The narrator, Reader, reflects on a lifetime of reading

A minimalist piece by the author of This Is Not a Novel follows the story of Novelist, an elderly author who sets out to pen his final work strictly in accordance with his own satisfaction, an endeavor that is challenged by his age, solitude, and the successes and failures of others. Original.

Product Description: Before achieving critical acclaim as a novelist, David Markson paid the rent by writing several crime novels, including two featuring the private detective Harry Fannin. Together here in one volume, these works are now available to a new generation of readers...read more

Following an incident in Greenwich Village, a trio of young Americans is drawn to Mexico where they will find themselves the object of curiosity and eventually drawn into violence. Reprint.

In a new novel that playfully deconstructs the novel, the author exposes himself--and the absurdities and tragedies of the creative life--in a funny, satirical, sometimes painful sendup of the novelist at work. Original.

Drifting somewhere between fiction, nonfiction, and memoir, the narrator, known as 'Writer,' takes readers on a fantastical fictional journey crammed with fascinating literary and artistic anecdotes, quotations, and cultural curiosities. Original. 25,000 first printing.

Product Description: "Alive with the pleasures of language . . . terribly funny, formidably intelligent."--Washington Post

Wittgenstein’s Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson―or anyone else―has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced―and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well―that she is the only person left on earth.Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy. And as she contemplates aspects of the troubled past which have brought her to her present state―obviously a metaphor for ultimate loneliness―so too will her drama become one of the few certifiably original fictions of our time.“The novel I liked best this year,” said the Washington Times upon the book’s publication in 1988; “one dizzying, delightful, funny passage after another . . . Wittgenstein’s Mistress gives proof positive that the experimental novel can produce high, pure works of imagination.”

Product Description: Although best known today for his singular, stunning “anti-novels” dazzlingly conjured from anecdotes, quotes, and small thoughts, in his early days David Markson paid the rent by writing punchy, highly dramatic fictions. On the heels of a new double edition of his steamy noirs Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Deadbeat comes a new edition of his 1965 classic The Ballad of Dingus Magee, whose subtitle — “Immortal True Saga of the Most Notorious and Desperate Bad Man of the Olden Days, his Blood-Shedding, his Ruination of Poor Helpless Females, & Cetera” — gives readers a hint of the raucous sensibility at work here...read more

Product Description: "Markson is regarded as an inventive literary stylist in the manner of James Joyce, William Gaddis, and Malcolm Lowry . . . and many critics have commented that his compressed, highly allusive fiction verges on poetry." In view of such a judgment (from Contemporary Literary Criticism), it should surely come as less than a surprise that Markson has indeed written poems through much of his career, the best of which are gathered here for the first time...read more