Recommendations based on "Invisible (Rough Cut)"

This celebrated collection of essays from the author of Infinite Jest is "brilliantly entertaining...Consider the Lobster proves once more why Wallace should be regarded as this generation's best comic writer" (Cleveland Plain Dealer).Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person?David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of John McCain's 2000 presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters."Wallace can do sad, funny, silly, heartbreaking, and absurd with equal ease; he can even do them all at once." --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

International Bestseller • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction“Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond.” — PeopleIn The Unbearable Lightness of Being, acclaimed author Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples, a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing, and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.This magnificent novel, now available in a beautifully designed Harper Perennial Deluxe Edition with French flaps and deckle edged paper, is a story of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, and encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.

From one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—a collection of stories that represent the art of a modern master who had the gift of making our problematic spiritual life palpable and real. Franz Kafka’s imagination so far outstripped the forms and conventions of the literary tradition he inherited that he was forced to turn that tradition inside out in order to tell his splendid, mysterious tales that are scrupulously naturalistic on the surface and uncanny in their depths.   This edition of his stories includes all his available shorter fiction in a collection edited, arranged, and introduced by Gabriel Josipovici in ways that bring out the writer’s extraordinary range and intensity of vision. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

Two tales, The Manor and The Estate, chronicle the lives of three generations of the Jacoby family against the advent of modern civilization in nineteenth-century Poland

“Eisner was not only ahead of his times; the present times are still catching up to him.”—John UpdikeCalled “a masterpiece” by R. Crumb, A Life Force chronicles not only the Great Depression but also the rise of Nazism and the spread of socialist politics through the depiction of the protagonist, Jacob Shtarkah, whose existential search reflected Eisner’s own lifelong struggle.

"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.

The third of Beckett's post-war novels, after Molloy and Malone Dies, The Unnamable was first published in French, and in Beckett's English in 1958. 'Like a great horned owl in an aviary', the unnamable narrator - so named because he knows not who he may be - sits nowhere and speaks of previous selves ('all these Murphys, Molloys, and Malones do not fool me') as so many diversions from the need to stop speaking altogether. As with the earlier novels, the prose has its own indomitable precisions, its afflicted but desirous reasons for being.

"It is not a work of nonfiction but a work of fantasy, and not the story of the making of the skyscraper but the story of the unmaking of a very particular one, the Empire State Building . . . The exquisite drawing style that marked Mr. Macaulay's earlier works on architecture remains as whimsical as ever." -- New York Times Book Review

'Her most important book since ALWAYS COMING HOME and her most satisfactory collection since her first, the brilliant, THE WIND'S TWELVE QUARTERS. A formidable and rewarding work, a prime candidate for best SF collection of the year. An essential book.' LOCUS Six of the eight piece are set in Le Guin's classic Hainish cycle. The title story, 'The Birthday of the World', stands alone and the final piece, 'Paradises Lost', is a new short novel original to the collection, a major addition to the generation starship subgenre of science fiction.

A modernist novel about a man's obsessive love of books—and disdain for humanity—from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Auto-da-Fé, Elias Canetti's only work of fiction, is a staggering achievement that puts him squarely in the ranks of major European writers such as Robert Musil and Hermann Broch. It is the story of Peter Kien, a scholarly recluse who lives among and for his great library. The destruction of Kien through the instrument of the illiterate, brutish housekeeper he marries constitutes the plot of the book. The best writers of our time have been concerned with the horror of the modern world—one thinks of Kafka, to whom Canetti has often been compared. But Auto-da-Fé stands as a completely original, unforgettable treatment of the modern predicament.