Devastating, and strictly for the most daring reader.Uncompromising, stark, bleak, unremittingly repetitive, gruesome, sickening and despairing -- The Room is perhaps not as great as Selby's more narratively interesting masterwork, Last Exit to Brooklyn, but it is no less accomplished a novel. The story, if one can call it that, is a mixture of incomplete biographical memories and revenge fantasies as imagined by a prisoner in a cell who is apparently awaiting trial for a petty violent crime (or maybe he has already been convicted), but we're never sure because the prisoner is one of the most unreliable narrators ever committed to the printed page. His life, in the little snippets we get, is unremarkable, marked by poverty and hints of a path leading to a life of crime. Back and forth he bats around obsessions in his mind -- the grayness of his cell (which reminds him of a toy model battleship he built as a kid), the cracks in the walls, the crappy prison food, the nausea in his gut, a zit on his face that drives him even more insane because it refuses to come to a head. But his most elaborate fantasies revolve around the officers who arrested him. As the book proceeds his obsessive desire for revenge against them (even though we never really know their side of the story) takes on the proportions of a self-righteous, self-aggrandizing crusade to abolish abuse in the entire justice system. He imagines his case being taken on by the best lawyers and newspapers and going all the way to Senate hearings -- all unfolded in minute detail. Of course, this all puffs himself up into a hero in his self delusion. Adding layer upon layer in his fantasies, he demonizes the cops as vicious rapists, and then imagines the most disgusting forms of revenge against them -- treating them like dogs in training and submitting them to the most explicitly brutal cruelties one can imagine.There are parts of this book (including the rape of a female motorist) that will make you queasy, I promise you. Along the way, Selby exhibits total mastery of stream-of-consciousness thought patterns. The ways Selby describes masturbation, or the ritual of popping a zit, or the inability of coughing up a knot of phlegm in the back of the throat or removing an ingrown hair are as astonishingly real and true as they are grotesque. Needless to say, this is not the feel-good book of the century, although there is one passage describing a memory of a hand job session between the man and his girlfriend in a movie theater that is an incredible turn on. It's one of the few explicitly sexual passages (and there are many) in the book that is not sick and violent. Written in 1971, it is one of the most angry, misanthropic examinations of one-man's totally hopeless view of the universe as you will encounter. "There's always something fucking you up," is sort of the guy's mantra. Rap has nothing on this book as a cop-hater's manifesto either. Having said that, it's view is anti-authoritarian, but in its place it offers no solutions, just the complete angry resignation of a man confined to a 6 x 9 cell. If you can take the book's challenging repetitive elements and the utterly barbaric fantasies, then you will be rewarded with a reading experience not to be forgotten. Again, not for everyone, to say the least, and hard to take even for me, but undeniably a formidable work of literary art.(KevinR@Ky, slightly amended and corrected, 2016)

A mind-bending new novel inspired by the twisted and wondrous works of Lewis Carroll... In a warren of crumbling buildings and desperate people called the Old City, there stands a hospital with cinderblock walls which echo the screams of the poor souls inside. In the hospital, there is a woman. Her hair, once blond, hangs in tangles down her back. She doesn’t remember why she’s in such a terrible place. Just a tea party long ago, and long ears, and blood… Then, one night, a fire at the hospital gives the woman a chance to escape, tumbling out of the hole that imprisoned her, leaving her free to uncover the truth about what happened to her all those years ago. Only something else has escaped with her. Something dark. Something powerful. And to find the truth, she will have to track this beast to the very heart of the Old City, where the rabbit waits for his Alice.

Ian McEwan’s symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose.On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses the flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives and her precocious imagination bring about a crime that will change all their lives, a crime whose repercussions Atonement follows through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century.

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