Best Selling Books by Steve Erickson

The novel that inspired the film starring James Franco and Seth Rogen: “One of a kind . . . a funny, unnervingly surreal page turner” (Newsweek). Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post Book World, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review Zeroville centers on the story of Vikar, a young architecture student so enthralled with the movies that his friends call him “cinéautistic.” With an intensely religious childhood behind him, and tattoos of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on his head, he arrives in Hollywood—where he’s mistaken for a member of the Manson family and eventually scores a job as a film editor. Vikar discovers the frames of a secret film within the reels of every movie ever made, and sets about splicing them together—a task that takes on frightening theological dimensions. Electrifying and “darkly funny,” Zeroville dives into the renegade American cinema of the 1970s and ’80s and emerges into an era for which we have no name (Publishers Weekly). “Funny, disturbing, daring . . . dreamlike and sometimes nightmarish.” —The New York Times Book Review “Magnificent.” —The Believer “[A] writer who has been compared to Vladimir Nabokov, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon.” —Bookmarks Magazine “Erickson is as unique and vital and pure a voice as American fiction has produced.” —Jonathan Lethem

DIVDIVIn what the Guardian recently named one of the best literary debuts ever, a love triangle intersects with a lost film masterpiece and weather as turbulent as the heart/divDIV Life stories converge and break away in Days Between Stations, Steve Erickson’s searing first novel. At the center is the tumultuous union between Jason and Lauren, who fall in love as youths in Kansas, and later relocate to San Francisco. A cyclist training for the Olympics, Jason is often abroad and unfaithful; Lauren, in turn, finds solace in Michel, a nightclub manager trying to reconnect with his past. Michel’s journey leads to The Death of Marat, a recovered lost masterwork of silent film directed by his grandfather, whose extraordinary life includes having grown up as an orphaned twin in a Parisian brothel. In a world shaped by sensuality and trauma, where sandstorms invade Los Angeles, the Seine freezes, bike racers vanish in Venice, and relationships are warped by amnesia, geological chaos and personal upheaval each wrenchingly reflect the other. /div/div

“Set against the backdrop of Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency . . . A complex and imaginative literary tapestry about family and identity” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). At once immediate and epic, funny and devastating, this new novel by the author of Shadowbahn is a transcendent dispatch from the intersection of art and politics, passion and memory. One November night in a canyon outside Los Angeles, Zan Nordhoc—a failed novelist turned pirate radio DJ—sits before the television with his small, adopted black daughter, watching the election of his country’s first black president, Barack Obama. In the nova of this historic moment, with an economic recession threatening their home, Zan, his wife, and their son set out to solve the enigma of the little girl’s life. When they find themselves scattered and strewn across two continents, a mysterious stranger with a secret appears, who sends the story spiraling forty years into the past. Sweeping from 1960s London and ’70s Berlin to twenty-first-century California, and the beginning-of-civilization Ethiopia, These Dreams of You chronicles not only a family struggling to salvage its bonds but a twelve-year-old boy readying himself for what the years to come hold. “Truly electrifying. In its gorgeous, vivid prose and its acutely sensitive soul, These Dreams of You shows us just what a novel can still do in our own crazy times.” —The Boston Globe “Drama filled with exuberance.” —The Washington Post “The four Nordhocs who provide the messy, vibrant heart of These Dreams of You make up a representative tableau for the new millennium: the American family as mash-up.” —The New York Times Book Review

A LA TIMES'' BEST BOOK OF 2017 (FICTION) “Gorgeous, compassionate, weird, unpredictable, alarmingly prescient . . . an answer to and sanctuary from the American Century to come." —Fiona Maazel, New York Times Book Review When the Twin Towers suddenly reappear in the Badlands of South Dakota two decades after their fall, nobody can explain their return. To the tens of thousands drawn to the “American Stonehenge” — including Parker and Zema, siblings driving from L.A. to Michigan — the Towers seem to sing, even as everybody hears a different song. And on the ninety-third floor of the South Tower, Jesse Presley, the stillborn twin of the most famous singer who ever lived, suddenly awakes. Over the days and months and years to come, he’s driven mad by a voice in his head that sounds like his but isn’t, and by the memory of a country where he survived in his brother’s place. So begins Shadowbahn, a kaleidoscopic, musical road-trip across the dreamscape of American destiny. Original and fearless in vision and form, Steve Erickson’s novel speaks to our current times, and to a nation “defiling its own great idea . . . the moment that idea was born.” “A beautiful, moving, strange examination of apocalypse and rebirth.” —Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods “Jaw-dropping. A tour-de-forcer’s tour de force.” —Jonathan Lethem, Granta

DIVDIVThe course of a century is rewritten in this fabulously warped odyssey, named a best book of the year by the New York Times/divDIV Tours of the Black Clock is a wild dream of the twentieth century as told by the ghost of Banning Jainlight. After a disturbing family secret is unearthed, Jainlight throws his father out of a window and burns down the Pennsylvania ranch where he grew up. He escapes to Vienna where he is commissioned to write pornography for a single customer identified as “Client X,” which alters the trajectory of World War II. Eventually Jainlight is accompanied by an aged and senile Adolf Hitler back to America, where both men pursue the same lover. Tours of the Black Clock is a story in which history and the laws of space and time are unforgettably transformed. /div/div

Erickson continues the themes of millennial obsessions that preoccupied him in The Sea Came in at Midnight (1999), this time in a lush, profoundly disorienting story saturated in metaphors of birth and apocalyptic decadence. As it opens, Kristin, who appeared in Sea, is a former rough chick made tender by motherhood. She lives in a hotel with her young son Kirk (short for Kierkegaard), on the edge of a lake (called Lake Zero, as in, you know, Ground Zero) that suddenly appeared and overtook much of downtown Los Angeles at the turn of the millennium.

A “brilliant” novel about an alternate America that has been split in two (San Francisco Chronicle). In a dystopian Los Angeles, Cale is a newly released political prisoner under surveillance. Beset by dark visions and relegated to working in a desolate library, he’s told, without explanation, that he’s “the one everyone’s looking for.” For Catherine, a mysterious South American beauty, the crossing is no less extreme: Leaving her tribal life, she undergoes various confinements and escapes before winding up at the door of a Hollywood screenwriter. Finally Jack Mick Lake, possessed by numerology, must negotiate a river all his own. Stark and ethereal, Steve Erickson’s tales connect to form a luminous and passionate whole.

Erickson''s funniest and most intensely confessional novel edges Los Angeles up against the next millennium and into a vortex of fire. The city is a surreal landscape overrun by abducted strippers, nomadic artists, reluctant pornographers, subversive newspaper columnists, alienated movie critics, teenage hookers afraid of the rain, and legendary filmmakers who may or may not exist. Steve Erickson is the author of five novels and two works of nonfiction.

DIVDIVIn a desperate effort to liberate herself, a fourteen-year-old slave—mistress to the man who invented America—finds herself flung into a different time and world/divDIV Steve Erickson’s provocative reimagining of American history, Arc d’X begins with the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. With “skin . . . too white to be quite black and too black to be quite white,” Sally is loved only to the extent that she can be possessed, and finds hope only in the promise that her children’s lives will be different from her own. The couple’s paradox-riven union echoes through the ages and in an alternate epoch where time plays by other rules. In Aeonopolis, a theocratic city at the foot of a volcano, priests seek to have Sally indicted, and in an emptied-out Berlin, the Wall is being rebuilt. Dizzyingly imaginative, Arc d’X is an unrivaled exploration of “the pursuit of happiness.” /div/div

DIVDIV“If you read one philosophical-doomsday kinky-sex road-trip novel this year, make it this one.” —Salon/divDIV It’s New Year’s Eve 1999, and the members of a powerful cult are about to commit ritual suicide. Fleeing their ranks at the final moment, teenager Kristin lands in Tokyo, where she gains employment listening to clients’ stories in a “memory hotel” designed to address the decay of Japanese collective memory after the Second World War. But Kristin herself has a startling odyssey: Among other things, it involves answering a personal ad only to wind up imprisoned, naked, in an empty house presided over by a man known as the Occupant, hard at work on a millennial calendar that has serious implications for the future. The Sea Came in at Midnight is a breathtaking fable of redemption and one of Erickson’s most impressive visions to date. /div/div

This exquisite and enchanting volume provides easy entry for newcomers to Neil Gaiman''s THE SANDMAN and to comics. Inside are the dreams of writers, fairies, felines and unemployed immortals, and the World Fantasy Award-winning tale A MIdsummer-Night''s Dream, which spotlights an unusual performance of William Shakespeare''s play. Sixth printing. Graphic novel format. Mature readers.

Billions of dollars are lost from marketing plans that fail to get implemented properly. This book draws upon fresh research, new technology and decades of experience to help marketers improve their chances of success. it proposes a practical marketing navigation system to help businesses ensure their plan identifies risks and delivers targets.

Among other things, Tim Hawkinson''s art celebrates the process and materiality of the work itself. This limited edition manual-esque exhibition catalogue, designed by the prominent New York firm, Helicopter, LLC, seeks to reflect that interaction with special features like a tough, transparent plastic jacket that exposes the book''s spiral binding, printed plastic section dividers, a pull-out text by the prominent Los Angeles novelist and film critic Steve Erickson, two posters, numerous gatefolds and a sound chip. Dramatic and typically unique, this volume explores the geography of bookmaking just as Hawkinson''s artwork explores the geography of the human form. Tim Hawkinson was born in San Francisco in 1960 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He has shown his work extensively for more than 25 years--recently at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

A novelist follows the campaign for president from the fall of 1995 to the following year, describing the republic as convulsed in an violent reaction against authority and searching for a new political identity.

Confrontée à la crise économique et victime de sa croyance en un monde meilleur, une famille blanche de Los Angeles, déstabilisée par l’adoption d’une fillette éthiopienne, quitte les États-Unis pour tenter sa refondation au fil d’un perturbant voyage entre Londres, Berlin et l’Afrique. Sur une bande-son où les rythmes de Van Morrison ou de David Bowie rencontrent ceux des ballades éthiopiennes, Steve Erickson dresse le portrait d’un Occident que la “démocrazy” a transformé en illisible labyrinthe.

This is a book written in retirement by two cousins, Peter Reynolds and Steven Erickson. Peter is a retired high school teacher. During his tenure as a teacher, he taught many subjects including special education, death and dying, Washington State history and his specialty, art. Peter was raised on a farm near the small town of Deer Park, Washington. He was drafted into the army and served in the Vietnam war. After returning from the war and finishing his education, he was hired as a teacher and taught the majority of his career in the same small town where he was born and raised. Steven was raised on a farm as well, not far from Peter and his family. He served in the US Marines and was a troop commander in the Vietnam war. After his service, Steven became an educator and taught abroad as well as in the Eastern Washington area for many years. He completed his professional life as a clinical psychologist in Spokane. During coffee, the cousins began a discussion about life and the myriad of possibilities for personalities and life experiences and how they develop. This morphed into a book that they named, There Ain''t No Script For Life. This book is made up of 20 chapters consisting of topics such as Family, Education, Environment, Tribal Mentality, Sexuality etc. In writing this book, Peter and Steven are hoping that readers will be encouraged to engage in discussions and question their own scripts for life and how they got to where they are and where they hope to be. They especially want readers to realize and accept that they are truly unique in this world and in this universe.

Randy Newman once sang, "I''ll talk to strangers if I want to, ''cause I''m a stranger too." Pondering whether the madness that drives families, friends and lovers apart is really greater than the madness that holds them together, Black Clock 19 is full of mad strangers: the one in the neighborhood in Susan Straight''s "Closing the Gate," the one in the house in Janet Sternburg''s "White Matter," the one bringing a message in Joseph McElroy''s "Plea."

Where will you spend Eternity? God will tell The Last Story You''ll Ever Hear. Read this short, concise rhyming story about two friends who had similar lives. They both had houses, cars and boats, great families, kids and wives. Everyone has to make choices as they go through life. Remember, by not choosing, the choice to not choose will make your choice for you. Skeptic and Confident made different choices as they went through life and had completely different results when they took their last breath and were standing in front of God for their final judgment. One was excited and the other in fear. When you finish this book, you will not only know where you will spend Eternity but what Eternity will be like. Life is like a vapor that passes very quickly. Eternity goes on forever and ever. Read this book and never have a doubt of knowing where you will spend forever. What doth it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and yet lose his life? This is your chance to choose LIFE.

"The first book entirely dedicated to the sculptures of multimedia artist Doug Aitken, this volume offers an overview of his 3D works and includes a specially commissioned text by acclaimed novelist Steve Erickson. Designed in the artist''s studio, the publication is organized as a graphic novel more than an inventory, while offering complete information on the pieces in the index. Using words and images, technology and human perception to trigger personal reactions from the readers, the works are combined here in a new form, assembled as they are in printed form as a "Gesamt-exhibition," one that is unique to the medium of the book"--Provided by publisher.

In the 1600s Daniel Defoe published what''s regarded as the first work of literary nonfiction. Chronicling the upheaval of our own time, writers created a new literary language combining state-of-the-art journalism and literary writing. This collection, a swooping narrative from the magazine of the same name, offers a roadmap pointing to the future, full of humor, politics, and pathos. Contributors include Steve Erickson, Mikal Gilmore, Blanche McCrary Boyd, Thrity Umrigar, Ted Mooney, Sarah Chayes, J.C. Hallman, Tim Page, Beth Alvarado, Lauren Camp, Maxine Chernoff, Gregory McNamee, Matt Cooper, Michael Brown, Sunnie R. Clahchischiligi, Paul Cullum, Keith Donnell Jr., David Galef, Jami Macarty, Mike Medberry, Christine Kiessling, Alberto Montero, Paul E Nelson, David Weir, Ben Quick, Stephen Derwent Partington, Stephen Pain, Hailey Nicole Warner, Herb Randall, William Thatcher Dowell, Michelle Browder.

Things are going all too well in the city of Quaint. So well, in fact, that something has to be done. The zeal for goodness can be catastrophic, and no-one knows this better than Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, two stalwart champions of all things bad. For the innumerable citizens of Quaint, driven to neurotic distraction and overwhelmed with good living, desperation breeds nefarious bed-mates, and before long the two homicidal necromancers - and their beleaguered and substance-addled manservant, Emancipor Reese - find themselves ensnared in a scheme to bring goodness into disrepute, if not utter ruination. To Reese''s bemusement, laudable motivations are, in a bizarre twist, uncharacteristically relevant to Master Bauchelain, although, of course, the payment of a chest filled with gold helps. Even so, sometimes, it turns out, one must bring down civilization... in the name of civilization.

Par une après-midi d''août 1969, un homme dont le crâne rasé arbore un tatouage représentant Elizabeth Taylor et Montgomery Clift dans une scène du film de George Stevens, Une place au soleil, descend de son Greyhound, pour poser enfin un pied tremblant d''émotion sur le légendaire Hollywood Boulevard. Mais, ce premier moment d''extase cinéphilique passé, Jerome Vikar va, dans une douleur grandissante, prendre conscience que nul, au royaume du cinéma, ne manifeste plus la vénération attendue pour un septième art en train de basculer sans rémission dans l''ère du grand commerce. Découvrant bientôt que drogue, sexe & rock''n''roll ont fait main basse sur la ville avec la répugnante complicité d''une génération renégate et inculte, Vikar en véritable "Candide à Hollywood" affronte et la désillusion et la violence environnante avec les armes d''un anticonformisme radical et inintelligible pour le commun des mortels hollywoodiens. Avec ce "ciné-autiste" contestataire, loufoque et mélancolique, obsédé par la figure d''un Dieu qui tue ses enfants telle que son inquiétant pasteur de père l''a jadis incarnée, adepte d''une sexualité si possible périphérique mais d''un langage-vérité, et animé d''une intransigeance esthétique qui fait de lui un déconcertant monteur de génie, Steve Erickson crée un personnage aussi subversif qu''attachant. Et rend un superbe hommage à un cinéma qui nous rêve bien plus encore que nous ne rêvons de lui.

Au soir du Nouvel An, conduits par des hommes en robe blanche, mille neuf cent quatre-vingt-dix-neuf femmes et enfants se jettent du haut d''une falaise de Californie. Kristin devait être la deux millième. Mais à la dernière minute, elle s''enfuit dans les collines de Hollywood et trouve refuge chez un homme à l''esprit passablement ravagé. Dans une pièce verrouillée, tout en bas de sa maison, il travaille à son grand œuvre : un énorme calendrier bleu qui présuppose que le véritable commencement du nouveau millénaire est non pas le 31 décembre 1999 à minuit, mais l''aube d''un matin de mai 1968. D''une tour celtique hantée en Bretagne à un memory hotel de Tokyo, La mer est arrivée à minuit est un kaléidoscope de destins. Et au centre de cette rosace futuriste, il y a Kristin, conteuse de dix-sept ans, qui entraîne le lecteur dans un voyage entre rêve, érotisme et suspense.