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Products - - Items tagged as "Surreal"

  • A Door Behind a Door QUICK VIEW A Door Behind a Door a novel by
    Yelena Moskovich

    DW Reviews "Pick of the Month"

    "Moskovich mystifies with this vivid story of a pair of estranged siblings who immigrated to Milwaukee from the Soviet Union as children in 1991... The dynamic style and psychological depth make this an engaging mind bender.” —Publishers Weekly

    From visionary author, Yelena Moskovich, A Door Behind A Door follows Olga as she puzzles her way in search of her missing brother, tangling with an underground Midwestern Russian mafia in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings.

    A Door Behind a Door

    a novel by
    Yelena Moskovich


    $ 8.99 $ 9.99
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    "A hint of Lynch, a touch of Ferrante, the cruel absurdity of Antonin Artaud, the fierce candour of Anaïs Nin, the stylish languor of a Lana del Rey song."
    The Guardian on Virtuoso

    In Yelena Moskovich's spellbinding new novel, A Door Behind A Door, we meet Olga, who immigrates as part of the Soviet diaspora of ’91 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled into Olga’s past as she puzzles her way through an underground Midwestern Russian mafia, in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings.

  • At the Edge of the Woods QUICK VIEW At the Edge of the Woods a novel by
    Kathryn Bromwich

    A Best Book of 2023

    "An accomplished, unsettling debut... of what it means to inhabit a female body but to reject femininity, and to feel a connection with the natural world that embodies both awe and terror. In this, its themes could not be more timely."
    —Stephanie Merritt,
    The Guardian


    With assurance and remarkable dexterity, Kathryn Bromwich’s masterful debut novel is a rich, gorgeously descriptive account of a woman hiding from old ghosts and new in the Italian Alps, while rekindling her own sense of self through nature.

    At the Edge of the Woods

    a novel by
    Kathryn Bromwich


    $ 9.99 $ 10.99
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    "Bromwich infects the senses with dread and wicked insight from the first page to the last—this is a stunning experience not to be missed."
    —Maryse Meijer, author of The Seventh Mansion

    With assurance and remarkable dexterity, Kathryn Bromwich’s masterful debut novel is a rich, gorgeously descriptive account of a woman hiding from old ghosts and new in the Italian Alps, while rekindling her own sense of self through nature.

  • Baby Geisha QUICK VIEW Baby Geisha a collection of stories by
    Trinie Dalton

    Los Angeles Magazine Critic's Pick
    "Half ingenious, and half-wily, winningly hard to pin down."
    Bookforum


    Eye-popping stories that showcase an assured and stylish talent.

    Baby Geisha

    a collection of stories by
    Trinie Dalton


    $ 8.99 $ 9.99
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  • Backlist Bangers QUICK VIEW Backlist Bangers

    Choose 12 select backlist titles for $100!


    For many backlist titles, after the initial enthusiasm and support, we're left with copies. Rather than sitting in boxes, we want the books out in the world, being discovered, shared, and enjoyed by readers! Rather than sitting in boxes in storage, we want the books out there in the world, being discovered, shared, and enjoyed by readers!

    Backlist Bangers


    $ 100.00 $ 192.00
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  • Binary Star QUICK VIEW Binary Star a novel by
    Sarah Gerard

    L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist
    A Best Book of 2015
    "Rhythmic, hallucinatory, yet vivid as crystal."
    —NPR

    An intense, elegiac portrait of young lovers as they battle personal afflictions.

    Binary Star

    a novel by
    Sarah Gerard


    $ 8.99 $ 9.99
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    *Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist.
    *Best Books of 2015
    —NPR,Vanity Fair
    *Best Fiction of 2015
    —BuzzFeed
    *Best Independent Press Books 2015
    —Flavorwire
    *Favorite Novels 2015
    —Largehearted Boy

    The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn't replenished; she is held together by her own gravity.
    With luminous, lyrical prose, Binary Star is an impassioned account of a young woman struggling with anorexia and her long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend. On a road-trip circumnavigating the United States, they stumble into a book on veganarchism, and believe they've found a direction.
    Binary Star is an intense, fast-moving saga of two young lovers and the culture that keeps them sick (or at least inundated with quick-fix solutions); a society that sells diet pills, sleeping pills, magazines that profile celebrities who lose weight or too much weight or put on weight, and books that pimp diet secrets or recipes for success.

  • Flats / Quake QUICK VIEW Flats / Quake a novel (2 in 1!) by
    Rudolph Wurlitzer

    "A post-cataclysmic landscape in which heroic storytelling
    has been blown to bits."
    Los Angeles Times

    Two classic novels in one "69ed" edition.

    Flats / Quake

    a novel (2 in 1!) by
    Rudolph Wurlitzer


    $ 12.75 $ 17.00

    Sorry! This is being reordered and will be back in stock soon.

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  • Found Audio QUICK VIEW Found Audio a novel by
    N.J. Campbell

    A Best Book of 2017
    "Amid the static of contemporary literature can be heard blips of fiction-future in N.J. Campbell’s defiantly bold Found Audio."
    —Steve Erickson

    For the first time ever, Found Audio presents a complete transcription of the unsettling audio recordings of a mysterious unnamed adventure journalist and his decades-long pursuit of the Borgesian "City of Dreams," alongside analysis from audio expert, Amrapali Anna Singh.

    Found Audio

    a novel by
    N.J. Campbell


    $ 8.99 $ 9.99
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    * A Best Book of 2017 —Writer's Bone

    "[A] mysterious work of metafiction... dizzying, arresting and defiantly bold."
    Chicago Tribune

    Amrapali Anna Singh is an historian and analyst capable of discerning the most cryptic and trivial details from audio recordings. One day, a mysterious man appears at her office in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, having traveled a great distance to bring her three Type IV audio cassettes that bear the stamp of a library in Buenos Aires that may or may not exist.

    On the cassettes is the deposition of an adventure journalist and his obsessive pursuit of an amorphous, legendary, and puzzling "City of Dreams." Spanning decades, his quest leads him from a snake-hunter in the Louisiana bayou to the walled city of Kowloon on the eve of its destruction, from the Singing Dunes of Mongolia to a chess tournament in Istanbul. The deposition also begs the question: Who is making the recording, and why?

    Despite being explicitly instructed not to, curiosity gets the better of Singh and she mails a transcription of the cassettes with her analysis to an acquaintance before vanishing. The man who bore the cassettes, too, has disappeared. The journalist was unnamed.

    Here—for the first time—is the complete archival manuscript of the mysterious recordings accompanied by Singh's analysis.

  • I'm Trying to Reach You QUICK VIEW I'm Trying to Reach You a novel by
    Barbara Browning

    A Best Book of 2012
    The Believer Book Award Finalist.

    First Michael Jackson, then Pina Bausch. Is someone killing famous dancers? A witty and seductive mystery.

    I'm Trying to Reach You

    a novel by
    Barbara Browning


    $ 8.99 $ 9.99
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    *The Believer Book Award Finalist
    * Winner of the 2013 IPPY Award for GAY/LESBIAN/BI/TRANS FICTION

    “I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died. When I heard the news, the first thing I thought was, That’s it. That’s the first line of my novel. ‘I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died.’” 

    First Michael Jackson, then Pina Bausch. Next is Merce Cunningham. 

    Gray Adams, a former dancer with the Royal Swiss Ballet at work on his dissertation at NYU, has a theory spurred by countless hours of YouTube-based procrastination: Someone is killing these famous dancers! (And he may bear an uncanny resemblance to Jimmy Stewart, circa Vertigo.) 

    I’m Trying to Reach You is a moving and candid contemporary look at how we process grief, as well as how we love and communicate with one another.

  • Landscapes QUICK VIEW Landscapes a novel by
    Christine Lai

    A Best Book of 2023

    "A rich meditation on the burden of remembrance, the ruins of the past, and the ruins that climate crisis will soon bring us, Landscapes is a tightly woven debut that travels easily between epistles, point of view shifts, and art criticism... As much as Landscapes is about destruction and decay, it is equally about picking up the ruins and rebuilding."
    —Christina Wood, Full Stop


    Recalling the works of Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro, Landscapes is an evocative reinvention of the pastoral and the country house novel for our age of catastrophe, and announces the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new writer.

    Landscapes

    a novel by
    Christine Lai


    $ 9.99 $ 10.99
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    An entrancing and prismatic debut novel by Christine Lai, set in a near future fraught with ecological collapse, Landscapes brilliantly explores memory, empathy, preservation, and art as an instrument for recollection and renewal.

    Recalling the works of Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro, Landscapes is an evocative reinvention of the pastoral and the country house novel for our age of catastrophe, and announces the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new writer.

  • Mira Corpora QUICK VIEW Mira Corpora a novel by
    Jeff Jackson

    A Best Book of 2013
    L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist

    "A piercing howl of a book."
    Slate

    A story of redemption in the face of nightmarish odds.

    Mira Corpora

    a novel by
    Jeff Jackson


    $ 8.99 $ 9.99
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  • My Volcano QUICK VIEW My Volcano a novel by
    John Elizabeth Stintzi

    Winner: Sator New Works Award

    "Climate change, time travel, startup culture, and volcanic eruptions intertwine in this sui generis outing from [Stintzi]...
    It’s a brilliant achievement."
    Publishers Weekly, starred review


    With its riveting and audacious vision, My Volcano is a tapestry on fire, a distorted and cinematic new work from the fiercely talented John Elizabeth Stintzi.

    My Volcano

    a novel by
    John Elizabeth Stintzi


    $ 9.99 $ 10.99
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    "Climate change, time travel, startup culture, and volcanic eruptions intertwine in this sui generis outing from [Stintzi]... Told in a series of buzzing numbered fragments, the narrative whirls around a volcano rising in Central Park that looks like Mount Fuji. As the volcano grows, Stintzi builds out the wide-ranging narrative with jump cuts... That Stintzi keeps all these plates spinning is a wonder; that they transform the chaotic present into a fiery, transcendent vision of the future is even more impressive. It’s a brilliant achievement."
    Publishers Weekly, starred review

    On June 2, 2016, a protrusion of rock growing from the Central Park Reservoir is spotted by a jogger. Three weeks later, when it finally stops growing, it’s nearly two-and-a-half miles tall, and has been determined to be an active volcano.

    As the volcano grows and then looms over New York, an eight-year-old boy in Mexico City finds himself transported 500 years into the past, where he witnesses the fall of the Aztec Empire; a Nigerian scholar in Tokyo studies a folktale about a woman of fire who descends a mountain and destroys an entire village; a white trans writer in Jersey City struggles to write a sci-fi novel about a thriving civilization on an impossible planet; a nurse tends to Syrian refugees in Greece while grappling with the trauma of living through the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan; a nomadic farmer in Mongolia is stung by a bee, magically transforming him into a green, thorned, flowering creature that aspires to connect every living thing into its consciousness.

    With its riveting and audacious vision, My Volcano is a tapestry on fire, a distorted and cinematic new work from the fiercely talented John Elizabeth Stintzi.

  • Nog QUICK VIEW Nog a novel by
    Rudolph Wurlitzer

    "The Novel of Bullshit is Dead."
    —Thomas Pynchon

    A man adrift in the American West, armed with nothing more than his own three pencil-thin memories and an octopus in a bathysphere.

    Nog

    a novel by
    Rudolph Wurlitzer


    $ 15.50

    Sorry! This is being reordered and will be back in stock soon.

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  • Pages of Mourning QUICK VIEW Pages of Mourning a novel by
    Diego Gerard Morrison

    May 2024!

    "Very funny and very sad and very, very smart. Unafraid to make his fiction work on and around questions of unambiguous gravity, Morrison never forgets the importance, indeed the power, in the endeavor of play."
    —Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie


    Pages of Mourning is a stunning achievement, a pioneering and inventive novel that confronts family history, creativity, Magical Realism, and the impact of violence from Mexico’s drug war, by a magnificent new talent in Diego Gerard Morrison.

    Pages of Mourning

    a novel by
    Diego Gerard Morrison


    $ 9.99 $ 10.99
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    A daring, captivating, darkly funny novel that grapples with uncertainty and loss in a land of violence and superstition, while questioning whether Magical Realism as a genre is capable of confronting the brutal dissonance of a country that awaits the return of the missing while not wholly acknowledging their death.

    Pages of Mourning is a stunning achievement, a pioneering and inventive novel that confronts family history, creativity, Magical Realism, and the impact of violence from Mexico’s drug war, by a magnificent new talent in Diego Gerard Morrison.

  • Palaces QUICK VIEW Palaces a novel by
    Simon Jacobs

    Starred reviews: Publishers Weekly, Foreword Reviews
    "Palaces is robust, both current and clairvoyant, and answers the question of what happens when our deepest fantasies become reality.—Foreword Reviews, starred review

    While exercising precision and a cool detachment, Simon Jacobs has crafted a surreal and spellbinding first novel of horror and intrigue.

    Palaces

    a novel by
    Simon Jacobs


    $ 8.99 $ 9.99
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    John and Joey are a young couple immersed in their local midwestern punk scene, who after graduating college sever all ties and move to a perverse and nameless northeastern coastal city. They drift in and out of art museums, basement shows, and derelict squats seemingly unfazed as the city slowly slides into chaos around them.

    Late one night, forced out of their living space, John and Joey are driven to take shelter in a chain pharmacy before emerging to a city in full-scale riot. They find themselves the only passengers on a commuter train headed north, and exit at the final stop to discover the area entirely devoid of people. As John and Joey negotiate their future through bizarre, troubling manifestations of the landscape and a succession of abandoned mansions housing only scant clues to their owners' strange and sudden disappearance, they're also forced to confront the resurgent violence and buried memories of their shared past.

    With incisive precision and a cool detachment, Simon Jacobs has crafted a surreal and spellbinding first novel of horror and intrigue.