Showing results by author "Stephen Wright"

Rich in characters both heartbreaking and bloodcurdling, comic and horrific, The Amalgamation Polka is shot through with politics and dreams, and it captures great swaths of the American experience, from village to metropolis to plantation, from the Erie Canal to the Bahamas, from Bloody Kansas to the fulfillment of the killing fields. Yet for all the brutality and tragedy, this novel is exuberant in the telling and its wide compassion.

Sardonic, searing, seductive, and surreal, the award-winning Meditations in Green is regarded by many as the best novel of the Vietnam War. It is a kaleidoscopic collage that whirls about an indelible array of images and characters: perverted Winkly, who opted for the army to stay off of welfare; eccentric Payne, who’s obsessed with the film he’s making of the war; and bucolic Claypool, who’s irrevocably doomed to a fate worse than death, just to name a few.

Dash and Dot—husband and wife; self-professed descendants of aliens from the M31 galaxy—are the world’s most in-demand lecturers on the UFO circuit. They live in a decommissioned church in the middle of America, with a radar dish on its steeple and a spaceship in the sanctuary. Their children have the run of the house when Dash and Dot are away.

An extraordinary wartime memoir, combining the best kind of adventure story with a coming-of-age testimony of unforgettable resonance and poignancy.

September 2011, Halkidiki, Northern Greece: A solitary 86-year-old man gazes across an Aegean headland, knowing that he must finally confront his past. He begins to write...September 1939, Nieppe, Northern France:14 year-old Stephen is living with his family, 25 kilometres from Ypres. His French mother battles with her encroaching blindness.