Dzanc Books: 412 books

Obsessed with bodies of water and haunted by a chorus of mysterious ladies, the unnamed protagonist desperately searches to find out what is real and what is a dream. A deep and vivid exploration of the passageway between life and death, The Mayflies is a lyrical and haunting look at loneliness, isolation, and what it truly means to move on.

An unusual first collection of fiction from a truly original and gifted Southern writer. The stories gathered here are wonderfully imaginative, erotically charged, unforgettable. Dean Paschal explores a variety of different worlds, like that of "Sautéing the Platygast," where evolution and the culinary arts have run amok.

A spare and chilling account of the day-to-day experience of Sloper, a janitor in a big-city office building, WASTE explores the import of the discarded--for those who generate it, those who dispose of it, and those who are themselves discarded. From the humble prospect of his station, Sloper uncovers ominous possibility in lives he barely brushes

William Goyen's second novel finds Marietta McGee-Chavez and her friends and acquaintances populate a world that is as much imagination as it is reality. And within it, they experience dreams and reality, sexual desire and loneliness, triumph and defeat.Subtitles, A Romance, In a Farther Country is an...

Completed while he was dying, William Goyen's Arcadio is one of the most affecting and imaginative farewells to life ever written. Arcadio, whose voice is inimitably Goyenesque, is a creature from beyond the normal walk of life. Half man, half woman, raised in a whorehouse and for years the veteran exhibitionist...

Part fable and part rhapsodic exploration of desire and loss, Half a Look of Cain bears Goyen's unmistakable artistic signature on every page. Told as a series of nested episodes, the novel is narrated alternately by a male nurse, his patient, and a lighthouse keeper. As boundaries blur and connections...

Savata--a beautiful, fair-skinned young woman who leaves a career on the night club circuit to become high priestess of her own church in Brooklyn--is the creation of one of America's most original, evocative, and highly regarded writers. William Goyen offers a wonderful blend of bold satire and dignified pathos in this touching, funny, short novel.

Goyen's fifth novel is a fable of sexuality, Texas country life in the first half of the twentieth century, religious revivalism, and the money madness and ecological destruction caused by the oil boom. The narrative is composed of the brief linked episodes and tales that are Goyen's trademark, and is written with an ear for the rhythms of regional speech that was his particular gift.

Baumbach describes our grip on both the present and the future with What Comes Next. He brings alive the public and private faces of hostility and anxiety through Chris Steiner, a university student on the verge of losing everything, starting with his mind.

Thirty-three year old Barry Munday is single minded in his pursuit of casual meaningless sex, but his life changes forever when an unfulfilled sexual encounter with a beautiful teenage girl meets with her angry, trumpet wielding father in a darkened theatre. Upon waking up in a hospital Barry discovers...

Set in Williams' fictional city of Leah, New Hampshire, Whipple's Castle is a mansion within the town where the Whipple family resides--husband, wife, three sons and a daughter, each with their own worries and dilemmas. Williams takes a close look at the darker side of small-town life through this family and their lives in this novel set in the 40's.

A story of terror and revenge, death, love, responsibility, the nature of reality-and an individual man. Luke Carr, whose wife and children have been killed in a plane crash, runs from his life, and work assignment, to the woods of New England where he’s also running from a series of anonymous letters being sent his way.

A love story that takes on all the passion and pain of early adulthood. A great look at post–World War II America."...warm and brilliant novel." --Chicago Tribune

John Cotter returns reluctantly to the smug New England town from where he had escaped via the G.I. Bill and foreign study fellowships. His older and much hated brother Bruce is dying of a brain tumor, and his possessive mother and stunned father requested John's presence. Upon his return he discovers...