"Forrest Gander's emotionally shattering novel depicts the experience of loss through the eyes of three different characters (one of whom is the deceased himself). It took Gander twenty years to write this book and it therefore comes as no surprise that every single line of this brief masterpiece is exquisitely pained, caustic, about to burst into flame." - Max
A powerful, surreal novel, in the tradition of Gogol, about the chaotic events surrounding the arrival of a circus in a small Hungarian town. The Melancholy of Resistance, Laszlo Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town.
"This single 15,283-line poem is a testament to Stanford's brief, explosive career before his suicide at age 29. Reading this gargantuan work is a truly disorienting, mesmerizing, and breathtaking experience. Lack of punctuation and stanzas forces the reader to really sit with the poem and work hard to mine out the riches therein. It's worth it, though. I'd include this text among books like Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, and Infinite Jest as a comparable example of maximalism and unrelenting brilliance at work. To quote C.D. Wright (his friend and former lover) from the book's preface, 'I believe that the poem anchored him to the world, and that it stood solidly between himself and a much earlier death than he died. He wrote: "I'll just bleed so the stars will have something dark to shine in." What can you say to that.' This is something that deserves to be witnessed." - Max
"This book, told from multiple narrative perspectives, fills in the historical details of Billy the Kid's life. The inventive tale uses prose, poetry, and old photographs to create a vivid sense of wholeness in the world Ondaatje creates. A fascinating examination of one of the Old West's most enigmatic outlaws, this short novel accomplishes so much with such brevity. Ondaatje's words, as usual, are like blades, whirling across the page, cutting away layers of the past, revealing the richness beneath." - Max
"This book haunts and harrows, hunts and hypnotizes. Pessoa wrote entire volumes of poetry, philosophy, and literary criticism under several different names (heteronyms) over the course of his lifetime, but this book of 'fiction' is, undoubtedly, his magnum opus. Every single sentence in here is one I could read over and over and over. There's nothing quite like this. I can't tell if I read this book or if this book read me." - Max
"The world gives us edges and form and we, it, walk around (in) it. This book is amazing." - Max
"Both wildly improvisational and tremendously focused, Moten's work trades (evades) syntactic logic for a more intuitive, cellular logic. Somehow both opaque and crystalline. Like walking through a cloud. His jazzed-out meditations stun, enlighten, confound, disassemble. Read this book and everything else he has ever written." - Max
"Truly disturbing and disorienting. Horrific and beautiful. How do you speak the unspeakable?" - Max
"'In this night, all nights. All the oceans in this brain. Life pushes leaves out of this branch. Who are you, and where, drifting with the continents...'" - Max