905 books match the query 'Literary' and 35 start with l
Shola von Reinhold
Duke University Press, 2020
Vanessa Place
University of Alabama Press, 2008
La Medusa is a polyphonic novel of post-conceptual consciousness. At the heart of the whole floats Medusa, an androgynous central awareness that anchors the novel throughout. La Medusa is at once the city of Los Angeles, with its snaking freeways and serpentine shifts between reality and illusion, and a brain—a modern mind that is both expansive and penetrating in its obsessions and perceptions.
Vanessa Place’s characters—a trucker and his wife, a nine-year-old saxophonist, an ice cream vendor, a sex worker, and a corpse, among others—are borderless selves in a borderless city, a city impossible to contain. Her expert ventriloquism and explosive imagination anchor this epic narrative in language that is fierce and vibrant, a penetrating a cross-section of contemporary Los Angeles and a cross-section of the modern mind.
Anaïs Nin
Ohio University Press, 2014
Anaïs Nin’s Ladders to Fire interweaves the stories of several women, each emotionally inhibited in her own way: through self-doubt, fear, guilt, moral drift, and distrust. The novel follows their inner struggles to overcome these barriers to happiness and wholeness. The author’s own experiences, as recorded in her famous diaries, supplied the raw material for her fiction. It was her intuitive, experimental, and always original style that transformed one into the other. Nin herself memorably claimed that “it was the fiction writer who edited the diary.”
Ladders to Fire is the first book of Nin’s continuous novel, Cities of the Interior, which also includes Children of the Albatross,The Four-Chambered Heart,A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur. These loosely interlinked stories develop the characters and themes established in the first volume, leading slowly toward a resolution of inner turmoil and conflict.
This Swallow Press reissue of Ladders to Fire includes a new introduction by Nin scholar Benjamin Franklin V, as well as Gunther Stuhlmann’s classic foreword to the 1995 edition.
Lesley Pratt Bannatyne
The Ohio State University Press, 2025
Selected by Deesha Philyaw as winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction
Shortlisted, 2026 Massachusetts Book Award, Fiction Category
The linked stories of Lake Song, set in the fictional town of Kinder Falls in New York’s Finger Lakes region, span decades to plumb the complexities, violence, and compassion of small-town life as the twentieth century hurtles forward. Against a backdrop of historical events—bootlegging, Klan attacks, gold smuggling, the Albany Ketchup Murders, the 1965 Northeast blackout—a generations-long mystery unwinds. In 1906 Mavis Staunch drowns in Okisee Lake days after she refuses to sell her land to a trio of brothers. The same night, one of the brothers, Angus Epps, doesn’t come home. Few suspect the two events are connected, and no one imagines the role that a ten-year-old boy, a canoe, and a pack of coyotes play in the tragedies. Spiritualists, grifters, sugar makers, arsonists, seekers, and saleswomen wind through each other’s lives and across decades to add layers of resonance to each captivating story. The mercurial lake that unites the people of Kinder Falls sustains as much as it haunts, both witness and diary.
Jeffrey Lewis
Haus Publishing, 2023
Joseph Geha
University of Michigan Press, 2012
Stephen Graham Jones
University of Alabama Press, 2008
A story of life, death, love, and the ties that bind us not only to what has been, but what will be.
After burning up the blacktop in New Mexico with The Fast Red Road and rewriting Indian history on the Great Plains with The Bird is Gone, Stephen Graham Jones now takes us to Montana. Set on a Blackfeet Indian reservation, Ledfeather lays bare the life of one Indian boy, Doby Saxon: his near-death experience, his suicide attempts, his brief glimpse of victory, and the unnecessary death of one of his best friends.
But through Doby emerges a connection to the past, to an Indian Agent who served the United States government over a century before. This revelation leads to another and another until it becomes clear that the decisions of this single Indian agent have impacted the lives of generations of Blackfeet Indians—and the life of Doby Saxon, a boy standing in the middle of the road at night, his hands balled into fists, the reservation wheeling all around him like the whole of Blackfeet history collapsing in on him.
Jones’s beautifully complex novel is a story of life, death, love, and the ties that bind us not only to what has been, but what will be: the power of one moment, the weight of one decision, the inevitability of one outcome, and the price of one life.
Lynn Galvin
University of Nevada Press, 2025
Alex Capus
Haus Publishing, 2011
Jeffrey Lewis
Haus Publishing, 2025
Monique Wittig. Translated from the French by David Le Vay
University of Illinois Press, 2007
One of the most widely read feminist texts of the twentieth century, and Monique Wittig’s most popular novel, Les Guérillères imagines the attack on the language and bodies of men by a tribe of warrior women. Among the women’s most powerful weapons in their assault is laughter, but they also threaten literary and linguistic customs of the patriarchal order with bullets. In this breathtakingly rapid novel first published in 1969, Wittig animates a lesbian society that invites all women to join their fight, their circle, and their community. A path-breaking novel about creating and sustaining freedom, the book derives much of its energy from its vaunting of the female body as a resource for literary invention.
David McGlynn
Northwestern University Press, 2027
A kaleidoscopic novel-in-stories set at a fictional Midwest college
Two centuries old and covered in ivy, Wisconsin’s Buchanan College is populated by an eclectic mix of students, staff, and professors hailing from the nearby suburbs to the far corners of the globe. From the outside, Buchanan seems an idyllic world of higher learning. Yet behind its bucolic exterior, a series of interconnected dramas play out: a slew of first-year students mysteriously disappear within days of moving in; an injured hockey star discovers an unlikely fountain of youth; an alumna returns to campus after fifty years in the hope of reconnecting with a former love. And throughout the novel we follow the story of Jenny Ramirez, a social worker and the wife of a popular professor, who commits an act that alters how the college sees her, and how she sees herself. Over a span of four years, from orientation to graduation, the characters in Liberal Arts are forced to weigh their ideals and aspirations against the harsh and often ridiculous realities of the world, and are left asking what, if anything, a liberal arts education has left to teach them.
Alex Capus
Haus Publishing, 2018
Jiri Weil
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Dacia Maraini
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Questo libro è stato tradotto grazie a un contributo del Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale italiano.
This book has been translated thanks to a contribution from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.
Lana K. W. Austin
West Virginia University Press, 2020
Mac Wellman
University of Alabama Press, 2013
Mark Powell
West Virginia University Press, 2022
In the fall of 2018, a bomb goes off at a water-bottling plant in the mountains of southwest Virginia, an incident the FBI declares an act of ecoterrorism. Arrested at the scene is Chris Bright, a mountain hermit with a long history of activism. Unaccounted for—and presumed dead—is Mara Wood, an installation artist who in the last two years has lost her son and left her husband.
But Mara’s estranged husband David cannot quite believe she is dead, and as he goes about reconstructing the story of what happened, he begins to imagine an alternate narrative—one in which their son doesn’t die and his wife doesn’t leave him, one in which his wife doesn’t carry on a secret relationship with Chris Bright, a man bent on fighting back against the environmental despoliation of his Appalachian home. Lioness is a page-turning, heart-wrenching examination of extremism: What pushes people to act violently, and is that violence ever justified?
Matthew Roberson
University of Alabama Press, 2014
Liam Callanan
Four Way Books, 2015
Alexis Easley
University of Delaware Press, 2011
This study examines literary celebrity in Britain from 1850 to 1914. Through lively analysis of rare cultural materials, Easley demonstrates the crucial role of the celebrity author in the formation of British national identity. As Victorians toured the homes and haunts of famous writers, they developed a sense of shared national heritage. At the same time, by reading sensational accounts of writers’ lives, they were able to reconsider conventional gender roles and domestic arrangements. As women were featured in interviews and profiles, they were increasingly associated with the ephemerality of the popular press and were often excluded from emerging narratives of British literary history, which defined great literature as having a timeless appeal. Nevertheless, women writers were able to capitalize on celebrity media as a way of furthering their own careers and retelling history on their own terms. Press attention had a more positive effect on men’s literary careers since they were expected to assume public identities; however, in some cases, media exposure had the effect of sensationalizing their lives, bodies, and careers. With the development of proto-feminist criticism and historiography, the life stories of male writers were increasingly used to expose unhealthy domestic relationships and imagine ideal forms of British masculinity.
The first section of Literary Celebrity explores the practice of literary tourism in Victorian Britain, focusing specifically on the homes and haunts of Charles Dickens, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Harriet Martineau. This investigation incorporates analysis of fascinating cultural texts, including maps, periodicals, and tourist guidebooks. Easley links the practice of literary tourism to a variety of cultural developments, including nationalism, urbanization, spiritualism, the women’s movement, and the expansion of popular print culture. The second section provides fresh insight into the ways that celebrity culture informed the development of Victorian historiography. Easley demonstrates how women were able to re-tell history from a proto-feminist perspective by writing contemporary history, participating in architectural reform movements, and becoming active in literary societies. In this chapter she returns to the work of Harriet Martineau and introduces a variety of lesser-known contributors to the field, including Mary Gillies and Mary Ward. Literary Celebrity concludes with a third section focused on the expansion of celebrity media at the fin de siècle. These chapters and a brief coda link the popularization of celebrity news to the de-canonization of women writers, the professionalization of medicine, the development of the open space movement, and the institutionalization of English studies. These investigations elucidate the role of celebrity media in the careers of Charlotte Robinson, Marie Corelli, Mary Braddon, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, Ernest Hart, and Octavia Hill.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Edited by Barbara K. Gold
University of Texas Press, 1982
Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Propertius—these are just a few of the poets whose work we would be without today were it not for the wealthy and powerful patrons upon whose support the Roman cultural establishment so greatly depended. Who were these patrons? What benefits did they give, to whom, and why? What effect did the support of such men as Maecenas and Pompey have on the lives and work of those who looked to them for aid?
These questions and others are addressed in this volume, which explores all the important aspects of patronage—a topic crucial to the study of literature and art from Homer to the present day. The subject is approached from various vantage points: literary, artistic, historical. The essayists reach conclusions that dispel the many misconceptions about Roman patronage derived from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century models in England and Europe.
An understanding of the workings of patronage is indispensable in helping us see how the Roman cultural establishment functioned in the four centuries of its flourishing and also in helping us read and enjoy specific poems and works of art. A book for all concerned with classical literature, art, and social history, Literary and Artistic Patronage in Ancient Rome not only deepens our understanding of the ancient world but also suggests important avenues for future exploration.
Abram Tertz
Northwestern University Press, 1992
Pamela Johnston
University of Nevada Press, 2008
Manlio Argueta
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Valentin Rasputin
Northwestern University Press, 1992
Antoine Volodine
University of Minnesota Press, 2026
A soldier engulfed in napalm suspends his death by composing a family saga in which he learns to live within the flames
Do not remain on the fire’s edge, find your way to the heart of the fire and do not leave. . . . Death does not exist as long as you reject it. A soldier watches an airplane dropping napalm on his position. In the instant before his fiery death, he does not see his life flash before his eyes. Instead, he improvises a novel, one that screams out of him at high speed.
In his story, Sam wanders a postapocalyptic landscape of broken cities and empty steppes for days, years, centuries. Through a series of blackly comic, dreamlike, bizarre scenes, he gleans lessons imparted by the weird and violent members of his family, including sorceress Aunt Yoanna, doomed Uncle Slutov, and two sharp-shooting cousins who try to persuade him to kill their mother. Sam’s clan teaches him how to accept his fate and live in the world of flames with no fear for the future.
The forty-ninth novel in the post-exotic series and the last to appear under the name Antoine Volodine, Living in Fire includes an interview with the writer about this book’s place in his overall project, its literary and cinematic influences, and its thematic connections with other works in the sequence. A triumphant conclusion to an epic experiment, Living in Fire cuts through a world aflame using dark humor, flights of fantasy, and radical acceptance.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

Thomas Meinecke
Diaphanes, 2026
A literary tour de force through the symbolic landscapes of recent cultural history, Lookalikes is a text in which everything is as it seems and nothing is as it is.
Thomas Meinecke’s lookalikes resemble many people––Marlon Brando, Shakira, Justin Timberlake, or Josephine Baker to name a few––but never themselves. Illusion is their capital; imitation is their business. They stroll through Düsseldorf's posh Königsallee, reading, quoting, and plagiarizing their way through the history of pop culture and philosophy, exploring categories of realness in parallel worlds and digital chat forums. At the same time, yet another Thomas wanders Brazil in disguise, tracing the journey of Hubert Fichte and his doppelgänger Jäcki. In this endless play of similarities, all identity is lost.
Between literary and sexual genres, mimesis and authenticity, fiction and reality, these lookalikes only ever find the Other, just as Meinecke’s text duplicates itself in the furor of allusions and reference systems, constantly branching out anew, never remaining the same, always changing these so-called original signs.
Levi S. Peterson
Signature Books, 2021
Lee Siegel
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Bruce Johnson
University of Iowa Press, 2025
J Efron
University of Alabama Press, 2025
Formally daring and emotionally disarming, Low-Risk Activities spins out twenty-two uncanny stories that feel like dispatches from a future already here—and already unraveling.
J Efron’s Low-Risk Activities is a genre-defying collection that slips between interview transcript, personal confession, government form, and speculative fable—told through the voices of orphans, immortals, office workers, digital nomads, and posthuman survivors. These are characters in limbo, each trying to make sense of a fractured world where logic doesn’t always follow law.
The book opens with Lan Caihe, a faux-memoir in which a gender-fluid, possibly immortal narrator navigates trauma, desire, and the politics of being unclassifiable—part myth, part autofiction, and entirely singular. Later entries mimic psychological evaluations, immigration interrogations, and philosophical questionnaires, inviting the reader not just to observe, but to participate.
Structured like a psychic excavation, Low-Risk Activities questions how we define personhood, how language shapes identity, and how systems reduce people to data—only to lose the meaning of what that data once held. Efron’s voice is intimate yet disorienting, full of humor, dread, and lyrical estrangement. Fans of Anne Carson, Jenny Boully, and Rivka Galchen will find familiar resonance in this work that refuses to resolve neatly—and in doing so, reveals something startlingly true.
Frank Lentricchia
Duke University Press, 2001
Aleksander Wat
Northwestern University Press, 1990
Deborah Jiang-Stein
University of Minnesota Press, 2025
Lives of longing and resilience, searching and belonging in a debut story collection from a memoirist and renowned advocate for change
For a Lucky Tomorrow Buy a Flower Today. Is it true? a prospective customer asks. About the luck? “Absolutely!” Felma says. Flowers, she knows, are all that’s anchored in this world, even if not for long, and like others in these luminous stories, Felma knows what it is to be rootless. In Lucky Tomorrow, Deborah Jiang-Stein presents an unforgettable cast of characters dreaming of redemption, purpose, and connection in a wounded yet beautiful world.
A young girl stuck working at her family’s candy stand. A former priest trapped on a crowded train. A prisoner robbed of the book she’s been writing. A father haunted by his broken family. A woman confined to a psych ward. A reverend caring for her dying housemate. And Felma, a flower vendor, searching for the daughter she gave birth to while in prison, who was swiftly bundled away. Felma’s story leads us in, through, and around the others—a central beating heart for these lives on the fringes, where Jiang-Stein finds a singular, tenacious humanity.
The stories in Lucky Tomorrow move through settings drawn from the path of the author’s own life: Seattle, where she grew up after being born in an Appalachian prison; Tokyo, where she once lived; the Twin Cities, where she currently resides; and the American South, where she travels for much of her advocacy work with women in prison. Pushing the boundaries of genre, Jiang-Stein delicately layers the stories of these outcasts, eccentrics, and visionaries, gathering them in from the shadows with remarkable empathy and candor, laying bare our shared sorrows and joys.