Cranston Public Library

A darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue from one of the leading writers of the twentieth century, the acclaimed author of Lolita.
"Half-poem, half-prose...a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth. One of the great works of art of this century." —Mary McCarthy, New York Times bestselling author of The Group
 
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"An old man is dying in a room. His bowl of soup comes, his pots are emptied. He waits to die. And while he waits, he constructs stories, mainly to pass the time. Saposcat, the Lambert family, Macmann and his nurse Moll. Other figures weave in and out of his vision and his imagination"--Publisher's web site

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide...

"A harrowing, perverse, laugh-aloud funny rocket ride of catastrophes...Gutsy, terse and cunning, Invisible Monsters may emerge as Palahniuk's strongest book." —Greg Berkman, Seattle Times

She's a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful center of attention to being

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"NAMED ONE OF THEBEST BOOKS OF THE SUMMER BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE, THE HUFFINGTON POST AND PUREWOW "Latin America's new literary star."--The New Yorker "Brilliant. Like a literary exercise for the mind, but strangely fun to decode."--Elle "The most talked-about writer to come out of Chile since Bolaño," (The New York Times Book Review), Alejandro Zambra is celebrated around the world for his strikingly original, slyly funny, daringly unconventional...

Rooted in the western United States in the decade post-9/11, theMystery.doc follows a young writer and his wife as he attempts to write his second book, a national epic he hopes will last forever, and as he searches for a form that will express the world as it has become, revealing the interconnectedness of all our lives. Pop-up ads, internet search results, spam, lines of code, frames of film and television mix with canonical works of literature,...

"The funniest book Pynchon has written." — Rolling Stone
"Entertainment of a high order." - Time
Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era.
In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre that is at once exciting and accessible, provides a classic illustration of the...

"The obsessive narrator, who opens the novel asking, "Where now? Who now? When now?" is a disembodied person, living in a large jar in a restaurant window in Paris. Essentially "unnameable," the narrator is referred to as Mahood, Worm, and Basil, in a series of tales. The final sentence in the novel is a long dramatic monologue. The narrator concludes with the desire to continue living despite an inescapable sense of anguish and entropy: "I can't...

An intimate, sensuous exploration of memory and desire, delving into loves and lusts past, by Oulipo member Anne Garreta.

One day while looking up a word in the New Oxford American Dictionary, Burrows was stopped in his tracks by an example sentence that seemed like a tiny piece of fiction which had wandered out of another book and settled down in the dictionary. Now he has created a collection of very short stories-- some barely one page long-- composed entirely of example sentences from various dictionaries. Genre-bending and wildly inventive, they create a giddy celebration...