Recommendations based on "Nova Express"

A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the tour de force th

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 POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM “ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS” (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW)Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.

This American underground classic is a rollicking cosmic mystery featuring Albert Einstein and James Joyce as the ultimate space/time detectives. One fateful evening in a suitably dark, beer-soaked Swiss rathskeller, a wild and obscure Irishman named James Joyce would become the drinking partner of an unknown physics professor called Albert Einstein. And on that same momentous night, Sir John Babcock, a terror-stricken young Englishman, would rush through the tavern door bringing a mystery that only the two most brilliant minds of the century could solve . . . or perhaps bringing only a figment of his imagination born of the paranoia of our times. An outrageous, raunchy ride through the twists and turns of mind and space, Masks of the Illuminati runs amok with all our fondest conspiracy theories to show us the truth behind the laughter . . . and the laughter in the truth. Praise for Masks of the Illuminati “I was astonished and delighted . . . Robert Anton Wilson managed to reverse every mental polarity in me, as if I had been pulled through infinity.”—Philip K. Dick “[Wilson is] erudite, witty, and genuinely scary.”—Publishers Weekly   “A dazzling barker hawking tickets to the most thrilling tilt-a-whirls and daring loop-o-planes on the midway to a higher consciousness.”—Tom Robbins “Wilson is one of the most profound, important, scientific philosophers of this century—scholarly, witty, hip, and hopeful.”—Timothy Leary

A brilliantly innovative and highly entertaining novel from a literary pioneer.Take a trip in a stranger’s head. Travel rain-shot streets with a gang of hip malcontents, hooked on the most powerful drug you can imagine. Yet Vurt feathers are not for the weak. As the mysterious Game Cat says, ‘Be careful, be very careful’. But Scribble isn’t listening. He has to find his lost love. His journey is a mission to find Curious Yellow, the ultimate, perhaps even mythical Vurt feather. As the most powerful narcotic of all, Scribble must be prepared to leave his current reality behind.This edition also includes three additional short stories by Noon.

The sequel to the cult classic The Illuminatus! Trilogy, this is an epic fantasy that offers a twisted look at our modern-day world--a reality that exists in another dimension of time and space that may be closer than we think.

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.

Thomas Bernhard was one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. His formal innovation ranks with Beckett and Kafka, his outrageously cantankerous voice recalls Dostoevsky, but his gift for lacerating, lyrical, provocative prose is incomparably his own.One of Bernhard's most acclaimed novels, The Loser centers on a fictional relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two of his fellow students who feel compelled to renounce their musical ambitions in the face of Gould's incomparable genius. One commits suicide, while the other-- the obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator-- has retreated into obscurity. Written as a monologue in one remarkable unbroken paragraph, The Loser is a brilliant meditation on success, failure, genius, and fame.

All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, 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 Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence. The present 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 (with the assistance of his American publisher-editor) 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.

Twenty-five of the finest science fiction short stories from one of the genre's greatest writers, Isaac Asimov. Isaac Asimov was the Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America, the founder of robot ethics, and one of the world's most prolific authors of fiction and non-fiction. Asimov's short fiction has been enjoyed by millions for more than half a century. Many of the stories in this collection are classics of the genre, including 'Living Space', which looks at the consequences of the existence of parallel universes and what would happen if life on Earth never developed. Always entertaining and thought provoking, these stories display Asimov's mastery of the short story form. He remains supreme as the thinking person's science fiction writer.