Mind Blowing Literature
Discover mind-blowing literature with our curated list of the most thought-provoking and transformative books. Expand your mind and explore groundbreaking reads today!
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Dark Reflections
by Samuel R. Delany
The story Arnold Hawley, a gay African-American poet living in New York City's East Village, beginning in his disillusioned elder years and ending with his ambitious youth.
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ID: 0819562718
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Aye, and Gomorrah
by Samuel R. Delany
A father must come to terms with his son's death in the war. In Venice an architecture student commits a crime of passion. A white southern airport loader tries to do a favor for a black northern child. The ordinary stuff of ordinary fiction--but with a difference! These tales take place twenty-five, fifty, a hundred-fifty years from now, when men and women have been given gills to labor under the sea. Huge repair stations patrol the cables carrying power to the ends of the earth. Telepathic and precocious children so passionately yearn to visit distant galaxies that they'll kill to go. Brilliantly crafted, beautifully written, these are Samuel Delany's award-winning stories, like no others before or since.
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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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Tree of Smoke
by Denis Johnson
Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That’s me. This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature. Tree of Smoke is Denis Johnson’s first full-length novel in nine years, and his most gripping, beautiful, and powerful work to date. Tree of Smoke is the 2007 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.
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ID: 1595821406
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ID: 0954563735
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Herman Melville: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick (LOA #9)
by Herman Melville
Well over a century after its publication, Moby-Dick still stands as an indisputable literary classic. It is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, Moby-Dick is a haunting, mesmerizing, and important social commentary populated with several of the most unforgettable and enduring characters in literature. Written with wonderfully redemptive humor, Moby-Dick is a profound and timeless inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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God Laughs When You Die
by Michael Boatman
A host of drug dealers meets a foe they cannot kill. The president accidentally invites demons into the country and watches the pope turn into a sabertooth tiger. A man, dead since 1920, lives again in present day Los Angeles to satiate a malevolent goddess. These tales by Michael Boatman will disturb, terrify and traumatize you. Boatman grabs you by throat and drags you kicking and screaming through his prose. With a dash of Lansdale and a smattering of Martina's Wild Cards, the tales within inhabit the dark and nasty side of our souls, and throughout Boatman infuses it all with a keen wit and an eye for detail. And when he lets you up to breathe, like God, you might just find yourself laughing. This is the sort of stuff I like to read as the bells sound midnight. Paul Haines award-winning author of Doorways for the Dispossessed Boatman's debut collection will knock you down and kick you in the teeth. Alternatingly hysterical, grotesque, bizarre, and fantastic, Boatman's collection is a must-read for anyone itching to get their hands on fresh new fiction that pulls no punches. Ronald Damien Malfi, author of The Nature of Monsters and The Fall of Never Michael Boatman writes like a visitor from hell. Someone out on short term leave for bad behavior. I love this stuff. He's one of the new, and more than promising, writers making his mark, and a dark and wonderful mark it is. Joe R. Lansdale
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ID: 0862322952
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ID: 0226380076
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ID: 0330335928
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Et Tu, Babe
by Mark Leyner
In this fiendishly original new novel, Mark Leyner is a leather-blazer-wearing, Piranha 793-driving, narcotic-guzzling monster who has potential rivals eliminated by his bionically enhanced bodyguards, has his internal organs tattooed, and eavesdrops on the erotic fantasies of Victoria's Secret models -- which naturally revolve around him. Leyner's jet-propelled roller derby through the cultures of celebrity, cyberpunk, and rabid egotism is exhilaratingly bizarre, exhaustingly funny -- and you'd better hope it's just fiction.
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ID: 0312426291
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Leviathan
by Paul Auster
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “compelling” (Los Angeles Times) novel of friendship, betrayal, estrangement, and the unpredictable intrusions of violence in the everyday—from “a literary original who is perfecting a genre of his own” (The Wall Street Journal) “Rich and complex . . . with fully fleshed characters, a fast-paced plot, thematic sophistication, and narrative cunning.”—The Boston Globe “Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin.” So begins Peter Aaron’s story about his best friend, Benjamin Sachs. Sachs had a marriage Aaron envied, an intelligence he admired, a world he shared. And then suddenly, after a near-fatal fall that might or might not have been intentional, Sachs disappeared. Now Aaron must piece together the life that led to Sach’s death. His sole aim is to tell the truth and preserve it—before those who are investigating the case invent an account of their own. Leviathan is a daring and immensely moving story by an author whom The Times Literary Supplement has called “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.”
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ID: 0908564112
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Altered Carbon
by Richard K. Morgan
In the 25th century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself - a person's consciousness can be easily downloaded into a new body, making death nearly obsolete. Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly brutal. Resleeved into a new body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco), Kovacs is thrown into a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that buys and sells human existence. As a warrior-for-hire, he is called to help a far-flung planet's government put down a bloody revolution. But when a rogue pilot and a sleazy corporate fat cat offer him a lucrative role in a treacherous treasure hunt, he's only too happy to go AWOL with a band of resurrected soldiers of fortune. All that stands between them and the ancient alien spacecraft they mean to salvage are a massacred city bathed in deadly radiation, unleashed nanotechnology with a million ways to kill, and whatever surprises the highly advanced Martian race may have in store.
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ID: 0976706016
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Burning Chrome
by William Gibson
Best-known for his seminal sf novel Neuromancer, William Gibson is actually best when writing short fiction. Tautly-written and suspenseful, Burning Chrome collects 10 of his best short stories with a preface from Bruce Sterling, now available for the first time in trade paperback. These brilliant, high-resolution stories show Gibson's characters and intensely-realized worlds at his absolute best, from the chip-enhanced couriers of "Johnny Mnemonic" to the street-tech melancholy of "Burning Chrome."
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ID: 1852425474
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ID: 0313296464
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ID: 0812218043
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ID: 1888451963
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Jack of Kinrowan
by Charles de Lint
Jacky Rowan is hurtled into the land of Faerie and is hailed as a trickster hero destined to save the Elven Courts.
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ID: 0425213900
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ID: 0743260937
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Breakfast in the Ruins
by Barry N. Malzberg
Barry N. Malzberg reflects back over four decades of writing science fiction, giving an insiderAs view of the field during that time which few can match, both for its authority and for the sharp and witty way he describes the highs and lows of one science fiction writerAs career. He also writes vivid profiles of writers and editors, ranging from the titans who transformed the field, such as John W. Campbell, to once popular writers who are now all but forgotten, such as Hugo Award-winner Mark Clifton. AIf there is any particular cachet to my perspective, A he writes, Ait comes because my career is, perhaps more than some, metaphoric.A The original, shorter version of the book was widely praised, as by the San Francisco Chronicle: AContains literary criticism ranging over the whole history of the field. . . . this is a mordant, brilliant book, A and by The Washington Post Book World: AMalzberg makes persuasively clear that the best of science fiction should be valued as literature and nothing else.A Breakfast in the Ruins is an indispensable book for every science fiction reader.
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On a Planet Alien
by Barry N. Malzberg
SCOPis the tale of a time traveller trying to stop some of history's worst moments before they happen. He has witnessed the last minutes of Jack Kennedy, King, Malcolm, Robert Kennedy. But Scop, in trying to alter, has merely reinforced the future. In the ENCLOSURE is the story of Quir, an alien forced to endure endless interrogations following the first meeting of creatures from space with the people of Earth. An alien whose only thoughts are of escape. For those arriving ON A PLANET ALIEN, the mission was to educate the native inhabitants of Folsom's planet and bring them withing the Federation. But something had happened on the voyage there. Could it be start some unknown force was controlling the crew's minds, a force that could bring disaster to the mission?
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ID: 1885941897
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Airships
by Barry Hannah
Now considered a contemporary classic, Airships was honored by Esquire magazine with the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award. The twenty stories in this collection are a fresh, exuberant celebration of the new American South -- a land of high school band contests, where good old boys from Vicksurg are reunited in Vietnam and petty nostalgia and the constant pain of disappointed love prevail. Airships is a striking demonstration of Barry Hannah's mature and original talent.
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Bats Out of Hell
by Barry Hannah
Three works from one of the most original and universally praised American writers of this century. Love and torment, lunacy and desire, tenderness and war--these stories provide a brilliant, dazzling odyssey into American life. No one but Barry Hannah could create these vivid worlds with such poetic detail.
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ID: 0671709909
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ID: 1599869764
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ID: 0521802369
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