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Book List - WEIRD books to peruse

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<?=$who;?> WEIRD books to peruse
List created by starman on Oct 23, 2015
List Votes: 2 Books: 66 Contributors: 1 Watchers: 2 List Type: Friends
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The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret & Miriam Shlesinger (Translator) & Sond...
A birthday-party magician whose hat tricks end in horror and gore; a girl parented by a major household appliance; the possessor of the lowest IQ in the Mossad -- such are the denizens of Etgar Keret’s dark and fertile mind. The Girl on the Fridge contains the best of Keret’s first...  more

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Samuel Johnson Is Indignant by Lydia Davis
From one of our most imaginative and inventive writers, a crystalline collection of perfectly modulated, sometimes harrowing and often hilarious investigations into the multifaceted ways in which human beings perceive each other and themselves. A couple suspects their friends think them boring;...  more

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Tall Tales with Short Cocks Vol. 2: A Bizarro Press Anthology (Volume 2) by Danger Sl...
Tall Tales with Short Cocks returns with 15 new stories from Bizarro Press. Featuring "The Apple of My iPhone" by Danger Slater, "Laser Tits" by Justin Grimbol, "The Interstellar Quest for Snack Cakes" by Patrick D'Orazio, and many more!

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Grudge Punk by John McNee
Grudgehaven: ?A city lost to the darkness, where acid rain drums on a hundred thousand corrugated iron rooftops and cold, mechanized eyeballs squint out of every filth-smeared window.? From the twisted mind of author John McNee come nine tales of brutality and betrayal from a city like no other....  more

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Beer Run of the Dead by D. F. Noble
An epic drunk romp through the wasteland of a zombie apocalypse, Beer Run of the Dead is the first book in a series sure to wet your whistle. Follow Kip, Rock and Steady, as they struggle to survive and stay completely shit faced in the face of certain undead doom. These three unlikely heroes...  more

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The Possibility of an Island (Vintage International) by Michel Houellebecq
A worldwide phenomenon and the most important French novelist since Camus, Michel Houellebecq now delivers his magnum opus–a tale of our present circumstances told from the future, when humanity as we know it has vanished.Surprisingly poignant, philosophically compelling, and occasionally...  more

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Closing Time and Other Stories by Jack Ketchum
From award-winning author and storyteller Jack Ketchum comes nineteen bleak stories of loss and pain. This is the author's newest collection, and includes his Bram Stoker Award-winning novella "Closing Time." Also included: "Returns," "Damned If You Do," "Station Two," "Elusive," "Papa," "The...  more

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Donners of the Dead by Karina Halle
Jake McGraw was unlike anyone I?d ever known. He was brash, rude, unapologetic and arrogant; chauvinistic, close-minded, and terribly stubborn. He was built like a tree, tall with a hard chest and wide shoulders and hands that looked like they could wrestle a bear. He was a cigar-chomping,...  more

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Beasts and Children by Amy Parker
In the tradition of Lorrie Moore, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Rebecca Lee, this debut story collection cuts into the sometimes dark heart of the American family From the tense territory of a sagging, grand porch in Texas to a gated community in steamy Thailand to a lonely apartment in nondescript...  more

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The Tattoo Murder Case by Akimitsu Takagi & Deborah Boliver Boehm (Translator)
Miss Kinue Nomura survived World War II only to be murdered in Tokyo, her severed limbs left behind. Gone is that part of her that bore one of the most beautiful full-body tattoos ever rendered by her late father. Kenzo Matsushita, a young doctor, must assist his detective brother who is in...  more

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Blood Sugar by Nicole Blackman
After one small printing from Incommunicado Press that quickly blasted out of stock and out of print, Akashic is proud to bring back this disturbing and evocative collection of new work and selected poems previously featured in Blackman's popular chapbooks Pretty, Sweet, and Nice. It is futile...  more

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Amphigorey Also by Edward Gorey
Drawings (including thirty-two pages in color), captions, and verse showcasing Gorey’s unique talents and humor. “The Glorious Nosebleed,” “The Utter Zoo,” “The Epiplectic Bicycle,” and fourteen other selections.

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The Recently Deflowered Girl: The Right Thing to Say on Every Dubious Occasion by Edw...
An infectiously funny guide to post-deflowerment decorum, with illustrations by a master of the absurd. For more than half a century Miss Hyacinthe Phypps has been offering guidance on proper behavior. Her simple rules of propriety and common sense have helped a generation of girls over the...  more

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We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory
Harrison is the Monster Detective, a storybook hero. Now he’s in his mid-thirties and spends most of his time not sleeping. Stan became a minor celebrity after being partially eaten by cannibals. Barbara is haunted by the messages carved upon her bones. Greta may or may not be a...  more

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Requiem For A Paper Bag by Davy Rothbart
Requiem For A Paper Bag: Celebrities and Civilians Tell Stories of the Best Lost, Tossed, and Found Items from Around the World Hey! My name is Davy. I make a magazine called Found. We publish notes & letters that folks find on the street. I asked my favorite writers, musicians,...  more

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Deep Dark Fears by Fran Krause
We all have strange, irrational fears?from seeing ghosts in the bedroom mirror to being sucked into a mall escalator or finding yourself miles below the ocean's surface on the deck of a sunken ship. In Deep Dark Fears, animator, illustrator, and cartoonist Fran Krause brings these fears to life...  more

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The Dog Said Bow-Wow by Michael Swanwick
Science fiction and fantasy's most adept short-story author reinvents some classic themes in an engaging collection that includes three of his Hugo award–winning stories. These smart expansions of traditional themes summon dinosaurs, dragons, peril in space, myths, faeries, and time...  more

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Nothing Is Strange by Mike Russell
20 mind-expanding short stories. Inspiring, liberating, otherworldly, magical, surreal, bizarre, funny, disturbing, unique... all of these words have been used to describe the stories of Mike Russell so put on your top hat, open your third eye and enjoy: Nothing Is Strange

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The Handsome Squirm by Carlton Mellick III
A tale of marriage, child-rearing, and vaginas that eat people. A man is arrested in the middle of the night. He doesn't know why. He doesn't remember committing any crime. The cops drop him off in a small community in the middle of the woods where a wedding is about to begin. It is his...  more

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Kill Ball by Carlton Mellick III
In a city where all humans live inside of plastic bubbles, exotic dancers are being murdered in the rubbery streets by a mysterious stalker known only as Kill Ball.

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Ugly Heaven by Carlton Mellick III
The afterlife is not what you think... Heaven is no longer a paradise. It was once a blissful utopia full of wonders far beyond human comprehension. But that was a long, long time ago. The afterlife is now in ruins. It has become an ugly, lonely wasteland populated by strange monstrous beasts,...  more

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Dangerous Space by Kelley Eskridge
Dangerous Space showcases a collection of seven seductive stories by Kelley Eskridge, whose novel Solitaire was a New York Times Notable Book, with an introduction by Geoff Ryman (author of Was and Air). The opening story, "Strings," takes us to a world that tightly controls musical...  more

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Little is Left To Tell by Steven Hendricks
Fiction. Readers enter a narrative rabbit hole through bedtime stories that Mr. Fin, a man with dementia, conjures for his long-lost son. Virginia the Wolf writes her last novel to lure her daughter home. A rabbit named Hart Crane must eat words to speak, while passing zeppelins drop bombs. Mr....  more

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RigorMortie: Death by Sex Puppet by Dick Bouvier & December Bouvier
RigorMortie, Death by Sex Puppet, a novel about stained love, lumpy sex and mind-altering odors, is quickly developing a cult following for its outrageous, "don't-drink-anything-while-you're-reading-because-you'll-spit-it-out-on-your-shirt" humor, offensive characters, and the authors'...  more

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The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau
Following the twin trails of desire and depravity to a shocking, sadistic paradise - a garden in China where torture is practiced as an art form - a dissolute Frenchman discovers the true depths of degradation beyond his prior bourgeois imaginings. Entranced by a resolute Englishwoman whose...  more

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Apeshit by Carlton III Mellick
Friday the 13th meets Visitor Q. Apeshit is Mellick's love letter to the great and terrible B-horror movie genre. Six trendy teenagers (three cheerleaders and three football players) go to an isolated cabin in the mountains for a weekend of drinking, partying, and crazy sex, only to find...  more

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Tall Tales with Short Cocks: A Bizarro Press Anthology (Volume 1) by Arthur Graham &a...
No description available.

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Altmann's Tongue: Stories and a Novella by Brian Evenson
No description available.

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The Grimscribe's Puppets by Unknown Author
No description available.

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At Fear's Altar by Richard Gavin
?Richard Gavin's new collection has some of the finest weird fiction I have ever read, tales that are unique and effective. His sequel to H. P. Lovecraft's 'The Hound' is especially delicious. This is a wonderful book, highly recommended!? ?W. H. Pugmire ?Richard Gavin is one of the bright new...  more

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I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
You will be scared. But you won?t know why? I?m thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It?s always there. Always. Jake and I have a real connection, a rare and intense attachment. What has it been...a month? I?m very attracted to him. Even though he isn?t striking,...  more

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Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy: Curiouser and Curiouser (The Blackwell Philosophy...
The perfect companion to Lewis Carroll's classic book and director Tim Burton's March 2010 remake of Alice in Wonderland Alices Adventures in Wonderland has fascinated children and adults alike for generations. Why does Lewis Carroll introduce us to such oddities as blue caterpillars who...  more

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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded: The Full Text of Lewis Carroll's Novel with...
This gorgeous 150th anniversary edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is also a revelatory work of scholarship.      Alice's Adventures in Wonderland--published 150 years ago in 1865--is a book many of us love and feel we know well. But it turns out we have only scratched the surface....  more

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Stories V! by Scott McClanahan
The final installment of Scott McClanahan's collections of short stories, following Stories and Stories II.

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Stories 2 by Scott McClanahan
The sequel to Scott McClanahan's acclaimed earlier collection.... of stories about West Virginia!

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Westward Weird by Martin H. Greenberg (Editor) & Kerrie Hughes (Editor)
From a Western circus where monsters and heroes collide, to a Civil War robot that clanks into battle, to a mining family that encounters parallel universes, Westward Weird features thirteen original stories that open the Old West to new frontiers of science fiction and fantasy. Introduction...  more

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The American Book of the Dead by Henry Baum
Eugene Myers is working on a novel about the end of the world. Meanwhile, he discovers his daughter doing porn online and his marriage is coming to an end. When he begins dreaming about people who turn out to be real, he wonders if his novel is real as well. Eugene Myers may just be the one to...  more

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Puppet Skin by Danger Slater
Hannah graduates from middle school on Friday. That's the day she transforms into a living puppet, like her parents and teachers before her. No longer a human girl made of flesh and feelings, but a perfect wooden new self, whose strings lead up from her limbs into an endless black void above....  more

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The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by...
A must-have for anyone with a passion for shopping carts and a love of the great outdoors. In The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America author Julian Montague has created an elaborate classification system of abandoned shopping carts, accompanied by photographic documentation of actual...  more

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People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves To Unsuspecting Bystan...
In People Who Don't Know They're Dead, Gary Leon Hill tells a family story of how his Uncle Wally and Aunt Ruth, Wally's sister, came to counsel dead spirits who took up residence in bodies that didn't belong to them. And in the telling, Hill elucidates much of what we know, or...  more

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Up Shit Creek: A Collection of Horrifyingly True Wilderness Toilet Misadventures by J...
We all know HOW TO SHIT IN THE WOODS ”but do we dare? After reading this uproarious collection of "fecal misadventures" from a veteran river-rafting guide and yarn spinner extraordinaire, you may think twice before venturing out into the great beyond ... or even down the hall to your...  more

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How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art by Kathleen...
An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art Our once-pristine wildlands are threatened by ever increasing problems of pollution. Since its first publication in 1989, How to Shit in the Woods has been adopted by outdoor enthusiasts everywhere as part of the solution. In this updated...  more

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The Sea Came in at Midnight by Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson is a visionary novelist whose time has come. Considered by many the secret heir to Pynchon and DeLillo, he has steadily acquired a passionate following of readers over the course of five previous novels. Now, with The Sea Came at Midnight, Erickson delivers a masterwork of intense...  more

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The ZOO WHERE YOU'RE FED TO GOD: A NOVEL by Michael Ventura
No description available.

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The ZOO WHERE YOU'RE FED TO GOD by Michael Ventura
The acclaimed screenwriter of Echo Park offers a riveting novel of a man's descent into madness. After a painful divorce, Michael Ventura finds himself at the zoo--hearing voices and seeing into the souls of animals. Through the love of an extraordinary woman, he slowly begins to reconnect with...  more

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Frozen to Life: A Personal Mortality Experiment by D.J. MacLennan
How far would you go to avoid death? Frozen to Life is the true account of the author's extraordinary answer to this question: If he cannot escape the constraints of a 'natural' lifespan, he will, upon his death, have his severed head preserved in a vat of liquid nitrogen in the Arizona...  more

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The Household Spirit: A Novel by Tod Wodicka
In this remarkable novel, Tod Wodicka, author of All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well, has crafted a luminous story of a most curious friendship. There?s something wrong next door. At least, that?s what neighbors Howie Jeffries and Emily Phane both...  more

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Fugue State by Brian Evenson & Brian Evenson
“Brilliant...Evenson manages to capture madness with a masterful tone. The specific genius of Fugue State rests in subtlety, in Evenson’s ability to maintain suspense, dread and paranoia through utter linguistic control.”?Time Out New York “19 satisfying and surreal...  more

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The Divinity Student (Buzzcity Press First Editions) by Michael Cisco
Fiction, with artwork by Harry O. Morris.

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The Divinity Student and Others: Novels and Stories of Michael Cisco by Michael Cisco...
Michael Cisco's surreal horror is legendary and has a large cult following. Cisco also has the admiration of the best writers in the field. But never before have his works been collected in hardcover form. This collection of four novels and a short story volume uses the author's preferred texts....  more

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Celebrant by Michael Cisco
Antic world-traveller, deKlend, is in search of the holy city of Votu, where time runs backwards and gangs of scavenging Pigeon Girls and Rabbit Girls are locked in strange rivalries. Celebrant is a sweeping fantasy of pilgrimage and reincarnation, and a travellers' guide to altered states of...  more

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The Art of Horrible People by John Skipp
"Savor this book. Savor this writer." - from the introduction by Josh Malerman, author of Bird Box From Hollywood film studios to high-security psychiatric facilities, there is an art to being a horrible person. Splatterpunk legend John Skipp turns the mirror back on ourselves, showing us all...  more

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The Troika by Stepan Chapman
Beneath the glare of three purple suns, manipulated by unseen forces, three travelers cross an endless desert: Alex, who wanted to be a machine, Naomi, the human corpsicle, and Eva, who escaped the whale emperor of her native land.... 1997 winner of the Philip K. Dick Award

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Beyond the Door by Jeffrey Thomas
From the wildly imaginative storyteller behind Punktown and other strange worlds comes the novella BEYOND THE DOOR. Two strangers meet in a train station and begin swapping stories -- stories that eerily interweave and grow more and more disturbing and bizarre. The headless undead...a gruesome...  more

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Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2016) by David Sedaris
From bestselling author David Sedaris, for the first time in print: selections from the diaries that are the source of his remarkable autobiographical essays. For nearly four decades, David Sedaris has faithfully kept a diary in which he records his thoughts and observations on the odd and...  more

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Dark Discoveries: Issue 26 by Jonathan Maberry & David Liss & Norman Patridge
No description available.

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Screw the Bitch : Divorce Tactics for Men by Dick Hart & Victor Santoro
No description available.

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Go, Mutants!: A Novel by Larry Doyle
The author of I Love You, Beth Cooper returns with an ingenious contemporary satire set in an alternate universe populated by the aliens, mutants, and atomic monsters of B-movie legend. It came to Earth . . . and now its spawn goes to high school. Earth has survived repeated alien...  more

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Hypochondria Can Kill : A Disease for Every Occasion, an Illness for Every Symptom by...
"There’s so much to worry about. Being tall can mean an early demise. Being short can kill, too. Then there are the perils of golfer’s liver and Chinese Restaurant syndrome ..." A witty, highly entertaining compendium of the many obscure potential killers that lurk in modern...  more

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Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art by Christopher Moore
It is the color of the Virgin Mary's cloak, a dazzling pigment desired by artists, an exquisite hue infused with danger, adventure, and perhaps even the supernatural. It is . . .Sacre Bleu In July 1890, Vincent van Gogh went into a cornfield and shot himself. Or did he? Why would an...  more

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The World Is on Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse by Joni Tevis
Grappling with a fear rooted in her by the end times sermons of her Southern youth, Joni Tevis seeks out apocalypse, destruction, and their aftermath in this heart-wrenching, but ultimately triumphant collection. Mining sources as disparate as the Bible and nuclear history, Tevis couples...  more

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My Life as a White Trash Zombie (White Trash Zombie, Bk 1) by Diana Rowland
Angel Crawford is a loser. Living with her alcoholic deadbeat dad in the swamps of southern Louisiana, she's a high school dropout with a pill habit and a criminal record who's been fired from more crap jobs than she can count. Now downward spiral her life has taken. That is, until the...  more

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The Sot-weed Factor by John Barth
No description available.

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The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell
Before The Exorcist and Rosemary?s Baby, there was The Case Against Satan   By the twentieth century, the exorcism had all but vanished, wiped out by modern science and psychology. But Ray Russell?praised by Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro as a sophisticated practitioner of Gothic...  more

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Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: Big Questions From Tiny Mortals About Death by Caitlin ...
This book answers real questions from kids about death, dead bodies, and decomposition. Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. The best questions come from kids. What would happen to an astronaut’s body if it were pushed out of a space...  more

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Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez
No description available.

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List Comments

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Comment added 5/5/16 by starman:
Thank you, I had not heard of those other Edward Gorey titles!

Comment added 3/27/16 by Donald H. (donaldmoon):
Great to see artist Edward Gorey listed. His claim to fame would have to be his many odd-sized 5.5" x 6" books, such as THE GASHLYCRUMB TINIES, collected in: AMPHIGOREY, AMPHIGOREY TOO, & AMPHIGOREY ALSO. Don't miss T.S. Eliot's "BOOK OF PRACTICAL CATS"!

Comment added 3/26/16 by starman:
Thanks, Donald. I try to put books here that don't fit into 'normal' categories, but which look interesting enough to read. Sometimes I need a little variety!

Comment added 1/12/16 by Donald H. (donaldmoon):
I haven't read any of the books, therefore this list is a valuable resource for "New Weird". Hope you'll add more as you encounter more of the same. --donaldmoon