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A seeing-eye dog leads a blind man into a frozen river, a southern Baptist loses his memory and finds true love in Bel Air, an obese dot.com executive has "anorgasmic" latex sex with her CEO, and a homeless man in New York creates an intellectual universe based on Post-it notes stuck to the inside of his cardboard box shelter--Douglas Glover's stories are wildly inventive, deadpan comedies of our universal human catastrophe. They are sly, demanding and wise--stories about language, desire and love (in a very dark place). The humor veers from the wry and sardonic to the salacious, mordant and playful. And always there are moments of such stark emotional intimacy that the reader slides, almost without noticing, from laughter to lament.

Together these two novels comprise the most fascinating, obsessive, and erotic works of contemporary Frech fiction. Like the works of Georges Bataille, and those of the Marquis de Sade before him, Klossowski's fiction explores the connections between the mind and the body through a lens of sexuality. Both of these novels feature Octave, an elderly cleric; his striking young wife Roberte; and their nephew, Antoine in a series of sexual situations. But Klossowski's books are about theology as well, and this merging of the sexual with the religious makes this book one of the most painstakingly baroque and intellectual novels of our time.

Fire the Bastards! is a scorching attack on the book-review media using the critical reception of William Gaddis's 1955 novel The Recognitions as a case study. Although this monumental novel is now generally regarded as one of the few indisputable milestones of contemporary American fiction, its original reviews were overwhelmingly negative. Combining meticulous research with savage indignation, Green exposes the inaccuracies, prejudices, and outright incompetence of Gaddis's reviewers to argue that the review media is ill-equipped to deal with masterpieces of innovative fiction, much preferring safe, predictable books that reassure (rather than question) conventional literary expectations. Despite his careful scholarship, Green is not a dispassionate commentator but an impassioned satirist, working in a rogue tradition that looks back to Swift's ferocious pamphlets. Originally published as a three-part series in his own magazine called newspaper - which Gilbert Sorrentino has described as "one of the authentic minor splendors of New York literary life in the late fifties and early sixties" - this is the first time Fire the Bastards! has appeared in book form. Gaddis scholar Steven Moore has written an introduction filling in the background to this unique work and comparing the book-reviewing media of today with that of the fifties.

The concluding installment of translator Woods's stupendous four-volume edition of "the German Joyce's" Collected Early Fiction, 1949-1964. Schmidt (1914-79) was a modernist master whose deeply unconventional fiction employs distorted grammar, punctuation, and typography in an all-out effort to render as accurately as possible, and in unedited and uncensored form, the fragmented nature of consciousness. Thus, The Stony Heart(1954) wittily conflates the adventures of historical researcher Walter Eggers as he pursues his scholarly quarry in a rural setting where he makes amazing discoveries about the local landscape ("Drunkards exist among sheep. . .") and short work of his hostess's wavering fidelity to her philandering husband. This novel's intermittent paeans to German literary culture and rude burlesques of Nazism are given more complex, if less immediately engaging form, in (the ingeniously retitled) B/Moondocks (1960), whose narrator Karl Richter's amatory pursuit of his troubled mistress stimulates him to invent a picaresque tale of the colonization of the moon. Both Richter's manipulation of his helpless Hertha and the aggressive sexuality of his mysterious "Auntee Hecta" subtly suggest the lurking presences of domination and sadism in what seems a tamed and reformed culture. Runaway puns and abstruse literary references further ruffle and complicate the surface of a fascinating work whose meanings are well worth digging for. And here's hoping translator Woods is at work on the rest of Schmidt's demanding rewarding oeuvre. (Kirkus Reviews)

"No other study of the American novel has such fascinating and on the whole right things to say."--Washington Post

Dalkey Archive Press first introduced readers to this "best-kept secret" of British literature with the hardback Collected Writings of Olive Moore in 1992. Spleen, the best of the author's three novels, tells the disturbing story of a woman who goes into self-imposed exile to an island off the coast of Italy after giving birth to a deformed child. Filled with self-reproach and guilt about her son and her life (having yearned to give birth to something "new and rare", she blames herself for her son's deformity), Ruth broods on what it means to be a woman ("nature's oven for nature's bun") and the inequalities between the sexes. Filled with the colors and beauty of the Italian countryside and in a style similar to Virginia Woolf's, Spleen challenges the assumption that women can't help but be tender and maternal, that their heads are only "ever-enlarging hearts".

In The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, Michael Stephens presents the most devastating vision of the Irish-American family since the nightmarish portrayals of Eugene O'Neill and James T. Farrell. Returning to their Brooklyn neighborhood for the wake and funeral of their father (Customs Inspector Leland Coole, aka Jackie Ducks, Little Lee, Crazy Jack, but remembered by his children as the "old bastard"), the sixteen Coole children talk and reminisce about their father and family; all adults now, their lives have been painful failures involving drugs, alcoholism, violence, petty crime, incest, and despair. Like any truly emotionally crippled children of a dysfunctional family, the Cooles rant with bitterness about their pasts but likewise romanticize their family, coupling an ability to analyze their plight with an utter inability to do anything about it. The novel is also the story of the decline of urban America and the story of third-generation immigrants who are both cut off from their roots and yet unassimilated into the illusory American melting pot. Stephens writes of all this with a passion and love of his materials. And he writes bravely because this is a book that will be attacked by those who believe in the mythical American family invoked by "family-values" politicians and wealthy evangelists. If Stephens has a message at all, it is that families are diseases made fatal by a cynical American society.

Like Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, Annihilation is about a day in the life of a town - in this case, a Polish-Jewish town shortly before World War II. The reader participates in the life of the town instant by instant - from the moment when the local courtesan pours the contents of her chamber pot out her open window up to the moment when the city policemen return to night duty. For the narrator, every object, every person and event belongs to the world he strives to save from impending annihilation: the landscape of beer drops left on a counter, the dance of the Hasidim before the Town Hall, the taste of mint drops in an attorney's mouth. As the minutes on the Town Hall's clock measure the day's passing, and as this day's passing brings the town one day closer to its historical annihilation, a Book of the Day writes itself, preserving the town in memory against the ravages of time and history. Already a success in Poland and in translation in France, Germany, and Italy, Piotr Szewc's novel has been compared to the novels of Proust and to the paintings of Chagall.