Recommendations based on "Fridays at Enrico's"

'Vonnegut looked the world straight in the eye and never flinched' J. G. BallardThis bitterly funny Cold War satire on the end of the world expresses our deepest fears of Armageddon, and has become a counter-culture classic.'A satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopee cushion' Jay McInerney'The closest thing we had to a Voltaire' Tom Wolfe'The time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. He is not only entertaining, he is electrocuting' The New York Times

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in CriticismThe first comprehensive selection in any language of the non-fiction--much of it appearing here in English for the first time--of “one of literature’s most fertile and original minds” (San Francisco Chronicle)A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paperIt will come as a surprise to many readers that the greater part of Jorge Luis Borges’s extraordinary writing was not in the genres of fiction or poetry, but in various forms of non-fiction prose. His thousands of pages of essays, reviews, prologues, lectures, and notes on politics and culture—though revered in Latin America and Europe as among his finest work—have scarcely been translated into English.Selected Non-Fictions presents a Borges almost entirely unknown to American readers. Here is the dazzling metaphysician speculating on the nature of time and reality and the inventions of heaven and hell, and the almost superhumanly erudite reader of the world’s literatures, from Homer to Ray Bradbury, James Joyce to Lady Murasaki. Here, too, the political Borges, taking courageous stands against fascism, antisemitism, and the Perón dictatorship; Borges the movie critic, on King Kong and Citizen Kane and the Borgesian art of dubbing; and Borges the regular columnist for the Argentine equivalent of the Ladies’ Home Journal, writing hilarious book reviews and capsule biographies of modern writers.Like the Aleph in his famous story—the magical point in a basement in Buenos Aires from which one can view everything in the world—Borges’s non-fictions are a vortex for seemingly the entire universe: Dante and Ellery Queen, Shakespeare and the Kabbalah, the history of angels and the history of tango, the Buddha, Bette Davis, and the Dionne Quints.Selected Non-Fictions presents more than 160 of these astonishing writings, from his youthful manifestos to his last meditations on his favorite books. More than a hundred of these pieces have never before appeared in English, and all have been rendered in brilliant new translations by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger. This unique selection presents Borges as at once a deceptively self-effacing guide to the universe and the inventor of a universe that is an indispensable guide to Borges.For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Glass Bead Game is an ultra-aesthetic game which is played by the scholars, creamed off in childhood and nurtured in elite schools, in the province of Castalia. The Master of the Glass Bead Game, Joseph Knecht, holds the most exalted office in Castalia. He personifies the detachment, serenity and aesthetic vision which reward a life dedicated to perfection of the intellect. But can, indeed should, man live isolated from hunger, family, children, women, in a perfect world where passions are tamed by meditation, where academic discipline and order are paramount? This is Herman Hesse’s great novel. It is a major contribution to contemporary philosophic literature and has a powerful vision of universality, the inner unity of man’s cultural ideals and his search for personal perfection and social responsibility.

The Futurological Congress is the fourth satirical science fiction novel in the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy series from Kafka Prize–winning author Stanislaw Lem.“Nobody can really know the future. But few could imagine it better than Lem.”—Paris ReviewBringing his twin gifts of scientific speculation and scathing satire to bear on that hapless planet, Earth, Lem sends his unlucky cosmonaut, Ijon Tichy, to the Eighth Futurological Congress. Caught up in local revolution, Tichy is shot and so critically wounded that he is flashfrozen to await a future cure—a future whose strangeness exceeds anything the congress conjectured.Translated by Michael Kandel.“A vision of Earth’s future where the authorities dose the population with ‘psychemicals’ to make life in a desperately over-populated world worth living.”—Boston Globe

'Etgar Keret's short stories are fierce, funny, full of energy and insight, and at the same time they are often deep, tragic and very moving' - Amos Oz At a children's tea party, a magician tries to pull a rabbit out of a hat, but takes out only its head; a young man has a mother and girlfriend who each demand that he gives them the other one's heart; while a Nobel Laureate asks an orphan to perform a very strange task. In Etgar Keret's blackly comic stories the unexpected can, and usually does, happen. They are clever, quick, sometimes violent and often intensely poignant. They are, in short, brilliant.

From the author of National Book Award-nominated Lost in the Funhouse • John Barth's first two novels are both existential comedies featuring strange, consuming love triangles and the destructive effects of an overactive intellect on the emotions."[Barth] ran riot over literary rules and conventions, even as he displayed, with meticulous discipline, mastery of and respect for them." —The New York TimesThe relationship between these two darkly comic novels is evident not only in their ribald and philosophical subject matter but in their eccentric characters and bitterly humorous tone. The protagonist of The Floating Opera is Todd Andrews, an orphaned war veteran who has been sleeping with his friend's wife. Todd awakens in the morning determined to commit suicide, having concluded that nothing in life has intrinsic value--but then spends the day methodically reasoning his way into disregarding that fact and remaining a part of the floating opera of life. In The End of the Road, a man named Jacob Horner finds himself literally paralyzed by an inability to choose a course of action from all possibilities. He begins an unconventional course of "mythotherapy" treatment at the Remobilization Farm, but his eccentric doctor's directives lead him into a tragic love triangle and from there to the nihilistic end of the road. Separately these two novels give two very different views of the universal human quest for meaning, and together they form the beginnings of an illustrious literary career.

"Set in the eighteenth century, it tells the story of Cosimo, a young Italian nobleman who rebels against parental authority by climbing into the trees and remaining there for the rest of his life. He adapts efficiently to an arboreal existence - hunts, sows crops, plays games with earth-bound friends, fights forest fires, solves engineering problems, and even manages to have love affairs. He also has time to read and think. His proposal for 'an Ideal State in the Trees' is acknowledged by Diderot, and Napoleon pays him homage. From his perch in the trees, Cosimo sees the age of Voltaire pass by and a new century dawn. His ending is as graceful and unusual as his life has been"--From back cover.

From the Author of The Basketball Diaries   Originally released in 1973, Living at the Movies was the first aboveground publication of the work of Jim Carroll, a singer-songwriter Newsweek called “contender for the title of rock’s new poet laureate.” In these poems, all written before the age of twenty-two, Carroll shows an uncanny virtuosity. His power and poisoned purity of vision are reminiscent of Arthur Rimbaud, and, like the strongest poets of the New York School, Carroll transforms the everyday details of city life into poetry. In language at once delicate, hallucinatory, and menacing, his major themes—love, friendship, the exquisite pains and pleasures of drugs, and above all, the ever-present city—emerge in an atmosphere where dream and reality mingle on equal terms. It is an astonishing debut by an important American writer and artist.   “Jim Carroll has the sure confidence of a true artist. . . . He is steeped in his craft. He has worked as only a man of inspiration is capable of working. . . . His beginning is a triumph.”—Gerard Malanga, Poetry

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • From one of the great comic innovators, the long-awaited fulfillment of a pioneering comic vision: the story of a corner of a room and of the events that have occurred in that space over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.“A book like this comes along once a decade, if not a century…. I guarantee that you’ll remember exactly where you are, or were, when you first read it.” —Chris Ware, The Guardian"In Here McGuire has introduced a third dimension to the flat page. He can poke holes in the space-time continuum simply by imposing frames that act as trans­temporal windows into the larger frame that stands for the provisional now. Here is the ­comic-book equivalent of a scientific breakthrough. It is also a lovely evocation of the spirit of place, a family drama under the gaze of eternity and a ghost story in which all of us are enlisted to haunt and be haunted in turn.” —The New York Times Book ReviewWith full-color illustrations throughout.

The definitive work on the extraordinary phenomenon of out-of-body experiences, by the founder of the internationally known Monroe Institute.Robert Monroe, a Virginia businessman, began to have experiences that drastically altered his life. Unpredictably, and without his willing it, Monroe found himself leaving his physical body to travel via a "second body" to locales far removed from the physical and spiritual realities of his life. He was inhabiting a place unbound by time or death. Praise for Journeys Out of the Body"Monroe's account of his travels, Journeys Out of the Body, jam-packed with parasitic goblins and dead humans, astral sex, scary trips into mind-boggling other dimensions, and practical tips on how to get out of your body, all told with wry humor, quickly became a cult sensation with its publication in 1971, and has been through many printings. Whatever their 'real' explanation, Monroe's trips made for splendid reading." —Michael Hutchinson, author of Megabrain"Robert Monroe's experiences are probably the most intriguing of any person's of our time, with the possible exception of Carlos Castaneda's." —Joseph Chilton Pierce, author of Magical Child"This book is by a person who's clearly a sensible man and who's trying to tell it like it is. No ego trips. Just a solid citizen who's been 'out' a thousand times now and wants to pass his experiences to others." —The Last Whole Earth Catalog