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NEW YORK (AP) -- At age 53, author Donald Antrim may just be getting started.

Over the past two decades, he has published three highly praised novels, a memoir and numerous short stories in The New Yorker. He has earned the respect, even reverence of such peers as Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides, but so far has had what he calls "literary-level" sales, the kind that leave many writers without a publisher or even a book in print.

But those who do read him are determined to tell others. He is under contract from a top literary house, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, for a novel, a second memoir and a book of stories. His previous novels "Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World," ''The One Hundred Brothers" and "The Verificationist" have been reissued by Picador, a paperback imprint of Farrar. Introductions are provided by Franzen, Eugenides and George Saunders, who regards Antrim as an overlooked genius.

"There's a discrepancy between what a great writer he is and how many people know this," Saunders told The Associated Press. "He is one of the funniest, sharpest, edgiest writers in America."

Antrim is almost a genre in his own right, Franzen writes in the introduction to "One Hundred Brothers," utterly "unlike any other living writer." His books are narrated by young, unstable men who wish to love and do good, but are compelled to make chaos. The plots are free and fantastic, yet constructed with mathematical logic: the romantic and philosophical thoughts of a psychiatrist suspended in mid-air at a pancake house; a home school teacher gone mad; a dining room bursting with 100 quarrelsome brothers.

The novels are short and unbroken, without chapters or even breaks between paragraphs. They take years to write in part because Antrim has no idea how they will turn out when he starts them. He will get an idea a gathering of psychiatrists or a family meal. He will write, pause, write, step away, come back. Each new sentence works off the sentence just completed, for some 150-200 pages.

"It's a very frustrating, but in some ways a really pleasurable way of working," Antrim, a tall, stocky man with a thoughtful speaking style, said during a recent interview at his Brooklyn apartment.

His literature is no stranger, or more complicated, than his childhood. A native of Sarasota, Fla., Antrim was mostly raised by an alcoholic mother who aged into "an increasingly damaged Lady Macbeth," he wrote in the memoir "The Afterlife." His parents married, divorced, then married and divorced again. He had an uncle who was apparently enough of a threat that federal and state agents once handcuffed him and took him away.

Antrim didn't know he wanted to do for college beyond get out of Florida. He chose a top school in the North, Brown University, where his fellow students included such future authors as Eugenides and Rick Moody. Antrim was interested in theater at the time and Moody remembers working with him on a production of Franz Kafka's "The Trial."

"I was a little intimidated by him at first because he was a couple years ahead of me," Moody told the AP in an email. "But I remember vividly the day, in rehearsal, when, in operating the whip that was one of his character's props, he threw his shoulder out of the socket, and then set about, in character, trying to get the thing to pop back in.

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Spreading the word about author Donald Antrim