Stephen Wright - Free Library Land Online

Meditations in Green

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 18:34:52 +0200

One of the greatest Vietnam War novels ever written, by an award-winning writer who experienced it firsthand.

Deployed to Vietnam with the U.S. Army's 1069 Intelligence Group, Spec. 4 James Griffin starts out clear-eyed and hardworking, believing he can glide through the war unharmed. But the kaleidoscope of horrors he experiences gets inside him relentlessly. He gradually collapses and ends up unstrung, in step with the exploding hell around him and waiting for the cataclysm that will bring him home, dead or not.

Griffin survives, but back in the U.S. his battles intensify. Beset by addiction, he takes up meditating on household plants and attempts to adjust to civilian life and beat back the insanity that threatens to overwhelm him.

Meditations in Green is a haunting exploration of the harrowing costs of war and yet-unhealed wounds, "the impact of an experience so devastating that words can hardly contain it" (Walter Kendrick, the...

Processed Cheese

Wed, 06 May 2020 11:03:57 +0300

From an "astonishing" writer (Toni Morrison), the savagely funny story of a couple who unexpectedly come into some money in a wealth-obsessed America deranged by Mammon.

A bag of money drops out of the sky, literally, into the path of a cash-starved citizen named Graveyard. He carries it home to his wife, Ambience, and they embark on the adventure of their lives, finally able to have everything they've always thought they deserved: cars, guns, games, jewels, clothes — and of course sex, travel, and time with friends and family. There is no limit except their imagination and the hours in the day, and even those seem to be subject to their control.

Of course, the owner of the bag is searching for it, and will do whatever is necessary to get it back. And, of course, these new riches change everything — and nothing at all.

Darkly hilarious, Processed Cheese is both satire and serious as death. It's a road novel, a family...

M31

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 18:34:54 +0200

A "beautiful and terrifying" novel about family and faith, set inside the secret world of UFO cultists (San Francisco Chronicle)
Dash and Dot are the world's most in-demand lecturers on the topic of UFOs and alien abduction. Convinced that we are all descended from M31, the nearest galaxy to ours, they live on the road, on late-night radio call-in shows, and occasionally with their family in a decommissioned church in the Midwest. A radar dish on its steeple and a spaceship in its sanctuary complete the modern nuclear-family setting.
A couple of UFO groupies arrive at the church and everything changes, brought to a head by the combined pressure of their strange beliefs and the ordinary difficulties of modern life. Dash and Dot set out on their ultimate journey, with a destination that cannot be foretold.
This "devastatingly forceful" novel is a masterwork from the author of Going Native and Meditations in Green that "reestablishes its...

The Amalgamation Polka

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 22:52:11 +0200