Books by Rick Moody

The author weaves together past and present and family legend as he shares his personal story of dealing with depression, and his search through his family's paternal lines to find clues to his melancholy.

A complete collection of short works offers insight into the progression of the writer's work throughout a thirty-year period and features, among other tales, the complete texts of At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and The Dog of the Marriage.

The author of Purple America and Ice Storm serves up a new collection of stories that seals his reputation as one of the best American writers under the age of forty.

After a break of eight years, Rick Moody, the author of THE ICE STORM, returns to fiction with THE DIVINERS, which examines the emptiness that lies at the heart of the oversized, overblown ambitions of the American entertainment industry. In December 2000, the election recount drags on, gripping the country with unrest. The future seems uncertain, but various players in the film and television industry have more important things to worry about: they're busy battling over the rights to THE DIVINERS, a miniseries about dowsing that doesn't even have a script and is supposedly inspired by a novel that no one actually seems to have read.

Winner of the Pushcart Press's Tenth Annual Editors' Book Award, Garden State is a brilliant and uncompromising look at life in what came to be known as Generation X -- those years just after college, when life is alternately exhilarating, humiliating, and just plain confusing. Haledon, New Jersey, is a suburb in eclipse. On the hills above the mid-Atlantic sprawl, the kids are looking for something to do. Four disaffected twentysomethings -- Alice Smail, one-time guitar player and unemployed short-order cook; Dennis Francis, painter and plumber; Max Crick, dealer in controlled substances; and Nails Pennebaker, night watchman -- pass the time playing in garage bands, drinking in seedy bars, and doing drugs, until real life finally shakes them from their stupor. Garden State is a moving novel about the lyricism of real life and the beauty of responsibility. With a new afterword by the author, it is both the first and the most lasting novel about a generation.

Winner of Best Screenplay Award at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. In another family drama, after his internationally acclaimed SENSE AND SENSIBILITY success, director Ang Lee takes his moving and comic sensibility to the American suburbs of the 1970s.

A collection of remarkable and wonderfully eclectic original essays and meditations--by Madison Smartt Bell, Benjamin Cheever, Kim Wozencraft, and other notable writers--offers a fascinating range of probing and very personal interpretations of what Christianity means today.

Probes the strained relationships between a woman and her abrasive mother, her cancer-stricken father, an ex-husband who is permanently tuned into Star Trek, and Jason, her erotic but higly manipulative lover. Reprint.

Hardy's novel begins with the famous scene in which Michael Henchard, a young farmer, gets drunk at a village fair and sells his wife and baby daughter to a passing sailor for five guineas. The consequences of this impulsive act are regrettable and far-reaching, and culminate in Henchard's ruin and his death in obscurity as a lonely old man. Henchard is similar to the heroes of Greek tragedies who destroy themselves through weaknesses in their own character. (The subtitle of the novel is "The Life and Death of a Man of Character.")

From the author of "The Ice Storm" comes the story of one weekend in the life of a New York publicist--a young man with a stutter, a terminally ill mother, and a drinking problem--who is summoned home to suburban Connecticut, only to find himself confronted by obstacles of comically epic proportions.

Simplicity in forms of worship, opposition to violence, and the importance of compassionate living and thoughtful listening are hallmarks of the spirituality of the Quakers. From their beginnings in seventeenth-century England to today, the Friends have attempted to live out their belief in the presence of God's spirit within their hearts. This book features the writings of some of the most influential and inspirational Quaker thinkers -- George Fox, John Woolman, Caroline Stephen, Thomas Kelly, and others -- providing a vivid portrait of the beautiful, simple spirituality of the Quakers.

Includes The Albertine Notes, in which a mind-altering drug dominates life in post-apocalypse New York City; K&K, about an office manager who receives increasingly scary notes in a suggestion box; and The Omega Force, in which an alcoholic former government official descends into jingoism and paranoia. Reprint.

"The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven," a novella by Rick Moody, is the first novella to be published in its entirety by the "Paris Review" since "Goodbye Columbus" in 1958. This piece won the Aga Khan Prize for best fiction in the "Paris Review" in 1994; the other stories in this collection have appeared previously in "The New Yorker," "Esquire," "Harper's," "Mississippi Mud," and "Grand Street."

Following in the footsteps of LEARNING HOW TO DIE, Greg Kot's wonderful overview of the enigmatic Midwest band Wilco, whose checkered music business career was the subject of the 2002 movie-length documentary I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART, the band members themselves chime in with their own contribution to the expanding library of Wilco-oriented material, THE WILCO BOOK. The sumptuous, coffee-table volume is not so much an explanation of the band's oeuvre (although celebrated author Rick Moody attempts a lengthy exegesis of five of their songs) as an exposition of their working methods, with the inclusion of many color plates, varying from arty depictions of birds to somewhat earthier pictures of band members and some quite beautiful photographs of their guitars. There are also texts from the band's leader, Jeff Tweedy, as well as various members of the collective road crew, ranging from the informative (usually the crew) to the inscrutable (usually Tweedy). Covering most of the rock & roll bases, from artful creativity to practical advice on road etiquette, and including a CD of rare band recordings, THE WILCO BOOK is an imaginative and lavishly illustrated glimpse inside the workings of one of the more innovative outfits in alternative music.