Tan Twan Eng, The Gift of Rain (New York: Weinstein Books, 2008).
William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck: A Novel (Penguin Books, 1966, 1997).
Denis Johnson, Angel: A Novel (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002) ("[H]e looked at his lawyer for the first time. It was the same lawyer Bill Houston had always been saddled with--about five-six, round glasses and mustache, western string tie, a public defender looking twelve or thirteen and clutching a plastic briefcase with probably nothing inside of it. Bill Houston sat down across the table from him and said, 'I can't get up no confidence in you.' 'If you could afford fancy counsel, you wouldn't be here, the lawyer said. 'I'm assuming that.'..." Id. at 139.).
Charlie Lovett, The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession (New York: Viking, 2013).
David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress, with an Afterword by David Foster Wallace (Champaign, Il: Dalkey Archive Press, 1988, 2012) ("In spite of frequently underlining sentences in books that had not been assigned, I did well in college, actually." Id. at 43.).
Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun, with a New Foreword by Cindy Sheehan (New York: Citadel Press, 1939, 2007) ("He wondered how he could have come through it alive. You heard about somebody scratching his thumb and the next thing you knew he was dead. The mountain climber fell off the front stoop and fractured his skull and died by Thursday. Your best friend went to the hospital to have his appendix taken out and four or five days later you were standing beside his grave. A little germ like influenza carried off five maybe ten million people in a single winter. Then how could a guy lose his arms and legs and ears and eyes and nose and mouth and still be alive! How did you make sense out of it?" Id. at 84-85. "Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can't talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead. If a man says death before dishonor he is either a fool or a liar because he doesn't know what death is. He isn't able to judge. He only knows about living. He doesn't know anything about dying. If he is a fool and believes in death before dishonor let him go ahead and die. But all the little guys who are too busy to fight should be left alone. And all the guys who say death before dishonor is pure bull the important thing is life before death they should be left alone too. Because the guys who say life isn't worth living without some principle so important you're willing to die for it they are all nuts...." Id. at 179-180.).
