An English horse race, the Golden Bowl at Aldington, provides the background for John Hawkes' exciting novel, The Lime Twig, which tells of an ingenious plot to steal and race a horse under a false name. But it would be unfair to the reader to...
Skipper, an ex-World War II naval Lieutenant and the narrator of Second Skin, interweaves past and present — what he refers to as his "naked history" — in a series of episodes that tell the story of a volatile life marked by pitiful losses, as...
"Rich, evocative, highly original piece of fiction. It gilds contemporary American literature with real, not synthetic, gold." — Anthony Burgess
"Need I insist that the only enemy of the mature marriage is monogamy? That anything less...
After years of underground existence, this brilliant novel is emerging as a classic of visionary writing and still remains Hawkes's only work devoted solely to American life.
The Beetle Leg, John Hawkes's second full-length novel, was...
The Cannibal was John Hawkes's first novel, published in 1949.
"No synopsis conveys the quality of this now famous novel about an hallucinated Germany in collapse after World War II. John Hawkes, in his search for a means to transcend...
Fiercely observed, often hilarious, and “reminiscent of Ibsen and Strindberg” (The New York Times Book Review), this exquisitely controversial novel was initially banned in its author’s homeland.
A searing portrayal of Vienna’s...
The last work of fiction by one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, Extinction is widely considered Thomas Bernhard’s magnum opus.
Franz-Josef Murau — the intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family —...
Instead of the book he’s meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this dark and grotesquely funny account of small woes writ large, of profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction. We learn of Rudolph’s...
The scientist Roithamer has dedicated the last six years of his life to “the Cone”, an edifice of mathematically exact construction that he has erected in the center of his family’s estate in honor of his beloved sister. Not long after its...
For five years, Konrad has imprisoned himself and his crippled wife in an abandoned lime works where he’s conducted odd auditory experiments and prepared to write his masterwork, The Sense of Hearing. As the story begins, he’s just blown the...