Perikrone

Apr	2024	Thirteen Cents (2000) by K. Sello Duiker If you’re looking for a fucked-up story from a fucked-up place, the Rainbow Nation rarely disappoints.
Jul	2023	A Fan's Notes (1968) by Frederick Exley Born to a local football star but himself no star athlete, Freddy Exley hopes to reach salvation by contributing to posterity with his writing and uses USC classmate and Giants all-star Frank Gifford as his muse.
Jun	2023	Hard Rain Falling (1966) by Don Carpenter "When you lose you lose forever, an when you win it only lasts a second or two. That's life. I aint lyin. I aint comin on. Why should I?"
Jun	2023	Of Human Bondage (1915) by W. Somerset Maugham 'I told you that it would give you an answer to your question when you asked me what was the meaning of life. Well, have you discovered the answer?'
Feb	2023	A Short Stay in Hell (2009) by Steven L. Peck The overwhelming majority of content in the Library of Babel is gibberish — it may take a year of searching to find a coherent sentence and a millenium to find a single paragraph.
Feb	2023	The Last Free Man and Other Stories (2019) by Lewis Woolston Sharp, personal short fiction borne of the Australian Outback: a study of the people who drift across that hostile and remote landscape and of their motivations, internal and external, for doing so.
Jan	2023	Dissipatio H.G. (1977) by Guido Morselli Dissipatio Humani Generis, Latin for the Dissipation of the Human Race. That’s “dissipation not in the moral sense,” but in the physical: everybody, from overcoat to marrow, gone, poof, overnight.
Dec	2022	Negative Space (2020) by B.R. Yeager Teenagers, narcotics, self-harm, occult sciences; B.R. Yeager is an indie author unafraid to color outside the lines.
Dec	2022	The Family of Pascual Duarte (1942) by Camilo José Cela "There are times when the best course is to sink out of sight like the dead, disappear in one fell swoop as if swallowed up by the earth, to vanish into thin air like a puff of smoke. But it is never quite possible to do any of these things."
Nov	2022	The Loser (1983) by Thomas Bernhard [fragment] "He was fascinated with people in their unhappiness, not with people themselves but with their unhappiness, and he found it wherever there were people, I thought, he was addicted to people because he was addicted to unhappiness."
Nov	2022	A Man with No Talents (2000) by Shirō Ōyama Ōyama is a shrewd observer with zero artifice or pretense, a self-proclaimed "average loser" with no swollen ego to stop him from telling things as they are.
Nov	2022	New Eden [fiction] "Dawn hadn't yet broken when the party arrived. Baker suited up and stood out front as two vehicles rolled down the long access road that divided his acres of solar panels. The vehicles drifted to a stop side-by-side twenty meters away, their low beams illuminating the clearing."
Oct	2022	The Passenger (2022) by Cormac McCarthy Nominally, there's a plot involving a drowned plane, fiendish federal agents, and the atomic bomb. It's told in a disorganized collection of painstakingly detailed conversations on topics ranging from Formula Two racing to particle physics to Kennedy's assassination, conversations darkening in tone as the apparatus of the state tightens around Bobby.
Oct	2022	The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (1983) by Breece D'J Pancake Darkness haunts the hollows of Pancake's West Virginia. There's a blight left by the closure of the mines, foreign wars, deindustrialization.
Oct	2022	Earth Abides (1949) by George R. Stewart What, exactly, do you get when a highly competent writer with upright pre-counterculture American morals and a strong sense of civic responsibility contemplates mortality in the age of The Bomb?
Sep	2022	Way Station (1963) by Clifford D. Simak [fragment]
Sep	2022	Hunger (1890) by Knut Hamsun Without employment, prospects, or an institutional safety net and a with rigid floor set by his ego on how low he could stoop, the only resource left to him to burn was his own fat.
Sep	2022	Mountainhead (2017) by New Juche No long-form articulate rehash your friend's ribald Thailand holiday stories: they might feature the same disfigured hookers and dirty powders, sure, but your friend eventually had his fill and came home. New Juche emerged on the other end not sated but seeking to go yet deeper.
Aug	2022	Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe [fragment]
Aug	2022	Eggplant (2021) by Ogden Nesmer An outwardly blasé and independent woman from a fallen California spirals headfirst into a conspiracy that transcends government on a gaslit misadventure that isn't so much drug-fueled as it is drug-flavored.
Aug	2022	A Princess of Mars (1912) by Edgar Rice Burroughs [fragment]
Jul	2022	Serotonin (2019) by Michel Houellebecq "Did we yield to the illusion of individual freedom, of an open life, of infinite possibilities? It’s possible; those ideas were part of the spirit of the age; we didn’t formalize them, we didn’t have the taste to do that; we merely conformed and allowed ourselves to be destroyed by them; and then, for a very long time, to suffer as a result."
Jul	2022	The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1930) by Grace Zaring Stone [fragment]
Jul	2022	Defeating Big Government Socialism (2022) by Newt Gingrich Elephant-flavored fodder for your next altercation with your purple-haired niece at Thanksgiving.
Jul	2022	Growth of the Soil (1917) by Knut Hamsun "My son, ay, he's the modern type, a man of our time; he believes honestly enough all the age has taught him, all the Jew and the Yankee have taught him; I shake my head at it all."
Jun	2022	Kalki (1976) by Gore Vidal [fragment]
Nov	2021	Fiasco (1986) by Stanisław Lem [fragment]
Oct	2021	Gothic Violence (2021) by Mike Ma
Feb	2021	The Shallows (2010) by Nicholas Carr We don’t “read” on the internet. We skim, we forage.
Feb	2021	The Ginger Man (1955) by J.P. Donleavy [fragment]
Jan	2021	Stoner (1965) by John Williams Underneath its surface level misery is a depiction of a life tirelessly dedicated to a cause both loved and believed in.
Jan	2021	East of Eden (1952) by John Steinbeck "‘Thou mayest rule over sin,’ Lee. That’s it. I do not believe all men are destroyed. I can name you a dozen who were not, and they are the ones the world lives by."
Sep	2020	Virgin Soil (1877) by Ivan Turgenev [fragment]
Aug	2020	The Moon Is Down (1942) by John Steinbeck "“Conquest after conquest, deeper and deeper into molasses.” His laughter choked him and he coughed into his handkerchief. “Maybe the Leader is crazy. Flies conquer the flypaper. Flies capture two hundred miles of new flypaper!”"
Aug	2020	The Glass Bead Game (1943) by Herman Hesse The eponymous Game is artfully hand-waved into existence as an academic exercise where the complete canon of man’s creation can be drawn upon and synthesized into some unified whole.
Aug	2020	Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller Wry and witty but 150 pages too long for a one-trick book without a plot.
Aug	2020	Industrial Society and Its Future (1995) by Theodore J. Kaczynski [fragment]
Aug	2020	Moby-Dick (1851) by Herman Melville "Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary."
Jun	2020	Eifelheim (2006) by Michael Flynn You may have heard elsewhere something like “those aliens aren’t really alien, they’re just funny looking humans” used to denigrate a science fiction novel for its unoriginality. In Eifelheim, the similarity between the proto-German villagers and the interloping aliens called the Krenken is exactly the point.
Jun	2020	Gateway (1977) by Frederik Pohl The Gateway is an artifact left by a long-gone race of aliens orbiting somewhere in the inner solar system perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. On it are countless ships that humans know very little about beyond how to press the “go” button.
May	2020	When Gravity Fails (1986) by George Alec Effinger Islam is the glue that holds When Gravity Fails together — Effinger captures and relays what it means to be both a believer and a lowlife.
May	2020	Judas Unchained (2005) by Peter F. Hamilton The Commonwealth demonstrates just how audacious and full-featured a fictional universe can be while still being packed full of relatable and fallible humans like the rest of us down here on Earth.
Dec	2019	Spin (2005) by Robert Charles Wilson A derivation from first principles of an unfathomably immense end, every few chapters introducing a new technological concept large enough to warrant its own book.
Jul	2019	The Stars My Destination (1956) by Alfred Bester Old-fashioned optimistic sci-fi: reach hard enough for something and you’ll find it’s within grasp.
Jan	2019	The City & The City (2009) by China Miéville Relatively unengaging off-noir detective story that serves primarily as a vehicle for ambitious world building.
Jan	2019	Aurora (2015) by Kim Stanley Robinson An introspective computer’s candid take on a bungled interstellar pilgrimage.