Here comes Lucien Springer. Age: forty-seven. Still handsome though muchly vodka'd novelist, currently abashed by acute creative dysfunction. Sole preoccupation amid these artistic doldrums: pursuit of fair women. Springer is a randy incorrigible who is guided by only one inflexible precept: no protracted affairs. And thus he has slyly sustained eighteen years of marriage 
Enter, then, Jessica Cornford. Age: almost half of Lucien's. Lush of body and roguish of mind. Whereupon what begins as bawdy interlude becomes perhaps the most untidy extramarital letch in literature. 
Rabelaisian yet uncannily wise, both ribald and bittersweet, Springer's Progress is that rarest of gifts, a mature love story. It is an also exuberant linguistic romp, a novel saturated with irrepressible wordplay and outrageous literary thieveries. Contemplating his own work, Lucien Springer modestly restricts his ambition to "a phrase or three worth some lonely pretty girl's midnight underlining." For the discerning reader, David Markson has contrived a hundred of them.

Springer's Progress

MARKSON, DAVID

Holt Rrinehart Winston

Unlike David Markson’s most recent works, including Vanishing Point and Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which David Foster Wallace described as "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country," his early novel, Going Down, is a more traditional effort, a masterfully plotted narrative set in Mexico in the 1960s. Three Americans, a man and two women, are living together in obvious intimacy. Their habits, strange to the Mexicans, are strangest of all to themselves.When Fern Winters’ attention is caught by movement behind a window in a run-down Greenwich Village apartment building, she can’t suspect that her encounter with the apartment’s occupant will eventually lead her to be come upon in an abandoned chapel, in a tiny mountain villageclutching the bloody machete with which one of the three has been murdered.Going Down is a rarity among novelsbrilliantly and poetically written, faultlessly constructed, centered on fully realized people, and yet completely uninhibited in its depiction of startling eroticism.

Going Down

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Holt; Rinehart; Winston

The Ballad of Dingus Magee

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Bobbs-Merrill

An unusual experimental novel about a women who believes she is alone on the earth. She breaks down the components of her troubled past and so "deconstructs" both her own narrative and the putative "reality" of the history of the world. The author has written a biography of Malcolm Lowry.

Wittgensteins Mistress

World Literature

RH Canada UK Dist

An unusual experimental novel about a women who believes she is alone on the earth. She breaks down the components of her troubled past and so "deconstructs" both her own narrative and the putative "reality" of the history of the world. The author has written a biography of Malcolm Lowry.

Wittgenstein's Mistress

Dalkey Archive Press

Wittgenstein’s Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson―or anyone else―has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced―and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well―that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy. And as she contemplates aspects of the troubled past which have brought her to her present state―obviously a metaphor for ultimate loneliness―so too will her drama become one of the few certifiably original fictions of our time. “The novel I liked best this year,” said the Washington Times upon the book’s publication in 1988; “one dizzying, delightful, funny passage after another . . . Wittgenstein’s Mistress gives proof positive that the experimental novel can produce high, pure works of imagination.”

Here comes Lucien Springer. Age: forty-seven. Still handsome though muchly vodka’d novelist, currently abashed by acute creative dysfunction. Sole preoccupation amid these artistic doldrums: pursuit of fair women. Springer is a randy incorrigible who is guided by only one inflexible precept: no protracted affairs. And thus he has slyly sustained eighteen years of marriage.Enter, then, Jessica Cornford. Age: almost half of Lucien’s. Lush of body and roguish of mind. Whereupon what begins as bawdy interlude becomes perhaps the most untidy extramarital letch in literature.Rabelaisian yet uncannily wise, both ribald and bittersweet, Springer’s Progress is that rarest of gifts, a mature love story. It is an also exuberant linguistic romp, a novel saturated with irrepressible wordplay and outrageous literary thieveries. Contemplating his own work, Lucien Springer modestly restricts his ambition to “a phrase or three worth some lonely pretty girl’s midnight underlining.” For the discerning reader, David Markson has contrived a hundred of them.

Ballad of Dingus Magee

United States

Vytis Pub Co

In this spellbinding, utterly unconventional fiction, an aging author who is identified only as Reader contemplates the writing of a novel. As he does, other matters insistently crowd his mind - literary and cultural anecdotes, endless quotations attributed and not, scholarly curiosities - the residue of a lifetime's reading which is apparently all he has to show for his decades on earth. Out of these unlikely yet incontestably fascinating materials - including innumerable details about the madness and calamity in many artists' and writers' lives, the eternal critical affronts, the startling bigotry, the countless suicides - David Markson has created a novel of extraordinary intellectual suggestiveness. But while shoring up Reader's ruins with such fragments, Markson has also managed to electrify his novel with an almost unbearable emotional impact. Where Reader ultimately leads us is shattering.

Reader's Block

Dalkey Archive

"Alive with the pleasures of language . . . terribly funny, formidably intelligent."--Washington Post

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MARKSON, DAVID. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by MARKSON, DAVID

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MARKSON, DAVID. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Springer's Progress

Going Down

The Ballad of Dingus Magee

Wittgensteins Mistress

Wittgenstein's Mistress

Wittgenstein's Mistress

Springer's Progress

Ballad of Dingus Magee

Reader's Block

Springer's Progress