With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are the urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic...more

Set in the near-future, this swirling comedy/epic revolves around a tennis academy, a residence for recovering substance abusers, a tight group of Quebecois-separatist terrorists, and "Infinite Jest", a film so funny that it literally kills. Perhaps one of the most ambitious attempts to capture the spirit of the age, Wallace's pervasive theme is th...more

The Sinking of Odradek Stadium is a brilliant comedy composed of an exchange of letters between a husband living in the Miami of the not-too-distant future and his wife living in an Italy of the not-too-remote past. He is Zachary McCaltex, an overweight, emotional intellectual--or in any event a librarian. She is the charming Twang Panattapam, a wo...more

With his stirring, rapturous first novel--originally published in 1956 --James Salter established himself as the most electrifying prose stylist since Hemingway. Four decades later, it is clear that he also fashioned the most enduring fiction ever about aerial warfare.Captain Cleve Connell arrives in Korea with a single goal: to become an ace, one ...more

EULA BISS EXPLORES RACIAL IDENTITY FROM THE HEART OF IOWA TO THE HALLS OF NEW YORK CITY'S PUBLIC SCHOOLSWhere is America in terms of race?In a book that begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies, Eula Biss explores race in America. Her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays--teach...more

The best-selling author of Infinite Jest on the two-thousand-year-old quest to understand infinity. One of the outstanding voices of his generation, David Foster Wallace has won a large and devoted following for the intellectual ambition and bravura style of his fiction and essays. Now he brings his considerable talents to the history of one of ...more

In a dazzlingly original work of nonfiction, the award-winning novelist Colson Whitehead re-creates the exuberance, the chaos, the promise, and the heartbreak of New York. Here is a literary love song that will entrance anyone who has lived in—or spent time—in the greatest of American cities.A masterful evocation of the city that never sleeps,...more