he crosses the line, falling in love, and the result is big trouble. The tale of a man's search to belong. By the author of Leaving Las Vegas.
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The Comfort of Strangers
by Ian McEwan
A vacationing English couple find more than they bargained for, in this inventive and unsettling novel from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement. Visiting an unnamed city, Mary and Colin attract the interest of Robert, a charismatic older man with a story to tell. But the more they get to know Robert—and his disabled wife, Caroline—the more apparent it becomes that there’s something not quite right about their new friends. A shocking work of violence and obsession, The Comfort of Strangers is Ian McEwan at his very best. Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons.
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Peter Camenzind
by Hermann Hesse
After a young writer leaves his Swiss mountain village to experience the world, his illusions are crushed by the suffering he witnesses, until a friendship with an invalid restores his hope.
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Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
by Gilbert Sorrentino
Gilbert Sorrentino's third novel is about the New York artistic and literary world of the 1950s and '60s, specifically the artists, writers, hangers-on, and the phonies who populated that world. In a prose that is ruthless as well as possessed of an enormous comic verve, the dedicated, the stupid, the rapacious, and the foolish are dissected. Eight major characters, many of whom reappear in Sorrentino's later novels, are employed to allow the reader a variety of views of the same world. Told in the weary voice of a cynical and sardonic narrator, the novel is crammed with fantastic characters, incidents, and episodes, and moves from wit and satire through elegiac brooding, to bitter invective. It is a superb re-creation of a real time and place.
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In the Cut
by Susanna Moore
An attractive, sexually violent woman from New York begins a harrowing journey when she encounters a handsome man having sex in the basement of a bar.
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Lithium for Medea
by Kate Braverman
Lithium for Medea is as much a tale of addiction—to sex, drugs, and dysfunctional family chains—as it is one of mothers and daughters, their mutual rebellion and unconscious mimicry. Here is the story according to Rose—the daughter of a narcissistic, emotionally crippled mother and a father who shadowboxes with death in hospital corridors—as she slips deeply and dangerously into the lair of a cocaine-fed artist in the bohemian squalor of Venice. Lithium for Medea sears us with Rose’s breathless, fierce, visceral flight—like a drug that leaves one’s perceptions forever altered.
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Women
by Charles Bukowski
Previously published: [Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press], 1978.
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Disgrace
by J. M. Coetzee
The provocative Booker Prize winning novel from Nobel laureate, J.M. Coetzee "Compulsively readable... A novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it aside once we've finished reading it." —The New Yorker At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. When an affair with a student leaves him jobless, shunned by friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife, he retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding. David's visit becomes an extended stay as he attempts to find meaning in his one remaining relationship. Instead, an incident of unimaginable terror and violence forces father and daughter to confront their strained relationship and the equallity complicated racial complexities of the new South Africa. 2024 marks the 25th Anniversary of the publication of Disgrace
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Jesus' Son
by Denis Johnson
Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiraling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The raw beauty and careening energy of Denis Johnson's prose has earned this book a place among the classics of twentieth-century American literature.
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Never Come Morning
by Nelson Algren
Never Come Morning is unique among the novels of Algren. The author's only romance, the novel concerns Bruno Bicek, a would-be boxer from Chicago's Northwest side, and Steffi, the woman who shares his dream while living his nightmare. "It is an unusual and brilliant book," said The New York Times. "A bold scribbling upon the wall for comfortable Americans to ponder and digest." This new edition features an introduction by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and an interview with Nelson Algren by H.E.F. Donohue.
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The End Of Alice
by A.M. Homes
From the 2013 Orange Prize–winning author of May We Be Forgiven. Only a work of such searing, meticulously controlled brilliance could provoke such a wide range of visceral responses. Here is the incredible story of an imprisoned pedophile who is drawn into an erotically charged correspondence with a nineteen-year-old suburban coed. As the two reveal—and revel in—their obsessive desires, Homes creates in The End of Alice a novel that is part romance, part horror story, at once unnerving and seductive.
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Safety of Objects
by A. M. Homes
Published to overwhelming critical acclaim, this extraordinary collection of short stories established A. M. Homes as one of the most provocative and daring writers of her generation. Here you'll find the cult classic A Real Doll, the tale of a teenage boy's erotic obsession with his sister's favorite doll; Adults Alone, which first introduced Paul and Elaine, the crack-smoking yuppie couple whose marriage careens out of control in Homes's novel Music for Torching; and Looking for Johnny, in which a kidnapped boy, having failed his abductor's expectations, is returned home. Brilliantly conceived, sharply etched, and exceptionally satisfying, these stories explore the American dream in ways you're not likely soon to forget. Working in Kodacolor hues, Homes offers an uncanny picture of a surreal suburbia-outrageous and utterly believable.
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Her
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"A surreal semi-autobiographical blackbook record of a semi-mad period of my life, in that mindless, timeless state most romantics pass through, confusing flesh madonnas with spiritual ones." This is how the author describes this extraordinary expatriate novel.
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The Dancer Upstairs
by Nicholas Shakespeare
The Peruvian guerilla leader Ezequiel is responsible for tens of thousands of fiendishly cruel murders, yet he consistently eludes capture. But in Agustn Rejas he has an indefatigable pursuer. From secluded city streets to the paths of a mountain village the policeman persists, tracking and anticipating Ezequiel's every move. Rejas' only reprieve is his love for his daughter's beautiful dance teacher--until he begins to pick up unmistakable signals that her circles--and Ezequiel's--intersect. Based on the extraordinary manhunt for the leader of Peru's notorious guerilla organization, The Shining Path, The Dancer Upstairs is a story reminiscent of Graham Greene and John LeCarr--tense, intricate, and heartbreaking.
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Piano Stories
by Felisberto Hernández
Inhabited by rich, eccentric characters and full of strange and surprising landscapes, this collection of short stories deeply influenced a generation of magical realists.If I hadn't read the stories of Felisberto Hernandez in 1950, I would not be the writer I am today. Because he taught me that the most haunting mysteries are those of everyday life. -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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The Night In Question
by Tobias Wolff
One of the sinuous and subtly crafted stories in Tobias Wolff's new collection--his first in eleven years--begins with a man biting a dog. The fact that Wolff is reversing familiar expectations is only half the point. The other half is that Wolff makes the reversal seem inevitable: the dog has attacked his protagonist's young daughter. And everywhere in The Night in Question, we are reminded that truth is deceptive, volatile, and often the last thing we want to know. A young reporter writes an obituary only to be fired when its subject walks into his office, very much alive. A soldier in Vietnam goads his lieutenant into sending him on increasingly dangerous missions. An impecunious mother and son go window-shopping for a domesticity that is forever beyond their grasp. Seamless, ironic, dizzying in their emotional aptness, these fifteen stories deliver small, exquisite shocks that leave us feeling invigorated and intensely alive.
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Atchley
by David Green
An author (named Atchley) has achieved critical acclaim by coupling an imagistically opulent narrative with a theoretical treatise on his own work. Now Atchley (this book) offers just such a narrative as well as a seemingly straightforward "deconstruction" of it. Does the book "actually" present Atchley's own auto-commentary? Is David Green Atchley?
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Interpreter of Maladies
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and a baffling new world, the characters in Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations.