Museum

FRIEDMAN, B.H.

Literature & Fiction

Fiction Collective 2

A group of people, trying to contend with the failure of hope that took place at the end of the sixties, withdraws from what they call "The Dynasty of the Million Lies" and creates a settlement in the woods of the far west. These refugees from our culture, trying to live a healthy, normal life as pioneers of a latter-day frontier, find they are forced to pay heavily for thier retreat in terms of sexuality, death and insanity. The novel consists of three parts: "Frankenstein", "The Children of Frankenstein" and "Palestine." The first section is a disjointed documentary collage expressing the violent chaos of the culture, the second is a narrative about the settlement with its communal and sexual experimentation, and the third, "Palestine," is a utopian vision of Isreal that takes place on a perfect kibbutz in which all problems are solved. 98.6 is a novel that marks the end of a generation of hope without giving in to hopelessness.

98.6: A Novel

Sukenick, Ronald

The Secret Table

Mirsky, Mark

Contemporary

The Talking Room

<p>The Talking Room reflects an apocalyptic vision of the late 20th century, seen through the eyes of a pregnant 13 year old who may or may not be a test tube baby. The Lesbian relationship between the mother J-wild, lost, beautiful-and competent Aunt V, a business woman, reveals itself to the reader as "the talking room" becomes the sounding board for endless fights, endless reconciliations. V's desperate search for the beloved J through the nights of waterfront bars is lightened by wildly comic excursions reminiscent of our great American humorists. With wit, poetic clarity and compassion, Marianne Hauser explores the paradoxes of our age-need for love yet flight from love, search for self yet self-destruction- a dilemma sared alike by today's heterosexual and homosexual world. The author's multifaceted view defies dogma or simplification as her characters draw us into their turbulent and deeply human drama.</p>

Hauser, Marianne

Genre Fiction

As told, or rather retold second-hand, by the narrator, Take It or Leave It relates the hilarious and amorous adventures of a young Frenchman who has been drafted into the U.S. Army and is being shipped Overseas to fight in Korea. The obsessed narrator retells, as best as he can, what the young man supposedly told him as they sat under a tree. He recounts how the young man escaped German persecution during World War Two, how he came to America and struggled to survive before joining the "rah rah spitshine" 82nd Airborne Division, and how, because of a "typical Army goof," he must travel in an old beat-up Buick Special from Fort Bragg to Camp Drum to collect the money the Army owes him, before he can set out for "the great journey cross-country" to San Francisco where he will embark for Overseas.Moving freely from past to present (and Vice Versa), and from place to place leap-frogging from digression to digression, Take It or Leave It explores new possibilities of narrative technique. Whie the story of Frenchy is being told, the narrator involves his listeners in digressive arguments about politics, sex, America, literature, laughter, death, and the telling of the story itself. Consequently, as this "exaggerated second-hand tale to be read aloud either standing or sitting" progresses, it also deviates from its course, and eventually cancels itself as the voices of the fiction multiply. Take It or Leave It, the ultimate postmodern novel, makes a shamble of traditional fiction and conventional modes of writing, and does so with effrontery and laughter.

Take It or Leave It

Federman, Raymond

Literary

Babble

Baumbach, Jonathan

Babble, a babybook for our time, is a fiction about (1) loss of innocence, (2) rites of passage, (3) family life, (4) babies, (5) baby-sitters, (6) war and peace, (7) robots, (8) raw youth, (9) crime and punishment, (10) stories, (11) sex and death, (12) language, (13) advanced education, (14) love, (15) the invention of culture, (16) mystery, (17) play, (18) fathers and sons, (19) superheroes, (20) the dehumanization of art. Babble is a baby book for grown ups, a comic novel about entering and losing the world, an adult dream of lost babyhood. Like Baumbach's previous novel, Reruns, though moving perhaps one step further out (or in), Babble depicts our world through a screen of metaphors, using the stuff of dreams, memory and cultural fantasy.

Humor & Satire

Jarrel likes to play with dynamite, Jeeter likes to drive pick-up trucks down muddy Adirondack logging roads at 50 miles an hour, sideways. Both of them, flirting with sanity, plot to dynamite a third brother, Lester, from a mental institution. The elements of that plot include a woman farmer, an Indian who just may be able to fly, and of course, Lester, whose only crime against sanity is the ability to sit in a wheelbarrow, pick his scabs, and question the sky. Together, the five of them structure a fragile existence in the north country of upper New York State, an area where farming has ceased to be fashionable or profitable but merely a series of deadly exercises in survival. What happens when the caprice of their personalities, the struggle for existence, and the authorities chip away at their unstable cohesiveness, provides the backbone of the novel. By turns comic, tragic, and clumsy, Temporary Sanity produces a mind that questions not just the limits of sanity, but indeed its rightful continent.

Temporary Sanity

Glynn, Thomas

A man removing the skin of a woman and wearing it, a package containing human wrists that spawn human body parts, a trip through Tennessee searching for fictional material, the ubiquitous number 43, are four separate stories that come together to form Moving Parts. You follow the author through several communes, greyhound bus trips, and a Cherokee burial ground, always searching but not finding anything. The obsession of the author with Wendy Appel, the human wrists, the number 43, become his identity. Moving Parts is a unique look into the mind and traveling of the author.

Moving Parts

Katz, Steve

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Books by Fiction Collective 2