Experimental

Wittgenstein's Mistress (Paperback)

By David Markson

$16.95

ISBN: 9781628973914

Availability: Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now

Published: Dalkey Archive Press - July 11th, 2023

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This experimental novel asks what would happen if you were the only person left on Earth and all you had were snippets of art history and Greek mythology — “the baggage that remains in one’s head” — to keep your mind from unspooling. Rather than take a dystopian bent, this post-apocalyptic novel quietly mesmerizes as its protagonist anchors herself in the quotidian and her own “fanciful private improvisations.” Unique and hypnotic.

Rachael

Plans for Sentences (Paperback)

By Renee Gladman

$30.00

ISBN: 9781950268580

Availability: In Stock: Click Title to See if it's in CAMBRIDGE or BOSTON

Published: Wave Books - May 3rd, 2022

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Writing about the fundamental mechanics of language and narrative is kinda like trying to chop down a tree, with another tree. Gladman comes closer than any other writer I've read at pulling off this impossible feat. Plans for Sentences is complex, challenging, & strangely beautiful and there are phrases that will make every writer sigh.

Josh

The Incompletes (Paperback)

By Sergio Chejfec, Heather Cleary (Translator)

$14.95

ISBN: 9781948830034

Availability: Available to Order from Supplier: Arrives at Store in a Week(ish)

Published: Open Letter - September 24th, 2019

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A beautifully baffling book about the peripatetic wanderings of your own mind through the hotels, hallways, & postcards of the protagonists, or about the instability hiding in every apparently solid building, or maybe even how you don’t know an event is significant until some disconnected and celestial phenomenon illuminates it.

Josh

Ducks, Newburyport (Paperback)

By Lucy Ellmann

$22.95

ISBN: 9781771963077

Availability: In Stock: Click Title to See if it's in CAMBRIDGE or BOSTON

Published: Biblioasis - September 10th, 2019

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In 2019's most ambitious novel Ellmann puts us in the mind of one of literature's most neglected characters; an average woman and mother doing her best in a world that respects neither women nor mothers. Rambunctiously political, tenderly personal, and profoundly humanist, Ellmann's simple respect for her protagonist's thoughts, feelings, faults, & successes is revolutionary. And on top of everything else in this towering achievement of a novel, you'll find yourself desperately rooting for a mountain lion.

Josh

The Hole (Paperback)

By José Revueltas, Amanda Hopkinson (Translated by), Sophie Hughes (Translated by), Álvaro Enrigue (Introduction by)

$12.95

ISBN: 9780811227780

Availability: Available with a Delay: On Order at Supplier: Email online@portersquarebooks.com for More Info

Published: New Directions - October 30th, 2018

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The Hole is a cross between Blood Meridian, Train Dreams, and Jean Genet’s works set in prisons. Yes, Revueltas fits all of that into into this little explosive seed. Reading it is about a four hour experience; one hour to read it and three hours to stare at a wall recovering from it.

Josh

Confessions of the Fox: A Novel (Hardcover)

By Jordy Rosenberg

$27.00
It's Complicated--Contact Us for More Information

ISBN: 9780399592270

Published: One World - June 26th, 2018

 

One part sexy rogue’s tale, one part intellectual exploration of the nature of history, one part examination of how people are marginalized by the powerful, all wrapped up in a tale of frustrated love and surveillance, this wild novel wriggles through genres, tones, and themes like a Dickensian pickpocket disappearing into a crowded London street. You won’t read anything like it this year. One of my favorite books of 2018.

Josh

Oraefi: The Wasteland (Paperback)

By Ofeigur Sigurdsson, Lytton Smith (Translator)

$16.95

ISBN: 9781941920671

Availability: Available to Order from Supplier: Arrives at Store in a Week(ish)

Published: Deep Vellum Publishing - October 2nd, 2018

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Easy to summarize, but impossible to explain Oraefi is a strange amalgamation of explorer’s tale, travelogue, historical fiction, collection of dramatic monologues, and celebration of place names. Ostensibly the story of a scholar who nearly dies while exploring a wasteland in Iceland, the story meanders through multiple layers and narrators like a stream flowing from the glacier to the forest to the sea. It’s a wild ride, unlike anything you’ve read.

Josh

Feeld (Paperback)

By Jos Charles

$16.00

ISBN: 9781571315052

Availability: Available to Order from Supplier: Arrives at Store in a Week(ish)

Published: Milkweed Editions - August 14th, 2018

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How do you write poetry when the language you’re supposed to write in excludes you? How do you find your voice when at least some of the world denies you even exist? In feeld, Charles invades these questions by building an alternative English, one closer to the overt grammatical chaos of Middle English, that allows for a different kind of exploration into how we make languaged-meaning from who we are as people.

Josh

Confessions of the Fox: A Novel (Hardcover)

By Jordy Rosenberg

$27.00
It's Complicated--Contact Us for More Information

ISBN: 9780399592270

Published: One World - June 26th, 2018

 

One part sexy rogue’s tale, one part intellectual exploration of the nature of history, one part examination of how people are marginalized by the powerful, all wrapped up in a tale of frustrated love and surveillance, this wild novel wriggles through genres, tones, and themes like a Dickensian pickpocket disappearing into a crowded London street. You won’t read anything like it this year. One of my favorite books of 2018.

Josh

Houses of Ravicka (Paperback)

By Renee Gladman

$16.00

ISBN: 9780997366662

Availability: Available with a Delay: On Order at Supplier: Email online@portersquarebooks.com for More Info

Published: Dorothy, a publishing project - November 1st, 2017

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What do you hear when you hear a house settle? Why do you dream when you move to a new apartment? What is your sense of direction? Houses of Ravicka is something like Escher noir written by Charlie Chaplin and edited by Gertrude Stein. Gladman is a genius, one of our greatest contemporary experimental writers & Houses is a breathtaking exploration of what it means to live in and with cities.

Josh