Medical school dropout Victor Mancini comes up with a complicated but ingenious scam to pay for his mother's elder care--pretend to be choking in a restaurant and con the individuals who "save" him into giving him money--while he cruises sex addiction groups for action, and visits his sick mother, whose Alzheimer's disease hides the bizarre truth a...more
Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient...more
Zoe Reynard's perfect life--marriage to her childhood sweetheart, a thriving business, and three wonderful children--begins to unravel as she begins to lose control, fails to get her husband to open up to her sexually, and embarks on three extramarital affairs. Reprint.
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 grea...more
We can more or less deduce the following of the main protagonist in Choke; Victor Mancini is a ruthless con artist. Victor Mancini is a medical school dropout who's taken a job playing an Irish indentured servant in a colonial-era theme park in order to help care for his Alzehimer's-afflicted mother. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. Victor Mancini i...more
A major American author of a stature with William Burroughs and Joseph Heller.?Los Angeles TimesHarry White is a man haunted by a satyr's lust and an obsessive need for sin and retribution. The more Harry succeeds - a good marriage, a good corporate job - the more desperate he becomes, as a life of petty crime leads to fraud and murder and, eventua...more
Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to...more
From our most celebrated writer of the psychological thriller comes this nerve-wracking yet eerilybeautiful work of erotic obsession and madness. In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins herpsychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting--a maximum-security hospital for the criminallyinsane. Beautiful and headstrong, Stella soon falls under the s...more
Admired by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Graham Greene, and Dylan Thomas, Djuna Barnes was the most influential and prolific female writer in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The Modern Library is proud to include--for the first time--her most critically acclaimed novel, Nightwood, which was praised by The Washington Post Book World as "a masterpiece o...more
"Kathryn Harrison is a wonderful writer…Spellbinding."- The New York Times Book Review"A juicy story of psychosexual suspence"- The Wall Street Journal"Shockingly complex and compulsively readable."- O, The Oprah Magazine"[Envy] has to be considered another succcess for one of the most interesting writers of her generation."- St. Louis Post Dispa...more