Recommendations based on "Great Jones Street (Contemporary American Fiction)"

"A thoughtful, intricate, ambivalent novel with the reach of greatness in it." —John Updike"It is impossible to do justice here to the subtleties, comedy, and wisdom of this very beautiful novel. Milan Kundera is an artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere, who says that the good (and evil) that issues from men's souls matters much more than the deeds of a State. And he says it with passion, with good humor, and with love." —Salman RushdieAll too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, more than a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Milan Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.This edition provides English-language readers an important further means toward revaluation of The Joke. For reasons he describes in his Author's Note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also to the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel's narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.

“Ursula Le Guin is more than just a writer of adult fantasy and science fiction . . . she is a philosopher; an explorer in the landscapes of the mind.” – Cincinnati Enquirer The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, and the Pushcart Prize, Ursula K. Le Guin is renowned for her spare, elegant prose, rich characterization, and diverse worlds. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is a short story originally published in the collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters.

Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory.“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

Wildly original, funny and moving, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is an extraordinary story of a life lived again and again from World Fantasy Award-winning author Claire North.Harry August is on his deathbed. Again.No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived a dozen times before. Nothing ever changes.Until now.As Harry nears the end of his eleventh life, a little girl appears at his bedside. "I nearly missed you, Doctor August," she says. "I need to send a message."This is the story of what Harry does next, and what he did before, and how he tries to save a past he cannot change and a future he cannot allow.

A series of lectures which Italo Calvino wrote in the final year of his life. Drawing on the works of Lucretius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Flaubert, Kundera, Perec and many more, he pinpoints the universal laws and literary lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity.

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness -- a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his.These are worlds undreamt of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering Channel"). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ("Oblivion").Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate."Stunning...Wallace is an astonishing storyteller whose fiction reminds us why we learned to read in the first place." --San Francisco Chronicle

Sum is a stunning exploration of funny and unexpected afterlives that have never been considered—each presented as a vignette that offers a lens through which to see ourselves here and now. In one afterlife, you find that God is the size of a microbe and is unaware of your existence. In another, you work as a background character in other people's dreams. Or you may find that the afterlife contains only those people whom you remember. The stories in Sum are rooted in romance, science, and awe: a mixture of death, hope, computers, immortality, love, biology, and desire that cuts through human nature at new and exciting angles.

A Penguin ClassicWinner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.This Penguin Classics deluxe edition features a specially designed cover by Frank Miller along with french claps and deckle-edged paper.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 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.

Roithamer has committed suicide having been driven to madness by his own frightening powers of pure thought. We witness the gradual breakdown of a genius ceaselessly compelled to correct and refine his perceptions until the only logical conclusion of the negation of his own soul.

In a perfect pairing of talent, this volume blends twenty illustrations by Peter Sís with Jorge Luis Borges's 1957 compilation of 116 "strange creatures conceived through time and space by the human imagination," from dragons and centaurs to Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat and the Morlocks of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. A lavish feast of exotica brought vividly to life with art commissioned specifically for this volume, The Book of Imaginary Beings will delight readers of classic fantasy as well as Borges's many admirers.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 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.