Edwin Mullhouse, a novelist at 10, is mysteriously dead at 11. As a memorial, Edwin's bestfriend, Jeffrey Cartwright, decides that the life of this great American writer must be told. He follows Edwin's development from his preverbal first noises through his love for comic books to the fulfillment of his literary genius in the remarkable novel, Cartoons.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • The author of Voices in the Night reveals the mesmerizing journey of an American dreamer as he walks a haunted line between fantasy and reality, madness and ambition, art and industry. “This wonderful, wonder-full book is a fable and phantasmagoria of the sources of our century.” —The New York Times Book Review Young Martin Dressler begins his career as an industrious helper in his father's cigar store. In the course of his restless young manhood, he makes a swift and eventful rise to the top, accompanied by two sisters--one a dreamlike shadow, the other a worldly business partner. As the eponymous Martin's vision becomes bolder and bolder, a sense of doom builds piece-by-hypnotic piece until this mesmerizing journey reaches its bitter-sweet conclusion.

Thirteen darkly comic stories, Dangerous Laughter is a mesmerizing journey that stretches the boundaries of the ordinary world.

A parody of a literary biography starring a 10-year-old novelist who is mysteriously dead at 11—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Martin Dressler. As a memorial, Edwin Mullhouse's best friend, Jeffrey Cartwright, decides that the life of this great American writer must be told. He follows Edwin's development from his preverbal first noises through his love for comic books to the fulfillment of his literary genius in the remarkable novel, Cartoons.

Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude," an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws, who lug their furniture with them into his cell. When Cincinnatus is led out to be executed, he simply wills his executioners out of existence: they disappear, along with the whole world they inhabit.

Designed as a companion to The Columbia Literary History of the United States, this compilation of 31 major essays covers the American novel from the 1700s to the present, although the majority deal with the 20th century. Within each era, themes, genres, and topics such as realism, gender, romance, and technology are discussed in depth, as well as modern Canadian, Caribbean, and Latin American fiction. Each essayist selects only the authors who best illustrate the topic, thus subtly skewing the view of the literary scene at that time. The volume also covers women, minorities, popular fiction, and the book marketplace. ISBN 0-231-07360-7: $59.95.

This is the only comprehensive, annotated bibliography of writing about biography. Rollyson, a biographer and scholar of biography, includes chapters on the history of biography (beginning in the Greco-Roman period and concluding with biographers such as Leon Edel and Richard Ellmann). Ample sections on psychobiography, the new feminist biography, and on biographers who appear in works of fiction, are also included. Cited in many recent books on the genre of biography, Biography: An Annotated Bibliography, is an essential research tool as well as a clearly written work for those wishing to browse through the commentary on this important genre.

Pretexts of Authority describes the Renaissance rhetoric of authorship and authority by examining the textual locus where this rhetoric appears in its most concentrated and complex form - the preface. In the process, it shows how the notion of authorship changed in a shift of systems of authorization during the Renaissance, a shift that coincides with the roots of the modern public sphere and with the change from religion to science and the public good as the intellectual court of appeal for legitimizing authorship. The author focuses on prefatory materials to kinds of texts that most fully exemplify the problem of self-authorization during the Renaissance. First, he examines Protestant prefaces, notably Luther's preface to his collected works and Milton's antiprelatical tracts. These works stand at the center of a rhetorical crisis; having abrogated the authority of the Catholic church through an appeal to the conscience of the individual, reformers found it necessary to forge a persona that could authorize their discourse without implying an authorizing will independent of God's. At the same time, these texts must attempt to close off means of authorization to potentially proliferating imitators. The second group of prefaces the author examines is to scientific works, notably those of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, who faced problems analogous to those of the Protestant reformers in their attempts to set aside Aristotelian authority without seeming to establish a personal authority that interrupts the transparent, impersonal discourse of scientific inquiry. The book argues that in both sets of texts the rhetorical quandary can be resolved only through recourse to the nascent notion of common sense, which allows an author to garner authority from an assumed bond with the audience. Authors no longer need to posit a privileged and suspect relation with the "master texts of Scripture" and the "Book of Nature," but can instead assume the mutual intelligibility of their text. This assumption is seen as the cause of the decline of the full-blown prefatory practice of the Renaissance.

A History of American Crime Fiction places crime fiction within a context of aesthetic practices and experiments, intellectual concerns, and historical debates generally reserved for canonical literary history. Toward that end, the book is divided into sections that reflect the periods that commonly organize American literary history, with chapters highlighting crime fiction's reciprocal relationships with early American literature, romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. It surveys everything from 17th-century execution sermons, the detective fiction of Harriet Spofford and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, to the films of David Lynch, HBO's The Sopranos, and the podcast Serial, while engaging a wide variety of critical methods. As a result, this book expands crime fiction's significance beyond the boundaries of popular genres and explores the symbiosis between crime fiction and canonical literature that sustains and energizes both.