Most Popular Books by Rick Moody

Rick Moody''s novels have earned him a reputation as a "breathtaking" writer (The New York Times) and "a writer of immense gifts" (The San Francisco Examiner). His remarkable short stories have led both the New Yorker and Harpers to single him out as one of the most original and admired voices in a generation. These stories are abundant proof of Rick Moody''s grace as a stylist and a shaper of interior lives. He writes with equal force about the blithe energies of youth ("Boys") and the rueful onset of middle age ("Hawaiian Night"), about Midwestern optimists ("Double Zero") and West coast strategists ("Baggage Carousel"), about visionary exhilaration ("Forecast from the Retail Desk") and delusional catharsis ("Surplus Value Books: Catalog Number 13.") The astounding title story, which has already been reprinted in four different anthologies, is a masterpiece of remembrance and thwarted love. Full of deep feeling and stunningly beautiful language, the stories in Demonology offer the deepest pleasures that fiction can afford.

A son is tasked with an impossible decision in this poignant, astutely observed portrait of a family in crisis from the author of The Ice Storm While visiting his mother, Billie, who suffers from a degenerative neurological disease that has left her paralyzed and unable to speak, Dexter “Hex” Raitliffe learns that his stepfather, Billie’s husband and caretaker, has left her. Alone and incapable of living on her own, Billie makes an unfathomable request of Hex: to assist her in committing suicide. Perpetually indecisive, paralyzed by self-doubt, and hindered by an unshakable stutter, Hex sets out to confront his stepfather, only to find himself facing off against his own struggles—with intimacy and alcoholism—along the way. Back in the suburbs of his youth, Hex experiences the lull of nostalgia as well as the sting of painful memories like his father’s death as he tries to reconcile his mother’s fate and his own wavering identity. Author Rick Moody evokes this singular setting with stunning clarity. Profoundly tragic yet punctuated by moments of hilarity, Purple America is a searing gaze into one family’s fragile, chaotic heart. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Rick Moody including rare images from the author’s personal collection.

A raw, unflinching, convention-defying memoir of substance abuse, depression, and guilt In his genre-bending memoir, Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm, delves into not only his own tormenting struggle with depression and alcoholism but also the pathos inherent in American society. Beginning with his childhood and widening his gaze to his ancestral past, Moody elegantly details the events that led him to admit himself to a psychiatric hospital. Seeking explanations for his inner demons, Moody traces his lineage back to Joseph “Handkerchief” Moody. In early-eighteenth-century Maine, Joseph accidentally killed his childhood friend and wore a handkerchief over his face for the rest of his life as a self-imposed punishment. His story stirs within Moody a drive to understand his own failings through a study of American violence from colonial times to the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. Remarkably broad in scope and full of Moody’s witticisms and brilliantly crafted prose, The Black Veil is an extraordinary exploration of both personal and cultural shame that transcends the expectations of a memoir. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Rick Moody including rare images from the author’s personal collection.

On the occasion of the paperback release of Demonology, Back Bay Books takes pleasure in making all four of Rick Moody''s acclaimed earlier works of fiction available in handsome new paperback editions.

From the acclaimed Rick Moody, a darkly comic portrait of a man who comes to life in the most unexpected of ways: through his online reviews. Reginald Edward Morse is one of the top reviewers on RateYourLodging.com, where his many reviews reveal more than just details of hotels around the globe -- they tell his life story. The puzzle of Reginald''s life comes together through reviews that comment upon his motivational speaking career, the dissolution of his marriage, the separation from his beloved daughter, and his devotion to an amour known only as "K." But when Reginald disappears, we are left with the fragments of a life -- or at least the life he has carefully constructed -- which writer Rick Moody must make sense of. An inventive blurring of the lines between the real and the fabricated, Hotels of North America demonstrates Moody''s masterly ability to push the bounds of the novel.

During one month in the autumn of election year 2000, scores of movie-business strivers are focused on one goal: getting a piece of an elusive, but surely huge, television saga, the one that opens with Huns sweeping through Mongolia and closes with a Mormon diviner in the Las Vegas desert; the sure-to-please-everyone multigenerational TV miniseries about diviners, those miracle workers who bring water to perpetually thirsty (and hungry and love-starved) humankind. Among the wannabes: Vanessa Meandro, hot-tempered head of Means of Production, an indie film company; her harried and varied staff; a Sikh cab driver, promoted to the office of -theory and practice of TV; a bipolar bicycle messenger, who makes a fateful mis-delivery; two celebrity publicists, the Vanderbilt girls; a thriller writer who gives Botox parties; the daughter of an L.A. big-shot, who is hired to fetch Vanessa''s Krispy Kremes and more; a word man who coined the phrase -- inspired by a true story; and a supreme court justice who wants to write the script.A few true artists surface in the course of Moody''s rollicking but intricately woven novel, and real emotion eventually blossoms for most of Vanessa''s staff at Means of Production, even herself. The Diviners is a cautionary tale about pointless ambition; a richly detailed look at the interlocking worlds of money, politics, addiction, sex, work, and family in modern America; and a masterpiece of comedy that will bring Rick Moody to a still higher level of appreciation.

A spirited collection of stories revealing the extremes of the human experience from the author of The Ice Storm In his first story collection, Rick Moody provides readers with a poignant, brazenly honest glimpse into the lives of a wide array of characters, from a paranoid husband obsessively listening in on his wife’s phone calls to the junkies and sex addicts of New York City’s underworld. Whether they’re grasping for connection or struggling to survive in a dismal and indifferent environment, these individuals’ haunting voices and the evocative worlds they inhabit make for a diverse and powerful volume. Experimenting with form—one story is told as a term paper, another as an annotated bibliography—Moody demonstrates the vast range of his fascinations and talents, as well as his arresting command of language. Candid depictions of contemporary society and the inner-workings of distinctive characters’ minds bring these inquisitive, heartrending, and at times undeniably funny accounts to life. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Rick Moody including rare images from the author’s personal collection.

“[A] moving, funny, hauntingly brilliant memoir about marriage.” —Caroline Leavitt, The San Francisco Chronicle Rick Moody, the award-winning author of The Ice Storm, shares the harrowing true story of the first year of his second marriage in this eventful, month-by-month account At this story’s start, Moody, a recovering alcoholic and sexual compulsive with a history of depression, is also the divorced father of a beloved little girl and a man in love; his answer to the question “Would you like to be in a committed relationship?” is, fully and for the first time in his life, “Yes.” And so his second marriage begins as he emerges, humbly and with tender hopes, from the wreckage of his past, only to be battered by a stormy sea of external troubles—miscarriages, the deaths of friends, and robberies, just for starters. As Moody has put it, "this is a story in which a lot of bad luck is the daily fare of the protagonists, but in which they are also in love.” To Moody’s astonishment, matrimony turns out to be the site of strength in hard times, a vessel infinitely tougher and more durable than any boat these two participants would have traveled by alone. Love buoys the couple, lifting them above their hardships, and the reader is buoyed along with them.

Montese Crandall is a downtrodden writer whose rare collection of baseball cards won''t sustain him, financially or emotionally, through the grave illness of his wife. Luckily, he swindles himself a job churning out a novelization of the 2025 remake of a 1963 horror classic, The Crawling Hand. Crandall tells therein of the United States, in a bid to regain global eminence, launching at last its doomed manned mission to the desolation of Mars. Three space pods with nine Americans on board travel three months, expecting to spend three years as the planet''s first colonists. When a secret mission to retrieve a flesh-eating bacterium for use in bio-warfare is uncovered, mayhem ensues. Only a lonely human arm (missing its middle finger) returns to earth, crash-landing in the vast Sonoran Desert of Arizona. The arm may hold the secret to reanimation or it may simply be an infectious killing machine. In the ensuing days, it crawls through the heartbroken wasteland of a civilization at its breaking point, economically and culturally -- a dystopia of lowlife, emigration from America, and laughable lifestyle alternatives. The Four Fingers of Death is a stunningly inventive, sometimes hilarious, monumental novel. It will delight admirers of comic masterpieces like Slaughterhouse-Five, The Crying of Lot 49, and Catch-22.

Right Livelihoods begins with a cataclysmic vision of New York City after the leveling of 50 square blocks of Manhattan. Four million have died. Albertine, the "street name for the buzz of a lifetime," is a mind-altering drug that sets The Albertine Notes in motion. The collection''s second novella, K & K, concerns a lonely young office manager at an insurance agency, where the office suggestion box is yielding unpleasant messages that escalate to a scary pitch. Ellie Knight-Cameron''s responses to these random diatribes illuminate the toll that a lack of self-awareness can take. At the center of The Omega Force is a buffoonish former government official in rocky recovery. Dr. "Jamie" Van Deusen is determined to protect his habitat -- its golf courses (and Bloody Marys), pizza places (and beers) from "dark-complected" foreign nationals. His patriotism and wild imagination are mainly fueled by a fall off the wagon. Only Rick Moody could lead us to feel affection for this man and the other misguided, earnestly striving characters in these alternately unsettling, warm, trio of stories.

Rick Moody offers a brilliant trio of stories, spanning glittering golf courses, a stifling office and a harrowing dystopia. "The Albertine Notes" presents a cataclysmic vision of New York City after the levelling of fifty square blocks of Manhattan by a suitcase bomb. Albertine, the ''street name for the buzz of a lifetime'', is a mind-altering drug through which survivors seek solace in the past. K and K concerns lonely young Ellie Knight-Cam- eron, office manager at an insurance agency, where the office suggestion box is yielding unpleasant messages that escalate to a scary pitch. And at the centre of The Omega Force is a buffoonish former government official in rocky recovery. Dr ''Jamie'' Van Deusen is determined to protect his habitat - its golf courses (and Bloody Marys) and pizza places (and beers) from ''dark-complected'' foreign nationals.

Rick Moody has been writing about music as long as he has been writing, and this book provides an ample selection from that output. His anatomy of the word cool reminds us that, in the postwar 40s, it was infused with the feeling of jazz music but is now merely a synonym for neat. "On Celestial Music," which was included in Best American Essays, 2008, begins with a lament for the loss in recent music of the vulnerability expressed by Otis Redding''s masterpiece, "Try a Little Tenderness;" moves on to Moody''s infatuation with the ecstatic music of the Velvet Underground; and ends with an appreciation of Arvo Part and Purcell, close as they are to nature, "the music of the spheres." Contemporary groups covered include Magnetic Fields (their love songs), Wilco (the band''s and Jeff Tweedy''s evolution), Danielson Famile (an evangelical rock band), The Pogues (Shane McGowan''s problems with addiction), The Lounge Lizards (John Lurie''s brilliance), and Meredith Monk, who once recorded a song inspired by Rick Moody''s story "Boys." Always both incisive and personable, these pieces inspire us to dive as deeply into the music that enhances our lives as Moody has done -- and introduces us to wonderful sounds we may not know.

Becky Wright is a typical teenager who has boy problems. She does not have a date for the Christmas dance. All she needs is a little bit of advice from someone older and wiser - a Reliable Source. Surely her older sister Angela is a Reliable Source . After all, Angela writes pornographic novels, so she must know all there is to know about boys and dating There is only one problem with Becky''s plan. Her parents have forbidden her seeing Angela, whom they believe is a corrupting influence. But Becky is a determined and resourceful young lady. She finally finds a way to meet her sister, but in doing so, she learns that Angela has more than dating wisdom to impart. Angela is privy to the skeletons in the family closet. The advice that Angela can give Becky will either get her into more trouble with her parents...or save her from harm. Will Becky get the help from her sister in time or is it already too late?

This volume chronicles Gregory Crewdson''s Twilight series, elaborate tableaux that capture bizarre surrealities behind deceptively familiar suburban facades. The images are accompanied by an essay from Rick Moody, a novelist renowned for exposing the underbelly of small-town, middle-class America.

In our third anthology, Aimee Bender introduces us to a young woman unable to summon the desire to sleep with her husband without payment in cash, Matt Sumell''s protagonist feels capable of anything but can save no one, Rick Moody charts the rise an fall of a romance via Twitter, Patrick deWitt presents a bleak, funny tale of two movers who are going nowhere, and Jenny Offill chronicles the awkward vigil of a man caring for his terminally ill ex-wife.

Examining the pictorial, literary, and musical world that Wilco conjure up on record and on stage this book is created in collaboration with Jeff Tweedy, Wilco and Tony Margherita. Primarily visual, The Wilco Book shows what Wilco does, how they do it and where it all comes together. The band narrates the book in the form of long captions accompanying the images. Just as the band assembles its disparate talents, this book coheres in the end to reveal a 40 minute CD of original, unreleased songs. This truly is a translation of the band''s sensibility from sound into print.

Meredith Monk works seamlessly across disciplines, pushing the boundaries of music, theater, dance, video, and installation, and is considered a pioneer of site-specific performance. This catalogue presents the first career encompassing, in-depth analysis of her work. Featuring never-before-published archival material, musical notations, drawings, and photographs, as well as an insightful conversation with the artist

Essays by Amy Cappellazzo and Rick Moody. Introduction by Michael Rush.

A family romance set in the 1970s follows the Hoods as they skid out of control in suburban Connecticut and as Watergate unfolds and troops head home from Vietnam. By the author of Garden State. 22,500 first printing. $20,000 ad/promo. Tour.