Jonathan Carroll is an American author celebrated for his modern fantasy and slipstream novels. His narratives often explore the intrusion of imagination into reality, blurring the lines between the ordinary world and the surreal. Frequently compared to magical realists of South America, Carroll masterfully employs elements like talking animals and realms that hover on the edge of dreams. His distinctive style probes the delicate boundary between what is real and what is imagined, offering readers a unique and captivating literary experience.
The acclaimed author of "The Land of Laughs" presents an astoundingly imaginative novel that traverses the fine line between our world and an invisible world of magic, in the story of a prize-winning architiect who is hired by a wealthy sultana to build a billion-dollar dog museum.
A surrealistic novel of people's perception of death. Ian McGann meets death is a dream, while Wyatt Leonard, who is dying of leukemia, meets death in a novelty store. As for Emmy Marhoun, three years after being killed she can still be seen walking about, unaware she is dead because she doesn't know the difference between life and death anymore
When a film-maker commits suicide, his legacy to his old friend is to solve the riddle of his death and to complete his final, flawed horror movie. This thriller transcends reality into the world of fantasy where the living and the dead intermingle.
For connoisseurs of imaginative fiction, the novels of Jonathan Carroll are a special treat that occupy a space all their own. His surreal fictions, which deftly mix the everyday with the extraordinary, have won him a devoted following. Now, in Glass Soup, Carroll continues to astound . . . .The realm of the dead is built from the dreams--and nightmares--of the living. Octopuses drive buses. God is a polar bear. And a crowded highway literally leads to hell.Once before, Vincent Ettrich and his lover, Isabelle Neukor, crossed over from life to death and back again. Now Isabelle bears a very special child, who may someday restore the ever-changing mosaic that is reality. Unless the agents of Chaos can lure her back to the land of the dead--and trap her there forever.Glass Soup is another exquisite and singular creation from the author January magazine described as "incapable of writing a bad book much less an uninteresting one."
Frannie McCabe realizes something seriously weird is going on when the dead dog he buried keeps turning up again. The Sciavos, a couple whose domestic war has the police involved, disappear completely. And Frannie's teenage self arrives to help him sort out his mistakes - before its too late.
Walker Easterling is a retired actor turned successful screenwriter living in the Vienna of strong coffee, fascinating friends, and mysterious cafes. When he falls in love with Maris York, a beautiful artist who creates cities, his life becomes alive in fantastic and unsettling ways. As Walker's love for Maris grows, his life gets more and more bizarre-he discovers he can see things happening just before they happen, and at the same time feels an incredibly strong tug from his past-so a friend steers him to Venasque, an odd little man reputed to be a powerful shaman. Venasque helps Walker discover and unravel his many interconnected past lives, and it is soon clear that an unresolved conflict from these past lives has resurfaced, and now threatens to undo Walker and Maris's love.At once lyrical, frightening, funny, and sexy, Sleeping in Flame is a spellbinding tale where reality and fantasy merge in astonishing convolutions of magic and suspense. It confirms that Jonathan Carroll is one of the very few novelists who-by constantly surprising us-give us an entirely new perspective on our world. It is no wonder that he is generally considered to be the most original and provocative novelist of his generation.
Cullen James is a young woman whose life dictates her dreams-and whose dreams control her life.In her first dream, she found the perfect man-and the same thing promptly happened in life. Now, she has begun to dream dreams set in Rondua, a fantasy world of high adventure, full of tests of her courage and strength. Slowly and quietly, her dream world is spilling over into her New York City reality and beginning to threaten everything she loves in life. Her friends are gathered to help her-but even her newfound courage may not be enough.
For schoolteacher Thomas Abbey there was no writer to equal Marshall France, a legendary author of children's books who hid himself away in the small town of Galen and died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four. Tom and his girlfriend Saxony, wanting to write France's biography, arrive in Galen, where they discover the writer's fiercely protective daughter Anna is waiting for them. Before long, they realise that this idyllic little town and its inhabitants - both human and animal - are not quite what they seem: France's magic has spread beyond the printed page . . .
Returning to her class reunion, Miranda Romanac has her heart set on meeting James Stillman, her first boyfriend, once again. Her life's never quite measured up to the ideal he represented for her but she is devastated to learn that he died three years before, in a car crash. Her life settles back into routine in New York, and she meets the fabulous Frances Hatch, mistress of many of the great in Paris in the twenties, and at the same time starts an affair with a married man. At which point she sees James Stillman, waving to her across the street. And her life changes forever. Confronted, literally, by the lives she's ruined one way or another, she learns the horrifying truth about herself and her own immortal existence.
When bestselling novelist Sam Bayer decides it's time he wrote his "Great Book", he chooses as his subject the death of a teenage beauty, Pauline Ostrova - the 'Beehive'. The town of Crane's view never felt the same after he discovered her body, floating in the lake, over twenty years before. Her boyfriend, Edward Durant, was arrested for the murder, tried and imprisoned. He died in Sing Sing jail. Sam Bayer's new book will tell her story, bring her to life again, and restore something of what the town had lost. But, for Samuel Bayer, the journey into his past becomes a terrifying jolt into the reality of the present. Bayer's gesture of respect to his youth turns sour in the face of all that he unearths; for many of the people close to him, this leads to devastating - and fatal - consequences.
