Kathy Acker was a high-wire writer. She took risks. She experimented for the sake of it. She made mistakes. She fell. She never wanted a modest success, and so her books, all of them, swing from passages of topflight bravura, where you think, "How did she do that?" to a sawdust-in-your-mouth kind of feeling that you just want to spit out. She is an exhilarating, exasperating writer who wants you in the ring with her, through the highs and the lows. There was always something touching and trusting about Acker's belief that her audience would not want a smooth finished product of the kind they could buy at any dime store, but would prefer to be in on the process -- flying when she did, falling when she did, nothing leveled out or homogenized.

She was ahead of her time. There is no doubt about that. Acker really was interactive art. It's w

It is the tenth anniversary of the publication of Douglas Adams's zany, bestselling novel, and to celebrate, here is a reissue of the cult classic.

The phenomenal world seller for over 30 years returns to its original publishing home in a beautiful new edition.

It is the world of the near future, and Offred is a handmaid. She is hoping the commander makes her pregnant because she is only valued if her ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she had a job of her own, a husband, and a child, but all of that is gone now.

The fiery and enigmatic masterpiece--one of the greatest novels of the Modernist era.
"Nightwood," Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" ("TLS"). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna--a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.
The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction--there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers

This is Barth's most distinguished masterpiece. This modern classic is a hilarious tribute to all the most insidious human vices, with a hero who is "one of the most diverting...to roam the world since Candide" ("Time ).

A controversial best-seller in 1977, The Public Burning has since emerged as one of the most influential novels of our time. The first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use living historical figures as characters, the novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the execution of alleged atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Vice-President Richard Nixon - the voraciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime - is the dominant narrator in an enormous cast that includes Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers, Walter Winchell, Uncle Sam, his adversary The Phantom, and Time magazine incarnated as the National Poet Laureate. All of these and thousands more converge in Times Square for the carnivalesque auto-da-fe at which the Rosenbergs are put to death. And not a person present escapes implicati

Four irate rebels join forces to wage war on the stripminers, clear-cutters, and the highway and dam and bridge builders who are turning their natural habitat into a wasteland. A new Introduction by historian Brinkley puts this enduring cult classic in perspective by placing it at the forefront of an important historical movement.

Winner of the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel and widely considered one of the most accomplished, powerful, and enduring classics of modern speculative fiction, Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "A Canticle for Leibowitz" is a true landmark of twentieth-century literature -- a chilling and still-provocative look at a post-apocalyptic future.

In a nightmarish ruined world slowly awakening to the light after sleeping in darkness, the infant rediscoveries of science are secretly nourished by cloistered monks dedicated to the study and preservation of the relics and writings of the blessed Saint Isaac Leibowitz. From here the story spans centuries of ignorance, violence, and barbarism, viewing through a sharp, satirical eye the relentless progression of a human race damned by its inherent humanness to recelebrate its grand foibles and repeat its gri

The story of an Irish college student who - half to amuse himself and half to avoid work - writes an irreverent novel about the figures of Irish myth and legend in which characters come to life and riot against their author, At Swim is a wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture. O'Brien opened up a whole new world of possibilities for fiction and subsequent novelists have played with his zany ideas, chief among them being the idea that characters in fiction have earned the right to be "recycled" - after all, they've proven their reliability as characters! - not retired once their stories are finished.

Winner 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 complex and richly layered narrative begins a few months after the German's secret V-2 rocket bombs start falling on London. British intelligence discovers that a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, corresponds identically to a map showing the V-2 impact sites. The implications of this discovery will launch Slothrop on an amazing journey across war-torn Europe, fleeing an international cabal of military-industrial superpowers, in search of the mysterious Rocket 00000.

The sprawling, encyclopedic narrative of Gravity's Rainbow -- with its countless subsidiary plots, more than 400 cha

A spectacular, Pultizer Prize-winning novel by a master of comedy, beloved by readers and critics alike. The place is the French Quarter, the characters, denizens of New Orleans's lower depths.

A new collection of stories from David Foster Wallace is occasion to celebrate. These stories -- which have been prominently serialized in Harper's, Esquire, the Paris Review, and elsewhere -- explore intensely immediate states of mind, with the attention to voice and the extraordinary creative daring that have won Wallace his reputation as one of the most talented fiction writer of his generation.

Among the stories are "The Depressed Person", a dazzling portrayal of a woman's mental state; "Adult World", which reveals a woman's agonized consideration of her confusing sexual relationship with her husband; and "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men", a dark, hilarious series of portraits of men whose fear of women renders them grotesque. Always challenging, always funny, and always unique -- these stories will further Wallace's already subst

"Slaughterhous-Five is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

"From the Paperback edition.