Stephen Wright Books In Order

Meditations in Green

Sardonic, searing, seductive and surreal, the award winning Meditations in Green is regarded by many as the best novel of the Vietnam War. It is a kaleidoscopic collage that whirls about an indelible array of images and characters: perverted Winky, who opted for the army to stay off of welfare; eccentric Payne, who’s obsessed with the film he s making of the war; bucolic Claypool, who s irrevocably doomed to a fate worse than death. Just to mention a few. And floating at the center of this psychedelic spin is Spec. 4 James Griffin. In country, Griffin studies the jungle of carpet bomb photos as he fights desperately to keep his grip on reality. And battling addiction stateside after his tour, he studies the green of household plants as he struggles mightily to get his sanity back. With mesmerizing action and Joycean interior monologues, Stephen Wright has created a book that is as much an homage to the darkness of war as it is a testament to the transcendence of art.

M31: A Family Romance

Dash and Dot husband and wife; self professed descendants of aliens from the M31 galaxy are the world’s most in demand lecturers on the UFO circuit. They live in a decommissioned church in the middle of America, with a radar dish on its steeple and a spaceship in the sanctuary. Their children have the run of the house when Dash and Dot are away. When a couple of UFO groupies show up looking for the extraterrestrial duo, they find instead a nuclear family or rather, a family gone nuclear whose comically discomforting world resembles our own as much as it does another world altogether.

Going Native

Going Native is Stephen Wright’s darkly comic take on the road novel, in which one man s headlong escape from the American Dream becomes everybody s worst nightmare. Wylie Jones is set: lovely wife, beautiful kids, barbecues in the backyard of his tastefully decorated suburban Chicago house with good friends. Set, but not satisfied. So one night he just walks out, gets behind the wheel of a neighbor s emerald green Galaxy 500, and drives off into some other life, his name changed, his personality malleable. In Wright s inimitable narrative, we re taken on a joy ride to hell, a rollercoaster of sex and violence and the peculiar mix of the two that is our society today.

The Amalgamation Polka

Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as a bright star in the literary sky, Stephen Wright now extends his astonishing accomplishment with a Civil War novel unlike any other.

Born in 1844 in bucolic upstate New York, Liberty Fish is the son of fervent abolitionists as well as the grandson of Carolina slaveholders even more dedicated to their cause. Thus follows a childhood limned with fugitive slaves moving through hidden passageways in the house, his Uncle Potter’s free soil adventure stories whose remarkable violence sets the tone of the mounting national crisis, and the inevitable distress that befalls his mother whenever letters arrive from her parents a conflict that ultimately costs her her life and compels Liberty, in hopes of reconciling the familial disunion, to escape first into the cauldron of war and then into a bedlam more disturbing still.

Rich in characters both heartbreaking and bloodcurdling, comic and horrific, The Amalgamation Polka is shot through with politics and dreams, and it captures great swaths of the American experience, from village to metropolis to plantation, from the Erie Canal to the Bahamas, from Bloody Kansas to the fulfillment of the killing fields. Yet for all the brutality and tragedy, this novel is exuberant in the telling and its wide compassion, brim*ming with the language, manners, hopes, and fears of its time all of this so transformed by Stephen Wright s imaginative compass that places and events previously familiar are rendered new and strange, terrifying and stirring. Instantly revelatory, constantly mesmerizing, this is the work of a major writer at the top of his form.

Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation

A collection of innovative fiction, comic book art, illustrations and other text by the most radical of the postmodern new wave.