The Secret Service agents guarding the vice president steel their nerves to a multitude of dangers every day. When he runs for the top spot on the Democratic ticket, however, their personal lives may just be the biggest obstacle to keeping him safe. Wry, muscular Vi Asplund is the daughter of an atheist insurance adjuster who took the young Vi and her brother, Jens, to the grisly accident scenes he covered. This tolerance for the macabre follows Vi into her career as an agent, and into Jens's development as the software designer for a gorey video game. Chief-of-detail Gretchen Williams fights to keep the team in order, while Agent Tashmo, a veteran presidential guard, reflects on the glory days of the Reagan administration. As the primary approaches, these intense men and women balance their own lives with that of the vice president. An astounding novel of survival and absurdity, Big If casts a sharp eye on America today.

Big If

Literature & Fiction

Costello, Mark

United States

Mariner Books

It is New Year's Day, 1965, and the body of Father George Sedgewick is discovered on a snow-covered runway of Logan Airport. Gone missing are four thousand communion hosts consecrated by Pope Paul VI, meant to be given out to the faithful at the first English-language mass in America later that year. Ray Dunn, a rising young assistant district attorney and the son of a corrupt cop, is assigned to the case. In another part of the city, legendary narcotics detective Manny Manning begins a desperate search for the shadowy source of deadly new heroin hitting the streets. This time Manny is determined to reach the top, but his adversary is cunning, brutal--and branching out into a strange drug called "acid." These quests for a killer and a dealer will intersect, unleashing the ghosts of the past and unlocking the secrets of Boston's most powerful institutions. Authentic, knowing, and bracingly cynical, Bag Men is a powerful thriller that will keep readers on the edge of their seats.

Bag Men

Harvest Books

The Murphy Stories (Illinois Short Fiction)

University of Illinois Press

The stories of Mark Costello are powerful, wrenching tales of life in a dislocated somewhere between the solidly down-and-out and the nervously middle class.Mark Costello, a native of Decatur, Illinois, is the author of the story collections The Murphy Stories (University of Illinois Press, 1973), which won the St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction, and Middle Murphy (University of Illinois Press, 1991). The Murphy Stories has received praise and one of its stories, Murphy's Xmas was anthologized in several collections.

Middle Murphy (Illinois Short Fiction)

These stories mark the return of Mark Costello's now-legendary creation Michael Murphy, the character who first appeared in the acclaimed collection The Murphy Stories. Joyce Carol Oates wrote in the Washington Post Book World, "Murphy is a Midwestern cousin of Donleavy's Ginger Man, but much more human and troubled. . . . It is a remarkable achievement, the presentation of a complex, suffering, self-conscious, and very lyric personality as he endures his own being."

Middle Murphy (Sunsinger Books Illinois Short)

David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's exuberant exploration of rap music and culture. Living together in Cambridge in 1989, David Foster Wallace and longtime friend Mark Costello discovered that they shared "an uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music called rap/hip-hop." The book they wrote together, set against the legendary Boston music scene, mapped the bipolarities of rap and pop, rebellion and acceptance, glitz and gangsterdom. Signifying Rappers issued a fan's challenge to the giants of rock writing, Greil Marcus, Robert Palmer, and Lester Bangs: Could the new street beats of 1989 set us free, as rock had always promised? Back in print at last, Signifying Rappers is a rare record of a city and a summer by two great thinkers, writers, and friends. With a new foreword by Mark Costello on his experience writing with David Foster Wallace, this rerelease cannot be missed.

Signifying Rappers

Biographies & Memoirs

WALLACE, DAVID FOSTER

Arts & Literature

Back Bay Books

The authenticity of George V. Higgins and the hipness of Carl Hiassen combine to galvanic effect in this debut police thriller of Boston in the sixties. The authenticity of George V. Higgins and the hipness of Carl Hiassen combine to galvanic effect in this debut police thriller of Boston in the sixties. An urban police thriller and first novel with a differenceliterary smarts and the real inside skinny on big-city politics and crime fighting. New Year's Day, 1965. The body of Father George Sedgewick is discovered on a snow-covered runway of Logan Airport, brutally murdered. No leads. Missing: four thousand hosts, blessed by the Pope, meant to be given out to the faithful at the first English-language mass in America later that year. Assigned to the case: Ray Dunn, rising young assistant district attorney, son of a corrupt cop. In another part of the city, legendary narcotics detective Manny Manning begins a desperate search for the shadowy source of deadly new heroin hitting the streets. This time Manny is determined to reach the top, but his adversary is cunning, brutaland branching out into a strange new drug called "acid". . . These quests for a killer and a dealer will intersect, unleashing the ghosts of the past and unlocking the secrets of Boston's most powerful institutions. Authentic, knowing, bracingly cynical, Bag Men immediately launches John Flood into the first rank of America's crime writers.

Bag Men: A Novel

W.W.Norton&Company

A scary, funny novel―a riff on recent history and the American obsession with assassination.
It's winter in New Hampshire, the economy is booming, the vice president is running for president, and his Secret Service people are very, very tense.
Meet Vi Asplund, a young Secret Service agent mourning her dead father. She goes home to New Hampshire to see her brother Jens, a computer genius who just might be going mad―and is poised to make a fortune on Big If, a viciously nihilistic computer game aimed at teenagers. Vi's America, as she sees it in the crowds, in her brother, and in her fellow agents, is affluent, anxious, and abuzz with vague fantasies of violence.
Through a gallery of vivid characters―heroic, ignoble, or desperate―Mark Costello's hilarious novel limns the strategies, both sound and absurd, that we conjure to survive in daily life.

Big If: A Novel

Contemporary

A scary, funny novel a riff on recent history and the American obsession with assassination. It's winter in New Hampshire, the economy is booming, the vice president is running for president, and his Secret Service people are very, very tense. Meet Vi Asplund, a young Secret Service agent mourning her dead father. She goes home to New Hampshire to see her brother Jens, a computer genius who just might be going mad and is poised to make a fortune on Big If, a viciously nihilistic computer game aimed at teenagers. Vi's America, as she sees it in the crowds, in her brother, and in her fellow agents, is affluent, anxious, and abuzz with vague fantasies of violence. Through a gallery of vivid characters heroic, ignoble, or desperate Mark Costello's hilarious novel limns the strategies, both sound and absurd, that we conjure to survive in daily life.

Literary

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Costello, Mark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Costello, Mark

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Costello, Mark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Big If

Bag Men

The Murphy Stories (Illinois Short Fiction)

The Murphy Stories (Illinois Short Fiction)

Middle Murphy (Illinois Short Fiction)

Middle Murphy (Sunsinger Books Illinois Short)

Signifying Rappers

Bag Men: A Novel

Big If: A Novel

Big If: A Novel