The Dogs of the Sinai by Franco Fortini (Seagull, $27.50). This, her 10th (published before she was 30!) won a Somerset Maugham Award, and perfectly combines psychological perspicacity and social critique in an unusual dystopian future London. With their visionary prose and insight, even the less successful are fascinating, and the best are incomparable. All Gaskell's novels are worth hunting down. Cisco is sui generis, and outright brilliant.Ī Sweet, Sweet Summer by Jane Gaskell (out of print). A 'fantasy' novel, sure, complete with all the furniture (magic weapons, flying armor, war in an imaginary land), but one that in its themes and expressionist language upends all our expectations of what literature can do and be. The Narrator by Michael Cisco (Eraserhead, $16). Too strange to be a classic, Ape's-Face is a startling anti-classic. With its decidedly odd prose and the gloom World War I casts across its pages, this 1914 novel reads as tainted by an effective but accidental - perhaps naïve - modernist sensibility.

An offbeat tour de force and an invocation of Englishness, inheritance, and supernatural threat. To look at the world after reading I Am Lazarus is to look at it in a stranger, truer way.Īpe's-Face by Marion Fox (out of print). Best known for her justly celebrated novel Ice, Kavan possessed an intense, hallucinatory voice and agonized regard that are even more powerful in these wartime short stories. I Am Lazarus by Anna Kavan (Peter Owen, $15).

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