Books about Surreal from Amazon.com

Jitterbug Perfume is an epic. which is to say, it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and doesn't conclude until nine o'clock tonight [Paris time]. It is a saga, as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle. The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. If the liquid in the bottle is actually is the secret essence of the universe, as some folks seem to think, it had better be discovered soon becaused it is leaking and there is only a drop of two left..
Price: $7.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Lucas Davenport's boss is about to lose her job as chief of police, his fiancée is distracted with wedding plans, and his house-remodeling project is at a standstill So when the FBI and DEA draft the Minneapolis cop to head off hit woman Clara Rinker's bloody murder spree, he's glad to oblige. The lady killer and the killer lady have tangled before in Sandford's Prey series, and their personal history seasons this fast-paced story of mayhem, murder, and revenge. After Rinker barely survives an assassination attempt that destroys her unborn baby and kills her lover, the son of a Mexican drug lord, she sets out to destroy the mobsters who ordered the hit, a journey that brings her into Davenport's sights again and also puts him back in action alongside a woman agent with whom he was once involved. But it's the grudging respect and even affection Sandford hints at between Rinker and Lucas that takes this crisp, confident thriller beyond the limitations of the genre and makes the characters flesh-and-blood human beings. A standout in a terrific series! --Jane Adams.
Price: $3.74 [Notify me when price goes down.]

There's a new genre rising from the underground Its name: BIZARRO For years, readers have been asking for a category of fiction dedicated to the weird, crazy, cult side of storytelling that has become a staple in the film industry (with directors such as David Lynch, Takashi Miike, Tim Burton, and Lloyd Kaufman) but has been largely ignored in the literary world, until now. The Bizarro Starter Kit features short novels and story collections by ten of the leading authors in the bizarro genre: D. Harlan Wilson, Carlton Mellick III, Jeremy Robert Johnson, Kevin L Donihe, Gina Ranalli, Andre Duza, VIncent W. Sakowski, Steve Beard, John Edward Lawson, and Bruce Taylor..
Price: $5.68 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Get to know the colorful cast of characters at the Granite State Trailerpark, where Flora in number 11 keeps more than a hundred guinea pigs andscreams at people to stay away from her babies, Claudel in number 5 thinks he is lucky until his wife burns down their trailer and runs off with Howie Leeke, and Noni in number 7 has telephone conversations with Jesus and tells the police about them. In this series of related short stories, Russell Banks offers gripping, realistic portrayals of individual Americans and paints a portrait of New England life that is at once dark, witty, and revealing.

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Price: $1.70 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This is the sixth book in Creation's highly-acclaimed Persistence of Vision film book series. Alejandro Jodorowsky remains one of cinema's most controversial and influential film-makers. In 1968 his scandalous debut, Fando & Lis, caused a riot in Mexico, forcing the Chilean-born director into exile in France. The following year, his ultra-violent underground smash hit El Topo inagurated the Midnight Movie phenomenon, transforming its creator into a counter-culture icon championed by John Lennon and, latterly, Marilyn Manson. Anarchy and Alchemy features • Exclusive interviews • Rare images • Exhaustive chapters on all Jodorowsky's films including the mesmerising cine-trip The Holy Mountain, the award-winning Oedipal circus show Santa Sangre • The aborted Dune project with Salvador Dali, Pink Floyd and H R Giger • Texts on Jodorowsky's 60s terror-theatre outfit The Panic Movement • His world mime tour with Marcel Marceau • His graphic novel collaborations with Moebius.
Price: $12.21 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Praise for The Swing Voter of Staten Island:

FROM KIRKUS REVIEWS:

Having first dazzled Weird-Lit ultra-hipsters with The Fuck-Up in 1997, Nersesian (Unlubricated, 2004, etc.) rounds out a busy decade with a dystopian epic.

Combining sci-fi space/time-warping, Unabomber-style political ranting and an overall air of goose-bump paranoia, this is one turbo-charged trip through a version of the 1980s no one could love. A gumbo of Weather Underground, S.L.A. and Black Panther droogies take over New York City in the '70s, splashing dirty bombs helter-skelter. Manhattan basically kaput, the federal government designates a former "military simulation city," a radioactive desert outside Vegas, as the New New York. The geographic layout's a convincing copy, but landmark names are corrupted: "Vampire Stake Building," "Onion Square," "Rock & Filler Center." And the Gangs of New York rule, with the Boroughs divided between Piggers (or We the Peoplers) and Crappers (All Created Equalers), political parties at mutual knifepoint. Into this bedlam drops protagonist Uli, a Manchurian Candidate knock-off programmed by mysterious nefarious forces to assassinate Dropt, a rival candidate to Pigger Mayor Shub. Hizzonner spouts masterful Orwellian jive ("He's intractable in a business that requires a lot of tractoring!"), and the citizens, when not overdosing on creepy new drugs, fantasize returning to the real Manhattan. But much to the fury of Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg, Ronald Reagan is running for re-election. If Staten Island's borough president allies with the national Democrats and Reagan loses, nobody gets to go back, because it's only budget-crunching Ronnie who wants to deep-six the fake New York. The loony-tune plot merely serves as a launch pad for Nersesian's meditations on Vietnam-era military insanity, big-city frenzy and the Tower of Babel capacities of language.

A sharp, strange read: Imagine William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick sharing a needle."

FROM PUBLISHERS WEEKLY:

Nersesian has carved out his niche with novels like The Fuck-Up and Unlubricated about New Yorkers trapped in their own ugly lives. His sixth is similarly sordid but uncharacteristically fantastical. Over the course of a week in a counterfactual 1980, amnesiac protagonist Uli must navigate a reproduction of New York City built in Nevada after the original was destroyed. He quickly learns that the city is divided into territories run by Piggers and Crappers (“political parties, or gangs”) and he has been programmed to assassinate the Crapper candidate for mayor. Manhattan and Brooklyn belong to Crappers, the Bronx and Queens are held by Piggers; Staten Island is independent, and thus constitutes the swing vote in the mayoral and--more importantly--presidential elections. “Rescue City” consists of smaller, cheaper versions of the original: bridges are made of rotten boards, famous landmarks are redubbed corrupt versions of their real names (e.g., Rock and Filler Center for Rockefeller Center and Onion Square for Union Square), and the East River suffers from a clogged drain. Uli mingles with a wide array of desperate characters while trying to uncover his identity and determine what, if anything, he should be fighting for. Nersesian's novel is exceptionally bleak and bewildering, and his fans would expect nothing less.

Up until now, Arthur Nersesian’s six novels (including The Fuck-Up, MTV/Pocket Books, which has sold over 100,000 copies) have focused on the tragicomedy of fin de siècle New York City. Now, in his boldest novel yet, he has broken through into a new landscape that at once fuses the real with the surreal, the psychological with the psychedelic. Actual characters from the 1960s and 1970s—Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Daniel Ellsberg, and the Berrigan Brothers—are but a few of the folks who populate this alternate version of American history.

The Swing Voter of Staten Island takes place over the course of a week in November 1981. Uli, suffering from amnesia, finds himself on a mission, but isn’t quite sure what it is, who sent him, or even who he is. He ventures across the perilous wilds of New York City, through abandoned neighborhoods and burned-out battlefields. But Uli soon awakens to the awful fact that this isn’t New York City at all. He is a key player in a strange, alternate history of both his city and country.

Uli has found himself trapped in New York, Nevada, isolated in the center of an impenetrable desert—where the US military was able to transform one of its “military situation cities” into a temporary refuge center, designed to resemble New York. While battling to make sense of his surroundings, Uli slowly remembers who he is and his own culpability in creating the current situation.

Arthur Nersesian is the author of six novels, including the smash hit The Fuck-Up (MTV/Pocket Books), Chinese Takeout (HarperCollins), Manhattan Loverboy (Akashic Books), Suicide Casanova (Akashic Books), and dogrun (MTV/Pocket Books). He lives in New York City.

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Price: $2.85 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, and Rene Magritte—among many other prominent surrealist artists—surely would not have enjoyed such success or notoriety in their lifetimes if it weren’t for Edward James. He kept money flowing into Dalí’s pockets and was the subject of Magritte’s famous painting La Reproduction Interdite. But James was more than a wealthy connoisseur of art. He was a poet, and ultimately an visionary in his own right, as evidenced by the construction of his vast and bizarre estate in Xilitla, Mexico: Las Pozas.

Award-winning biographer Margaret Hooks tells the strange, circuitous, and often tragic tale of this eccentric man and his surreal estate, captured exquisitely in photographs by Sally Mann, Michael Schuyt, Lourdes Almedia, and more.

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Price: $18.81 [Notify me when price goes down.]