Odyssey Editions: 36 books

Set in Mexico City during the early 1950s, Queer follows William Lee's hopeless pursuit of desire from bar to bar in the American expatriate scene. As Lee breaks down, the trademark Burroughsian voice emerges, a maniacal mix of self-lacerating humor and the Ugly American at his ugliest. Originally...

Five of Saul Bellow’s most moving, richly textured, and exquisitely plotted short stories make up this volume, each providing a history of personality and self-awakening. The title story, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” follows a musicologist narrator who for years has scattered wounding witticisms...

Who is Mr. Sammler? A Jewish intellectual educated in Western philosophy, a one-eyed Holocaust survivor, the future author of the greatest biography ever written of H.G. Wells ... or merely the trusted confidant of countless eccentric New Yorkers, a "registrar of follies"? Through the chaotic streets...

In More Die of Heartbreak, our erratic narrator explains to his audience that he must abandon Paris for the Midwest. Of course, Kenneth merely wants to be closer to his beloved uncle, the world-famous botanist Benn Crader, to receive the older man’s worldly wisdom. The mercurial Benn, however, struggles...

What if a lookalike stranger stole your name, usurped your biography and went around the world pretending to be you? In this tour de force of fact and fiction, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring the State of Israel, promoting...

The Armies of the Night chronicles the famed October 1967 March on the Pentagon, in which all of the old and new Left—hippies, yuppies, Weathermen, Quakers, Christians, feminists, and intellectuals—came together to protest the Vietnam War. Alongside his contemporaries, Mailer went, witnessed,...

The author of twelve books, including the bestselling Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, Musicophilia, and Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks is internationally renowned for his compassionate approach to patients affected by profound neurological disorders. Yet when an accident on an uninhabited...

Modern life rests on two electromagnetic wave platforms: knowledge and power. The power platform is where the knowledge platform was in 1993. Emanating from the United States, digital mobile and Internet networks wrapped around the world, changing societies and economies in just a few years. The hundreds...

The first of Louise Erdrich’s polysymphonic novels set in North Dakota – a fictional landscape that, in Erdrich’s hands, has become iconic – Love Medicine is the story of three generations of Ojibwe families. Set against the tumultuous politics of the reservation,the lives of the Kashpaws and the Lamartines are a testament to the endurance of a people and the sorrows of history.

“With the lover everyday life recedes,” Roth writes—and exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, he presents in Deception the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction. This chilling and unconventional novel...

The all-knowing djinn of ancient lore can adopt many forms, but there are times when it chooses the limits of one body, one life. In this bewitching first novel, a djinn takes up residence in a restlessly brilliant woman, guiding her choices in life and love as she chases the satisfaction that eludes...

A new novella from the acclaimed author of Ceremony, and Almanac of the Dead. Leslie Marmon Silko is the author of the novels Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, and Gardens in the Dunes. She has also written many short stories, poems and essays, and her most recent book is a memoir, The Turquoise Ledge....

In The Harold Letters, Janice Van Horne, Clement Greenberg’s widow, has gathered together Greenberg’s letters as a young man to his then friend and confidant, Harold Lazarus. Spanning fifteen years, this collection of letters intimately chronicles the development of Greenberg’s taste and ideas....

With his uncanny wit and perception, Saul Bellow tells the story of Charlie Citrine, a young man whose life is reaching a critical moment. Over several years, Charlie’s almost obsessive love of literature has led him into a deep friendship with the renowned poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, and when Humboldt...