B-Sides and Wild Rides

While knowing one’s audience has undoubtedly propelled many a bestselling author, there is nevertheless something a little riveting about the sort of authors who suggest we learn to know them back.

Once in a while, anyway. Often this comes at the cost of our discomfort, sometimes incoherence, usually in the shadows of so much left unsaid. If you have not worked things out by the end of such books, or discovered a moral, or followed the bouncing-ball plot, well then, neither have their authors entirely, in fact they are probably open to suggestion.

The books to your right were all written by artists considered “beloved” in the language of the industry, and though you may recognize the look of them vaguely, chances are you will not stumble across these particular titles anywhere books are not donated for free. None of them are probably great by any conventional definition, but they are antic and wobbly and relentless, with sudden gulps of silence in between, like a performer already too far out on the ledge to have anything left to lose.