American

[close] From the incomparable David Rakoff, a poignant, beautiful, witty, and wise novel in verse whose scope spans the twentieth century

Through his books and his radio essays for NPR's This American Life, David Rakoff has built a deserved reputation as one of the finest and funniest essayists of our time. Written with humor, sympathy, and tenderness, this intricately woven novel proves him to be the master of an altogether different art form.

LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE; CHERISH, PERISH leaps cities and decades as Rakoff sings the song of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal.

The characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or cruelty. A daughter of Irish slaughterhouse workers in early-twentieth-century Chicago faces a desperate choice; a hobo offers an unexpected refuge on the rails during the Great Depression; a vivacious aunt provides her clever nephew a path out of the crushed dream of postwar Southern California; an office girl endures the casually vicious sexism of 1950s Manhattan; the young man from Southern California revels in the electrifying sexual and artistic openness of 1960s San Francisco, then later tends to dying friends and lovers as the AIDS pandemic devastates the community he cherishes; a love triangle reveals the empty materialism of the Reagan years; a marriage crumbles under the distinction between self-actualization and humanity; as the new century opens, a man who has lost his way finds a measure of peace in a photograph he discovers in an old box—an image of pure and simple joy that unites the themes of this brilliantly conceived work.

Rakoff's insistence on beauty and the necessity of kindness in a selfish world raises the novel far above mere satire. A critic once called Rakoff "magnificent," a word that perfectly describes this wonderful novel in verse.
About David Rakoff:

David Rakoff wrote the bestsellers Fraud, Don’t Get Too Comfortable and Half Empty. A two-time recipient of the Lambda Literary Award and winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, he was a regular contributor to Public Radio International’s This American Life. His writing frequently appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Wired, Salon, GQ, Outside, Gourmet, Vogue, and Slate, among other publications. An accomplished stage and screen actor, playwright, and screenwriter, he adapted the screenplay for and starred in Joachim Back’s film The New Tenants, which won the 2010 Oscar for Best Live Action Short. He died in August 2012 at the age of 47, shortly after finishing this book.
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[close] Experimental, post-modern, philosophical, satirical, dystopian fiction.

Catena recounts the open-ended odyssey of a modern antihero adrift at sea.

Born into the cultural fragmentation of diaspora and a world citizen by default, the protagonist, named simply Dog, roams the globe in a Sisyphean quest for home, unable to claim allegiance to either creed or flag.

Erudite, sharp-witted, and street-smart, Dog marshals the survivor’s tenacity in his attempt to distill a legacy of victimization into a cogent, dynamic identity marked by the creative impulse, and, ultimately, a life-affirming ethos borne of the liberation from the self and the other alike.

The first epistle of the Journey to Virginland trilogy, Catena is Dog’s maiden foray into his ancestral country, where women are perennially struck by virginhood, men remain churlishly Neanderthaline, and a resplendent culture is held hostage by the twin hydras of chauvinism and corruption. It is here, in his self-referential heartland, that a disillusioned and ostracized Dog will be propelled into a consummate search for meaning.

The ensuing journey unfolds as a fluid, cinematic tapestry of emotion and experience, seemingly rudderless yet tightly interconnected, with the narrative woven together by the protagonist’s biting observations on sex, politics, history, religion, and philosophy.

Closely reflecting Dog’s splintered world, which is a consequence of empire in naked brutality marketed as progress, or as the exigencies of civilization, Catena is a conscious subversion of the form and structure of the modern novel. Melikian rejects the very nature of the conventional novel, viewing it as emblematic of the rational structures, cohesiveness, and verticality of centers of power, of the ongoing project of imperialism.

What emerges from Catena is the irreverent, often bawdy, and intensely moving tale of a stateless outsider which dispenses linearity in favor of fresh air, and a freedom of seeing which hints, with every turn, at a higher sense of humanism. [close]

[close] "[A promising short-fiction debut." — The Washingtonian

"There’s a clarity and honesty here and in many of the other pieces in War Stories which will no doubt appeal to fans of American minimalism."
— Philadelphia Review of Books


We all carry our own battle scars. This is the premise of War Stories, a rich collection of short fiction that draws upon both the literal and figurative meaning of its title. Through a diverse array of characters, settings, and circumstances, War Stories delivers a series of powerful tales from the home front of war: the stories of parents, siblings, and spouses of those who have fought, as well as those who have returned from battle.

Set against the backdrop of contemporary conflicts, War Stories’s compelling nine narratives tell of a wounded veteran who seeks renewal through an imagined relationship with a neighborhood girl, a grieving father who finds peace and reconciliation at the site of a disastrous bus crash, a young woman who searches for identity and meaning in the wake of her husband’s injury, and an urban teenager engaged in a fateful standoff with local recruiters. Interspersed with these tales are powerful, non-traditional “war stories” – of youth, unexpected loss, and heartbreaking love.

War Stories’s thoughtful, beautifully crafted tales, which range in style from deceptively simple to rich and complex, tell of people young and old, male and female, who share two things: humanity and resilience. These diverse and deftly written stories are joined through Elisabeth Doyle’s remarkable style and ease in creating a universe full of despair, hope, and dreams. At turns tender and harsh, tragic and yearning, War Stories will leave the reader wanting more.



Note: This book was originally released in 2012, but this is a second edition with bonus content. [close]