Book Recommendations

[puppet nonsense]

It may have been mentioned before, but I just picked up and started reading a copy of "They Had Goat Heads" by D Harlan Wilson. I must say, I haven't been this excited to read an author's work since...well...Ligotti.



Every story ranges in length from less than a page, to perhaps ten pages, and are chocked full of absurd horrors, and what sometimes feels like a lunatic narrating a dream. Wonderful.

I've never known the exact thing I'm looking for in literature, but I get it from Ligotti, and I am getting it from "They Had Goat Heads". I would enthusiastically recommend this to anyone who enjoys reading Ligotti.

[MagnusTC]

I am reading Against Expressionism (ed. Craig Dworkin & Kenneth Goldsmith), published last year. Not exactly horror, but I think some of you might also find it interesting nevertheless. I do, so far. Here is the table of contents:

Kenneth Goldsmith, Why Conceptual Writing? Why Now?
Craig Dworkin, The Fate of Echo
Monica Aasprong, from Soldatmarkedet
Walter Abish, from Skin Deep
Vito Acconci, from Contacts/ Contexts (Frame of Reference): Ten Pages of Reading Roget’s Thesaurus & from Removal, Move (Line of Evidence): The Grid Locations of Streets, Alphabetized, Hagstrom’s Maps of the Five Boroughs: 3. Manhattan
Kathy Acker, from Great Expectations
Sally Alatalo, from Unforeseen Alliances
Paal Bjelke Andersen, from The Grefsen Address
Anonymous, Eroticism
David Antin, A List of the Delusions of the Insane: What They Are Afraid Of & from Novel Poem & from The Separation Meditations
Louis Aragon, Suicide
Nathan Austin, from Survey Says!
J. G. Ballard, Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty
Fiona Banner, from The Nam
Derek Beaulieu, from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Samuel Beckett, from Molloy & from Watt
Caroline Bergvall, Via (36 Dante Translations)
Charles Bernstein, from I and The & Untitled Poem
Ted Berrigan, An Interview with John Cage
Jen Bervin, from Nets
Gregory Betts, from If Language
Christian Bök, from Busted Sirens & from Eunoia
Marie Buck, from Whole Foods
William S. Burroughs, from Nova Express
David Buuck, Follow
John Cage, Writing + rough ! e Cantos
Blaise Cendrars, from Kodak
Tomas Claburn, from i feel better after i type to you
Elisabeth Clark, from Between Words
Claude Closky, + e First + ousand Numbers Classifi ed in Alphabetical Order & from Mon Catalogue
Clark Coolidge, from Cabinet Voltaire & from Bond Sonnets
Hart Crane, Emblems of Conduct
Brian Joseph Davis, from Voiceover
Katie Degentesh, The Only Miracles I Know of Are Simply Tricks That & People Play on One Another
Mónica de la Torre, from Doubles
Denis Diderot, from Jacques le fataliste et son maître
Marcel Duchamp, from notes
Craig Dworkin, from Legion & from Parse
Laura Elrick, from First Words
Dan Farrell, from Avail & from The Inkblot Record
Gerald Ferguson, from The Standard Corpus of Present Day English Language Usage Arranged by Word Length and Alphabetized Within Word Length
Robert Fitterman, Metropolis 16 & from The Sun Also Also Rises
Lawrence Giffin, Spinoza’s Ethics
Peter Gizzi, Ode: Salute to the New York School, 1950–1970, A Libretto
Judith Goldman, from dicktée & from from r’ture/ CENTaur
Kenneth Goldsmith, from Day & from No. 111 2.7.92-10.20.96 & from Soliloquy & from The Weather
Nada Gordon, Abnormal Discharge
Noah Eli Gordon, from Inbox
Michael Gottlieb, from The Dust
Dan Graham, Exclusion Principle & Poem-Schema
Michelle Grangaud, from Biographies/ Poetry
Brion Gysin, First Cut-Up
Michael Harvey, from White Papers
H. L Hix, Poem composed of statements made by George W. Bush in January 2003
Yunte Huang, from Cribs
Douglas Huebler, from Secrets: Variable Piece .4
Peter Jaeger, from Rapid Eye Movement
Emma Kay, from Worldview
Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler, from Apostrophe
Michael Klauke, from Ad Infinitum
Christopher Knowles, from Typings
Joseph Kosuth, from Purloined: A Novel
Leevi Lehto, from Päivä
Tan Lin, from BIB
Dana Teen Lomax, from Disclosure
Trisha Low, Confessions
Rory Macbeth, from The Bible (alphabetized)
Jackson Mac Low, from Words nd Ends from Ez
Stéphane Mallarmé, from La dernière mode & from Le livre
Donato Mancini, Ligature
Peter Manson, from Adjunct: An Undigest & from English in Mallarmé
Shigeru Matsui, Pure Poems
Bernadette Mayer, from Eruditio ex Memoria
Steve McCaffery, Fish Also Rise & The Kommunist Manifesto
Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter, from Issue 1
David Melnick, from Men in Aida, Book II
Richard Meltzer, Barbara Mauritz: Music Box
Denny Lile, Maple Leaf Cowpoop Round-Up
Christof Migone, from La première phrase et le dernier mot
Tomoko Minami, from 38: + e New Shakespeare
K. Silem Mohammad, Spooked and Considering How Spooky Deer Are & from Sonnagrams
Simon Morris, from Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head & from Re-writing Freud
Yedda Morrison, from Kyoto Protocol
Harryette Mullen, Bilingual Instructions & Elliptical & Mantra for a Classless Society or Mr. Roget’s Neighborhood
Alexandra Nemerov, First My Motorola
C. K. Ogden, Work in Progress by James Joyce
Tom Orange, I Saw You
Parasitic Ventures, from All the Names of In Search of Lost Time
George Perec, Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuff s Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four
M. NourbeSe Philip, from Zong!
Vanessa Place, from Statement of Fact
Bern Porter, Clothes
Raymond Queneau, from The Foundations of Literature
Claudia Rankine, from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
Ariana Reines, from The Cow
Charles Reznikoff, from Testimony, Volume II: + e United States (1885–1915): Recitative
Deborah Richards, from The Beauty Projection
Kim Rosenfield, The Other Me
Raymond Roussel, from How I Wrote Certain of My Books
Aram Saroyan, Untitled Poem
Ara Shirinyan, from Your Country Is Great
Ron Silliman, from Sunset Debris
Juliana Spahr, Thrashing Seems Crazy
Brian Kim Stefans, from The Vaneigem Series
Gary Sullivan, Conceptual Poem (WC + WCW) & To a Sought Caterpillar
Nick Thurston, He Might Find
Rodrigo Toscano, Welcome to Omnium Dignitatem
Tristan Tzara, from Dada Manifesto on Feeble and Bitter Love
Andy Warhol, from a: a novel
Darren Wershler, from The Tapeworm Foundry
Christine Wertheim, Finnegans Wanke/ Finnegans Wake (translation)
Wiener Gruppe, ideas for a «record album/ functional» acoustic cabaret & 11 abecedaries
William Butler Yeats, Mona Lisa
Steven Zultanski, My Death Drive
Vladimir Zykov, from I Was Told to Write Fifty Words

[Cyril Tourneur]

James Wood of The New Yorker wrote in 2011: "The Melancholy of Resistance is a comedy of apocalypse, a book about a God that not only failed but didn't even turn up for the exam. Less manic, less entrapped than War and War, it has elements of a traditional social novel." Wood continued: "The Melancholy of Resistance is a demanding book, and a pessimistic one, too, since it seems to take repeated ironic shots at the possibility of revolution. ... The pleasure of the book, and a kind of resistance, as well, flows from its extraordinary, stretched, self-recoiling sentences, which are marvels of a loosely punctuated stream of consciousness."

[Brendan Moody]

I come bearing a recommendation for a self-published book, one that's more polished, complex, and subtle than a lot of what gets traditional publication: William Rosencrans's The Epiphanist, an SF novel with a richly imagined and described milieu and some solid thematic underpinnings in question about religion, government, and the relationship between the two. I wrote a review of the book on my blog, and also posted an excerpt and conducted an interview with the author. Kindle owners might note that the Kindle edition of The Epiphanist costs a mere 99 cents.

[Cynothoglys]

I have just finished reading NVSQVAM (Nowhere) by Ann Sterzinger and I can wholeheartedly recommend it to those of you that enjoy books with antinatalist themes, dark humor, and copious pop-culture footnotes intended for readers in the distant future. If Jim Crawford, Celine, and Bill Hicks had collaborated on a novel, it might have been similar to this.

NVSQVAM (Nowhere): Ann Sterzinger: 9781616583460: Amazon.com: Books

NVSQVAM (Nowhere): Ann Sterzinger: 9781616583460: Amazon.com: Books

[Mr Loligo]

Just finished "The Ritual" by Adam Nevill which I would like to recommend. I was going to write more here, but I don't want to risk any spoilers. Here is the amazon link, but of course other book sellers are available...

The Ritual: Amazon.co.uk: Adam Nevill: Books

The Ritual: Amazon.co.uk: Adam Nevill: Books

[Brendan Moody]

I've recently read Jake Arnott's The House of Rumour, an atmospheric, inventive variation on the "secret history" genre. There's no overarching plot as such, just a lot of intricately-connected narrative strands that reflect on the motifs of secret knowledge, transformation, ecstasy, and despair. Each of the twenty-two self-contained chapters is titled after a tarot card from the Major Arcana. Intriguing historical links like Ian Fleming's work with Aleister Crowley and Crowley's ties to L. Ron Hubbard allow Arnott to reflect on the ways in which occultism and science fiction fulfill similar needs for human grandeur, while a fictional starlet's journey from repressed memories to a UFO cult to Jonestown looks at the darker side of esoteric belief. There are no explicit supernatural elements, but some characters believe there are, which makes for a couple especially eerie chapters. It's a hard book to describe, since I can only hint at all the clever echoes and parallels, but I think some people here will like it a lot. It's been out in the UK for a while; the US release date is next Tuesday. I've written an Amazon review that goes into slightly more detail.

[Siderealpress]

Dear all,

those who find the Arnott book of potential interest may be interested in the graphic work of artist Susan Treister

http://www.suzannetreister.net/

who also draws some very interesting links between fact/fiction/conspiracy/counterculture and government in her elegent drawings. The website lets you peer at them in (some) detail.

Here is her 'From Diogenes of Sinope to Anarcho-Primitivism and the Unabomber via Science-Fiction':

http://ensemble.va.com.au/Treister/H...s-Anarchy.html

Enjoy...

REGARDS!

J

[blackout]

i recently finished reading glory and splendour: tales of the weird by alex miles, and was very pleasantly surprised. i believe many here would greatly enjoy this book. for a first collection, well done:

Amazon.com: Glory and Splendour:: Tales of the Weird (9781470190859): Alex Miles: Books

Amazon.com: Glory and Splendour:: Tales of the Weird (9781470190859): Alex Miles: Books