Showing results by publisher "The Talking Book" in Literary Fiction

Originally published in 1936, this is Anaïs Nin's first work of fiction. But unlike her diaries and erotica, House of Incest does not detail the author's relationships with her famous lovers, nor does it contain graphic depiction of sex. Rather, it is a surrealistic look within the narrator's subconscious mind as she attempts to escape from a dream in which she is trapped, or in Nin's words, as she attempts to escape from "the woman's season in hell." Nin's usage of the word "incest" in this case is metaphorical, not literal.

"Searingly honest, brilliant and disturbing. Brad Phillips peels back the skin and bone and stares right into the human soul." (Anthony Bourdain) Brad Phillips' collection of short stories adeptly walks a very thin line between taboo and propriety, with rigorous self-awareness and generosity. By confusing ideas around fiction and autobiography, Phillips writes with painful sincerity about shame, addiction, trauma, and the more troubling outreaches of sexual desire, with wit that is at odds with the subject matter. Brad Phillips is a well-known Canadian artist.

It was, maybe, the first job I'd ever had where people were happy to see me. An odd feeling indeed, to wield this kind of power. To be this kind of force. As near to magical as any mortal should stride. A technician of unspeakable joy. Braving the neon mountains to return with blue raspberry concentrate. Tearing out sundae cone fangs from the mouths of snow beasts. And so on.

“Is me - Bob. Bob Marley.” Reincarnated as homeless Fall-down man, Bob Marley sleeps in a clock tower built on the site of a lynching in Half Way Tree, Kingston. The ghosts of Marcus Garvey and King Edward VII are there too, drinking whiskey and playing solitaire. No one sees that Fall-down is Bob Marley, no one but his long-ago love, the deaf woman, Leenah, and, in the way of this otherworldly book, when Bob steps into the street each day, five years have passed.

In this stunning and powerful debut, a girl with no name embarks on a fraught three-way relationship with Matt, a Satanist and a tattoo artist, and his girlfriend Frances, a new mom. The liaison is caged by strict rules and rigid emotional distance. Nonetheless, it’s all too easy to surrender to an attraction so powerful she finds herself erased, abandoning even her own name in favor of a new one: Lilith.

A collection of stories that focus on love, lost love, death, the absurdity of the human condition, relationships, and beauty.

A baby rat freed from the bottom of a dumpster becomes a white ibis wandering the wet driveway after a storm. Goodbye, hello, goodbye. It was the garbage times; it was time for something else. A tale of two tales, connected by a mysterious sunlit portal.

A missing laptop, a critic, a sojourn in communal living - Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love is a bracingly intelligent examination of grief, autonomy, aging, desire, information overload, and the condition of being a thinking and feeling inhabitant of an often unthinkable, numbing world. Anna Moschovakis’s debut novel bristles with honesty, humor, and the hungers that propel us to revise and again revise our lives.

Welfare is wholly made up of four-line paragraphs and has a cadence that is uniquely its own. A high school student leaves his parents’ home to live on his own with friends and with the help of government aid. The narrator becomes your best friend on the first chapter. I walk down the slight slope of their driveway. A backpack full of t-shirts and socks and underwear and books on my back. I have 50 dollars and two packs of cigarettes in the pocket of my army surplus jacket. But no lighter. You can’t have everything I tell myself. Steve Anwyll lives in Canada.

Aging widower Russ Lanaker knows he doesn't know his neighbors - but when he finds out one of them was witness to, and career expert on, the strange UFO phenomenon known as the Phoenix Lights, he realizes that's a situation he'd like to change. What follows is an odyssey out of his air-conditioned comfort zone, through the sun-baked Arizona suburbs, and onto the franchise-lined (and not-so-great) American road. In an existential style reminiscent of Don DeLillo, but with the humor and heart of a Coen Brothers film, Alex Higley takes us along as Russ strikes out in search of knowledge.