Contemporary American fiction

A novel about poets and others who live by their words and wits.

Lenore Beadsman, a 24-year-old telephone switchboard operator who gets caught in the middle of a Cleveland-based character drama. In Wallace's typically offbeat style, Lenore navigates three separate crises: her great-grandmother's escape from a nursing home, a neurotic boyfriend, and a suddenly vocal pet cockatiel. The controlling idea surrounding all of these crises is the use of words and symbols to define a person.

A collection of stories includes such diverse themes as a death-defying stunt man, a retired primatologist troubled by the "civilized" world, 1960s survivors "stuck" in that decade, and a freshly-marketed Ayatollah.

In 1870 the Lone Eaters, a small band of Pikuni (or Blackfeet) Indians, are living in the Two Medicine Territory of Montana. The extinction of the Pikuni way of life is ominously in sight. Only the form of that end is in question.

Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling or hope. Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.

The trials and tribulations of a profesor of Hitler studies.

Marco Fogg, loner and dreamer, is forced from his Manhattan apartment and roams Central Park as a vagrant until he is rescued by gentle Kitty Wu. He ends up as the live-in helper to an invalid old man, the recording of whose life story becomes Marco's obsession.

Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues Paco almost two days later, he is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body. He winds up back in the US with his legs full of pins, daily rations of Librium and Valium, and no sense of what to do next. One evening, on the tail of a rainstorm, he limps off the bus and into the small town of Boone, determined to find a real job and a real bed--but no matter how hard he works, nothing muffles the anguish in his mind and body. Brilliantly and vividly written, Paco's Story--winner of a National Book Award--plunges you into the violence and casual cruelty of the Vietnam War, and the ghostly aftermath that often dealt the harshest blows.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Jessica Hagedorn has transformed her bestselling novel about the Philippines during the reign of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos into an equally powerful theatrical piece that is a multi-layered tour de force. As Harold Bloom writes, "Hagedorn expresses the conflicts experienced by Asian immigrants caught between cultures . . . she takes aim at racism in the U.S. and develops in her dramas the themes of displacement and the search for belonging."--From publisher's description.

"Martin, in the middle of a divorce, is seeking solace. Flying off to the neon-lit south Florida coastline, he settles in for some rest and rehabilitation with his soon-to-be ex-sister-in-law. Martin quickly settles into her bed too, creating a situation that is bound for trouble - especially when his ex-wife also appears on the scene. Cautiously, the threesome try to sort things out, engaging in varied rituals of mating, hating, forgetting, and forgiving. A funny and unforgettable novel about friends, family, and the kind of quirky, complicated relationships that will keep readers rapt through the final pages."--BOOK JACKET.

In the late 1870's, a small band -- including Cecil, who hopes to capture a grizzly bear cub and train it for the vaudeville circuit, Charley; a trapper in search of gold; Sutton; and two Indian women --make their way westward into the American wilderness.

Genre/Form: Fiction Additional Physical Format: Online version: Auster, Paul, 1947- Music of chance. New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Viking, 1990 (OCoLC)643909839 Material Type: Fiction Document Type: Book All Authors / Contributors: Paul Auster Find more information about: ISBN: 0670835358 9780670835355 OCLC Number: 21229180 Description: 217 p. ; 24 cm.

"McMurtry's description of the old North Fort worth cattle world, about the time of World War I, with the stockyards, the cowboy hotels, cattle trains pulling in every hour, the sound of streetcars, and bootheels on paving bricks, delivers an absolute sense of time and place. A complicated love story fills the last portion of the books, and brings the novel up to modern times." --A.C. Greene THE 50 BEST BOOKS ON TEXAS

Stand-up comic Dottie Engels and her two daughters each cope differently with Dottie's success.

Beautiful and charismatic, nineteen-year-old Checker Secretti is the most gifted and original drummer that the club-goers of Astoria, Queens, have ever heard. When he plays, conundrums seem to solve themselves, brilliant thoughts spring to mind, and couples fall in love. The members of his band, The Derailleurs, are passionately devoted to their guiding spirit, as are all who fall under Checker's spell. But when another drummer, Eaton Striker, hears the prodigy play, he is pulled inexorably into Checker's orbit by a powerful combination of envy and admiration. Soon The Derailleurs, too, are torn apart by latent jealousies that Eaton does his utmost to bring alive.

Jick, facing age and loss, his prized ranch beset by outside interests, is jumpstarted back into adventure by Mariah, a red-headed newspaper photographer.

"The time is the tenth century A.D. The newcomers are a proud and bloody-minded people whose kings once changed themselves into wolves. The Norse have advanced as implacably as a glacier from Iceland to the wastes of Greenland and from there to the place they call Vinland the Good. The natives are a bronze-skinned race who have not yet discovered iron and still see themselves as part of nature"--Publisher description.

Chuck Burgoyne appears to be the perfect houseguest, but the Graves family is soon threatened by their mysterious visitor, who discovers their darkest secrest and about whom no one knows anything.

A collection of ten stories which explore the joys and agonies of love and friendship. Each of the stories illuminates a dark corner of human existance. Some are amusing and some are tragic.

The courtship of Vincent Cardworthy and Misty Berkowitz and the marriage of Holly Stergis and Guido Morris are marked by practical concerns, romance, surprises, luck, and no upper hands.

First Sentence: “And it’s a story that might bore you, but you don’t have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, and Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin’s room, because she was a Freshman and had a roommate and Lorna was, she remembers, a Senior or a Junior and usually sometimes at her boyfriend’s place off-campus, to who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N.Y.U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed To Get Screwed party, or a townie.” This is the second novel from Ellis, of American Psycho fame. It doesn’t depart much from the style (run-on sentences, sex, drugs, 80’s MTV music videos, more drugs, more sex, some violence thrown in there) of his other works, except that here it works throughout the whole book. Here he gives us a little more to work with, like allusions (Howard Roark!), different narrators, a setting that’s not L.A, and a semi-coherent plot. His talent is endless and the sentences run on seamlessly until you’re almost disappointed when a sentence actually ends. Nobody in the world can write like Ellis, though many have tried, and failed miserably. Yes, Ellis is a deranged person (has to be), but he’s also a prolific, talented writer whose put his time in. And here he shines. It’s about sex and drugs and horrible, self-absorbed, incomplete people, trying to get laid and quit smoking in a fictional University in New England. The things they do are despicable and immoral. There’s nothing redeeming about any of the characters in the entire book, no hope, and yet this book stings because nobody could write this well about people like this if they did not, in fact, exist in real life. When’s the last time you went to college? What do you think happens in Universities around America? What do you think most people are really like? This is a documentary of lost, attractive young people falling into the void. And nobody cares and nobody cares and nobody cares.

E.T.H.S. graduate (class of 1967), James Atlas describes, in thinly veiled fiction, growing up in Evanston and attending ETHS in the 1960's. Although he later attends Harvard and wins a fellowship to Oxford, his roots remain on the North Shore.