Before achieving critical acclaim as a novelist, David Markson paid the rent by writing several crime novels, including two featuring the private detective Harry Fannin. Together here in one volume, these works are now available to a new generation of readers. In Epitaph for a Tramp, Fannin isn'...
In recent novels, which have been called "hypnotic," "stunning," and "exhilarating," David Markson has created his own personal genre. In this new work, The Last Novel, an elderly author (referred to only as "Novelist") announces that since this will be his final effort, he has "carte blanche to ...
The Barnes & Noble Review This experimental work is an enthralling amalgamation of anecdotes, aphorisms, and quotations from writers and artists, interspersed with self-reflexive comments by the Writer who has assembled them. As the title implies, this is certainly not a novel -- not in the gene...
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 re...
“You old mule-sniffer,” he asked himself thoughtfully, alone in the jail, “jest what is it, anyway, makes you so bad?”But he believed he knew, really. “It’s because I never had me a mother,” he decided, “to guide me onto the correct paths of life.”For that matter he had never had a father either,...
Still, one would be pleased if the pope was not the same pope who made people burn Sappho's poems. When I state that any of these things were done or said, incidentally, what I more truthfully mean is that they were alleged to have been done or said, of course. As it was similarly alleged that Gi...
Probably I’d busted in on the middle of his favorite Bach cantata. His greasy black curls fell into his eyes when he shook himself.He came out of it but his co-ordination was all loused up. He started to reach for the back of his skull with his right hand, then fell forward again and clutched the...