Recommendations based on "The Breast"

The author questions the condition of modern man in this novel depicting a science-fiction writer's struggle to find peace and sanity in the world

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

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 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.

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.

A brilliantly crafted collection of stories from celebrated science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem Trurl and Klaupacius are constructor robots who try to out-invent each other. Over the course of their adventures inThe Cyberiad, they travel to the far corners of the cosmos to take on freelance problem-solving jobs, with dire consequences for their unsuspecting employers. Playfully written, and ranging from the prophetic to the surreal, these stories demonstrate Stanislaw Lem's vast talent and remarkable ability to blend meaning and magic into a wholly entertaining and captivating work.

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.

Vineland is hardly anyone’s favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon’s return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity’s Rainbow, it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked Vineland opens up new ways of thinking about Pynchon’s writing and about how we read and how we live in the rough currents of history. Beginning with his early besotted encounters with Vineland, Coviello reads Pynchon’s offbeat novel of sixties insurgents stranded in the Reaganite summer of 1984 as a delirious stoner comedy that is simultaneously a work of heartsick fury and political grief: a portrait of the hard afterlives of failed revolution in a period of stifling reaction. Offering a roving meditation on the uses of criticism and the practice of friendship, the fashioning of publics and counterpublics, the sentence and the police, Coviello argues that Vineland is among the most abundant and far-sighted of late-century American excursions into novelistic possibility. Departing from visions of Pynchon as the arch-postmodernist, erudite and obscure, he discloses an author far more companionable and humane. In Pynchon’s harmonizing of joyousness and outrage, comedy and sorrow, Coviello finds a model for thinking through our catastrophic present.

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

The Crying of Lot 49 is widely recognized as a significant contemporary work that frames the desire for meaning and the quest for knowledge within the social and political contexts of the '50s and '60s in America. In the introduction to this collection of original essays on Thomas Pynchon's important novel, Patrick O'Donnell discusses the background and critical reception of the novel. Further essays by five experts on contemporary literature examine the novel's "semiotic regime" or the way in which it organizes signs; the comparison of postmodernist Pynchon and the influential South American writer, Jorge Luis Borges; metaphor in the novel; the novel's narrative strategies; and the novel within the cultural contexts of American Puritanism and the Beat movement. Together, these essays provide an examination of the novel within its literary, historical, and scientific contexts.