Set against the backdrop of an Arizona influenced by the Mexican Revolution and the westward expansion of the United States, Christ versus Arizona is a bravura performace by the 1989 Nobel Prize-winn
Where the Air Is Clear, Carlos Fuentes's first novel, is an unsparing portrayal of Mexico City's upper class. Departing from a traditional linear narrative, Fuentes overlays Mexican myths onto contemp
When a process-server arrives at a housing project on the edge of Paris to draw up a routine inventory of goods in view of seizure, the reception he receives from distrainees Rose Melie and her teena
An eminently poetic book, Langrishe, Go Down (Higgins's first novel) traces the fall of the Langrishes--a once wealthy, highly respected Irish family--through the lives of their four daughters, especi
Through a series of improbable coincidences, in the early 1970s Harry Mathews, then living in France, was commonly reputed to be a CIA agent. Even his closest friends had their suspicions, which were
In his own words,the novel is "a kind of encyclopedia made into farce . . . A book inwhich I shall spit out my bile." At the center of this book are Bouvardand PAccuchet, two retired clerks who set o
The Review's aesthetic focus has been called many things-postmodern, experimental, avant-garde, metafictional, subversive-but in bringing this aesthetic to a wider audience it also seeks to expose th
Part novel, part autobiography, The Great Fire of London is one of the great literary undertakings of our time. Both exasperating and moving, cherished by its readers, it has its origins in the autho
A madman recalls his first erotic encounter, a priest loses sleep over a heretic, a scholar searches for the anomaly that inspired the Hindu divinities, a spinster hallucinates her own seductions, a p
So begins the imaginary interview that comprises this novel. Professor Y, the interviewing academic, asks questions that allow C?line, a character in his own book, the chance to rail against conventi
Arrested and imprisoned in a small Swiss town, a prisoner begins this book with an exclamation: "I'm not Stiller!" He claims that his name is Jim White, that he has been jailed under false charges and
A scathing, razor-sharp satire set on a New Orleans-bound riverboat, The Confidence-Man exposes the fraudulent optimism of so many American idols and idealists -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thor
When an unknown black poodle inexplicably explodes in philosophy professor Timothy Chesterton-Brown's back yard -- paralyzing the professor and killing his guest -- the "mystery of the sardine" begins
In Don't Ever Get Famous, a range of writers and scholars examine the cultural, sociological, and historical contexts of this wildly diverse group of writers. These poets, many of whom are still writ
Winner of the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, A Temple of Texts is the latest critical collection from one of America’s greatest essayists and novelists. Here, William H. Gass pays ho
The Review of Contemporary Fiction is a tri-quarterly journal that features critical essays on fiction writers whose work resists convention and easy categorization.
With a delightful combination of the ridiculous and the sublime, Jonkeexplores surreal dimensions of space and sound, always anchoring hisflights of fancy in accessible imagery. More than any other a
From the award-winning author of The Tunnel and A Temple of Texts, come four interrelated novellas that explore good and evil, action and thought, redemption and possession. The reader will encounter
By no means does French fiction have to rest on its laurels. New authors with new ideas abound, and many reflect a France that is culturally diverse and intellectually vigorous. Motte (no affiliation
In addition to "The Glass Slipper," this collection contains nine other stories held together by a common thread of self-perception: Yasuoka writes from the belief that the self has such depths that
