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The Book of Freaks
by
Jamie Iredell (Goodreads Author)
Fiction. Like an expanded Dictionary of Received Ideas, THE BOOK OF FREAKS takes its subject matter from everyday life. Both hilarious and poker-faced in equal measures, this faux encyclopedia categorizes mundanities and renders them starkly unexpected. From circus freaks, to nationalities, to you and everyone you've ever met, THE BOOK OF FREAKS points out what we already...more
Paperback, 133 pages
Published
February 22nd 2011
by Future Tense Books
(first published February 2011)
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The Book of Freaks is something! I received a lot more from within the covers of this book than I had bargained for. What I found in these pages were old friends, neighbors, bums, immigrants, the faithful and the faithless, barflies, zimbabweans, and used-car salesmen. Iredell's words are colorfully wacky, but precisely so, and constitute super rich food for thought. With each new page you start to realize that this isn't merely a joke book like you thought it might be. Jamie Iredell, through al...more
Jamie Iredell made my ears feel weird and sexy at around this time last year. I was in Seattle for a weekend reading and saw that Blake Butler was reading at a cafe. My lady and I went to check out the young stud--I had read a bunch of BB's stuff and had emailed with him but had never met him in person. One of his Atlanta friends was touring and reading with him. This was Jamie Iredell. He was touring for a book called "Prose. Poems. A Novel." (a really great, loosely autobiographical book) but...more
Iredell's earlier collections have been fragmentary, full of moments and sketches that add up to powerful impressions of places and lives. With Book of Freaks, the same fragmentation is at play but he's pulled back a bit, including the book itself in that gaze, not to mention the reader. In fact, the biggest "freak" here may be the book itself, because of the sheer unlikeliness and artificiality of a linear life like those we've learned to expect from fiction. The questions Iredell raises about...more
A sort of guide to the world we live and the neighbors we ignore, but also its own statement that we are all freaks.
Mr. Iredell smashes though each section, which is in order by the governing rules of the alphabet, laughing at the topics and showing words as putty. He molds, he combines, he places text we love on the wall for a later play date.
Mr. Iredell smashes though each section, which is in order by the governing rules of the alphabet, laughing at the topics and showing words as putty. He molds, he combines, he places text we love on the wall for a later play date.
“From the smallest towns to the largest cities, Jamie Iredell’s The Book of Freaks has become a shocking metaphor for a life spent bodybuilding. Because of its subject matter, this book will be interesting to all decent hippies and the dead literary critic Leslie Fiedler.” – Mickey Hess
wasn't expecting much but lately, when it comes to reading, I'd rather not read what often comes off as a writer's workshop collective exercise (as my pal Jack so aptly put it).
An absolutely bizarre and one-of-a-kind book. If it weren't so damn great, I'd be jealous. Hell, I'm jealous anyway. James Iredell is a strange kind of genius.
maybe...
I read this in bits and pieces like a dictionary where I wasn't looking up a word. Iredell makes a book that isn't really novel, but a not-really novel that is really a great book. Sampsell is smart for hearing this manuscript read aloud at a reading, smarter even for publishing it, and Iredell is smartest of all for writing it.
Well done, Mr. Iredell. And I think I will be re-reading this in some scattershot one-at-a-time way. Yerba Buenans? Damn.
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Jamie Iredell lives in Atlanta. He is the author of Prose: Poems, a Novel, and The Book of Freaks.
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Feb 21, 2011 04:58am