Flats is a post-apocalyptic exploration of the human self. Submerged amidst a cast of faceless characters named after ruined American cities who compete over a shrinking fringe of space, Flats is a modern masterpiece of the counterculture.

Quake chronicles the unraveling of society after an earthquake strikes ’60s Los Angeles. By painting a bleak picture of what people are capable of doing to one another in extreme circumstances, Quake is nihilistic and haunting, as well as uncomfortably foreboding. And more relevant than ever.

This edition of Flats + Quake features a new introduction from noted critic and writer Michael Greenberg (Hurry Down Sunshine, Beg, Borrow, Steal).

Visit The Drop Edge of Yonder page.
Visit the Nog page.

A Top 5 Book of 2009
"Each book is short, but dense and trippy. If you want to know what it felt like to be a reader in the late 60's and early 70's, when so many new experimental works were put out by mainstream publishers, these books are great places to start. Nog even had a blurb from Thomas Pynchon ("the novel of bullshit is dead!"), Flats wore its Samuel Beckett influence proudly on its sleeve, Quake took us through a slo mo pomo earthquake in L.A. Together they provide a tour of the dissolution of identity that was daily life in the late sixties."
-Michael Silverblatt, KCRW

"Reading Rudolph Wurlitzer's novels is like watching a road movie backward. In his 1969 underground classic, Nog, the narrator drifts across an amorphous terrain on which his shifting identity molds itself like soft clay. Flats and Quake mine much the same territory, a post-cataclysmic landscape in which heroic storytelling has been blown to bits. Quake reads like a mash-up of On the Road and Waiting for Godot. For the first time in more than three decades, it's possible to investigate the interplay between Wurlitzer's novels and his screenplays, the way his radical experiments in one informed his canny deconstruction of the other."
-Sam Adams, Los Angeles Times

"The reader, the writer, and the denizens of [Flats] all get taken for a ride here, then are set down, slightly more cracked than they were before. [Quake] is Wurlitzer at his most Pynchonian. The frontier - alluded to in Flats, deconstructed in Wurlitzer's 1973 screenplay for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and played for laughs in last year's Drop Edge of Yonder - is again the subject [in Quake], posited this time as the place where humans turn back into whatever they turn back into when the marijuana and Social Security run out."
-Zach Baron, Village Voice

"Push aside Brautigan and Ginsberg and make room in the curriculum for Wurlitzer as an overlooked and undervalued voice of the counterculture of the '60s and '70s, wedged comfortably between the collected works of Willam S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. Quake is, and remains, one of the greatest novels ever composed about Los Angeles and death in the West"
-Rodger Jacobs, PopMatters.com

Theodore Hamm interviews Rudolph Wurlitzer in The Brooklyn Rail.

"Rudolph Wurlitzer is really, really good." —Thomas Pynchon

"Wurlitzer is one of the most unique and fascinating American writers."
—Dennis Cooper

"If you can legitimately judge a writer by fellow scribes who honestly extol his work, and count on his inhabiting a plane of popularity and celebrity similar to the one where his endorsers dwell, then Rudolph Wurlitzer should be a name on the lips of sage critics and fans of zesty, transgressive postmodernist fiction everywhere. Wurlitzer might be the closest thing we have to an actual cult author, a highly talented fiction writer."
—Paul DiFilippo, Barnes & Noble Review