Books like Valmouth by Ronald Firbank

Stephen is an ideal child of aristocratic parentsa fencer, a horse rider and a keen scholar. Stephen grows to be a war hero, a bestselling writer and a loyal, protective lover. But Stephen is a woman, and her lovers are women. As her ambitions drive her, and society confines her, Stephen is forced into desperate actions.

"*The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas ... is not an autobiography by Alice Toklas, Stein's companion from 1907 to her death, but a funny, innovative memoir which pays unusual attention to the 'wives of geniuses' as well as the 'geniuses' themselves. It focuses on the Paris years, mythologizing the Stein-Toklas household and presenting Stein as the writing member of an international art movement that starred Picasso. A lot of what we remember about Paris in the 1920s comes from *The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas*. Along the way Stein tells some stories about her past which are, according to her biographer James Mellow, streamlined versions of the truth." -Phyllis Rose in *The Norton Book of Women's Lives*

Night and day, Virginia Woolf's second novel, is both a love story and a social comedy in the tradition of Jane Austen; yet it also questions that tradition, recognizing that the goals of society and the individual may not necessarily coincide. At its center is Katharine Hilbery, the beautiful grand-daughter of a great Victorian poet. She must choose between becoming engaged to the oddly prosaic poet William Rodney and her attraction to Ralph Denham, with whom she feels a more profound and disturbing affinity. Katharine's hesitation is vividly contrasted with the approach of her friend Mary Datchet, dedicated to the Women's Rights movement. The ensuing complications are underlined and to some extent unravelled by Katharine's mother, Mrs Hilbery, whose struggles to weave together the known documents, events and memories of her father's life into a coherent biography reflect Woolf's own sense of the unique and elusive nature of experience.

"Kate, an undercover newbie gossip reporter, follows a celebrity into rehab to dish all the dirt--but things are always more complicated than they seem in the first charming novel by Catherine McKenzie"--

James Joyce’s most celebrated novel, and one of the most highly-regarded novels in the English language, records the events of one day—Thursday the 16th of June, 1904—in the city of Dublin.

The reader is first reintroduced to Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce’s previous novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen is now living in a rented Martello tower and working at a school, having completed his B.A. and a period of attempted further study in Paris. The focus then shifts to the book’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser and social outsider. It is a work day, so both Bloom and Stephen depart their homes for their respective journeys around Dublin.

While containing a richly detailed story and still being generally described as a novel, Ulysses breaks many of the bounds otherwise associated with the form. It consists of eighteen chapters, or “episodes,” each somehow echoing a scene in Homer’s Odyssey. Each episode takes place in a different setting, and each is written in a different, and often unusual, style. The book’s chief innovation is commonly cited to be its expansion of the “free indirect discourse” or “interior monologue” technique that Joyce used in his previous two books.

Ulysses is known not only for its formal novelty and linguistic inventiveness, but for its storied publication history. The first fourteen episodes of the book were serialized between 1918 and 1920 in The Little Review, while several episodes were published in 1919 in The Egoist. In 1921, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice won a trial regarding obscenity in the thirteenth episode, “Nausicaa.” The Little Review’s editors were enjoined against publishing any further installments; Ulysses would not appear again in America until 1934.

The outcome of the 1921 trial worsened Joyce’s already-considerable difficulties in finding a publisher in England. After lamenting to Sylvia Beach, owner of the Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company, that it might never be published at all, Beach offered to publish it in Paris, and Ulysses first appeared in its entirety in February 1922.

The first printing of the first edition was filled with printing errors. A corrected second edition was published in 1924. Stuart Gilbert’s 1932 edition benefited from correspondence with Joyce, and claimed in its front matter to be “the definitive standard edition,” but was later found to have introduced errors of its own.

The novel’s initial reception was mixed. W. B. Yeats called it “mad,” but would later agree with the positive assessments of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, stating that it was “indubitably a work of genius.” Joyce’s second biographer Richard Ellmann reports that one doctor claimed to have seen writing of equal merit by his insane patients, and Virginia Woolf derided it as “underbred.” Joyce’s aunt, Josephine Murray, rejected it as “unfit to read” on account of its purported obscenity, to which Joyce famously retorted that if that were so, then life was not fit to live.

The sheer density of references in the text make Ulysses a book that virtually demands of the reader access to critical interpretation; but it also makes it a book that is easily obscured by the industry of scholarship it has generated over the last century. The dismissal of a serious interpretation is tempting, but would trivialize Joyce’s enormous project as an extended joke or an elaborate exercise in ego. Likewise