Jason has
2622 books
(272 selected)
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| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
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date purchased | owned | purchase location | condition | format | ||
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| 9781939987099
| 5.00
| 1
| Jun 10, 2013
| Jun 10, 2013
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This is the latest from my publishing company, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, slated for release on June 10th, 2013. At that point...more
This is the latest from my publishing company, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, slated for release on June 10th, 2013. At that point I will get a longer essay up here, explaining why I decided to sign this book in the first place. Don't mistake this version for the other "Mountainfit" listing here at Goodreads; that other one is for a slightly different version Sethi self-published last year!(less)
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| May 15, 2013
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May 15, 2013
| Hardcover
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| 9781939987082
| 4.75
| 4
| May 27, 2013
| May 27, 2013
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This is CCLaP's newest book, being released on May 27th. At that point I will get a more substantial essay posted here, all about the book and why I d...more
This is CCLaP's newest book, being released on May 27th. At that point I will get a more substantial essay posted here, all about the book and why I decided to sign it in the first place. We'll be making a strong push towards getting copies of the book into the hands of every person who adds this to their library, so I hope you'll have a chance to do so in the coming weeks.(less)
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| May 10, 2013
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May 10, 2013
| Hardcover
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| 0765329476
| 9780765329479
| 3.71
| 451
| Nov 13, 2012
| Nov 13, 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The Inexplicables is the fourth book I've now read in Cherie Priest's remarkable "Clockwork Century" steampunk series, and in fact a quote from one of my earlier reviews ended up making the front cover of this one; and that surprised and delighted me but also felt very natural, because this is one of my favorite genre series of all time by now, and I look forward to the point seemingly every year when Priest has a brand-new volume done and ready to come out. They all take place in a what-if Victorian America in the late 1800s with just layers upon layers of fantastical details piled on: there's a giant wall around the ruined remains of the former Seattle, for example, because a mad scientist once ruptured an underground cave during a bank heist and released a heavy gas that turns people into zombies; but like a first-person-shooter videogame, there are also miles of underground tunnels, businesses and residences under this gassed zombie wasteland, full of outlaws and Chinamen who take this gas and distill it into a heroin-like drug that is then shipped across America in giant armed dirigibles; and in the meanwhile, the Civil War is still going on decades after it did in real life, because here the South develops railroads, submarines and robots to help even out the fight; and in the latest development in this speculative universe, it turns out that none other than Bigfoot has managed to accidentally enter the walled wasteland of downtown Seattle, and that the poisonous gas is slowly turning him into an unstoppable force of violence. And that's what makes these books so delightful; for while her characterizations are not much more than minimally solid enough to pass muster, it's Priest's plotting skills that are her real forte, delivering exciting after exciting tale that in epic scope has now taken us all the way across the United States and back, this newest volume set back in the walled Seattle where the story began. Breathtaking in its pacing, and such a mega-pastiche that you'll be in awe simply over how well she melds it all together, this is the literal definition of an intellectual's guilty pleasure, and should be highly enjoyed by one and all if read with this attitude. Highly recommended, as are all her books. Out of 10: 8.9, or 9.9 for steampunk fans (less) | Notes are private!
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| Apr 17, 2013
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Apr 17, 2013
| Paperback
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| 1934081388
| 9781934081389
| 4.75
| 4
| Nov 01, 2012
| Nov 01, 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) In my half a decade of reviewing indie literature now, the one great small press that I think most gets overlooked is the fantastic Casperian Books; for while they always pick the most superb authors out there when it comes to the specific thing these authors are trying to accomplish, what this tends to be are smaller, more slowly paced character studies, which when combined with their lackluster covers tends to get them lost in the shuffle many times of the literal thousands of indie presses that now exist. Take Tom Mahony's Pacific Offering, for example, which doesn't offer up too many thrills from its actual storyline -- longtime surfer buddies take one last poverty-stricken road trip to Mexico to catch some waves, realizing along the way that they are growing too old to tolerate the recklessness of such trips anymore, and that their diverging lives are rapidly bringing an end to even their friendship, a serviceable enough plot but no great shakes. But when it comes to evoking the melancholy tone and feel that such a premise suggests, Mahony has few peers; and as someone who lives in the area and most likely has picked up the board a few times himself, he brings a real authenticity to this telling, and really pulls you in to the southern California coast and all its details in an engaging and impressive way. A quiet and winsome book but a compelling read, perhaps your life won't be changed by its small slice-of-life scope, but certainly you will be rewarded by this well-done loss-of-innocence tale. Out of 10: 9.0(less) | Notes are private!
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| Apr 10, 2013
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Apr 10, 2013
| Paperback
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| 9781939987051
| 4.00
| 5
| Dec 01, 2012
| Apr 01, 2013
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I'm the publisher of this book! Longer essay on the reasons I signed it coming soon!
| Notes are private!
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| Apr 02, 2013
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Apr 02, 2013
| Hardcover
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| 148195430X
| 9781481954303
| 5.00
| 1
| Feb 20, 2013
| Feb 20, 2013
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I find it difficult to do analytical reviews of poetry, which is why my arts center doesn't accept such work; but I did at least want to mention here...more
I find it difficult to do analytical reviews of poetry, which is why my arts center doesn't accept such work; but I did at least want to mention here that I recently had a chance to read through this latest by my acquaintance Robert Riche, and enjoyed it quite a bit. For sure it's slow-paced and sentimental, and you should know that before picking it up, but in general I found this a nice bedtime read, and enjoyed getting through another three or four pieces each night as I went to sleep. Recommended for fans of the genre. (less)
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| Mar 19, 2013
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Mar 19, 2013
| Paperback
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| 1621050793
| 9781621050797
| 4.06
| 114
| Feb 01, 2013
| Feb 01, 2013
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I picked up this short novel because Sam Pink is part of that whole hipster-lit crowd I've mentioned here before -- a Brooklyn/Chicago circle of friends that includes Tao Lin, Jordan Castro, Heiko Julien and more -- who I'm fascinated by because they are literally the first group of young artists in my life who make me feel legitimately old and out of touch, and I find something really interesting about trying to figure out why that is. This newest by Pink, for example, is similar to Lin's work in that neither really have a three-act plot to speak of; this is simply a rambling look at a few random days in the life of a random slacker artist, as he travels across the city to visit a girlfriend, hangs out with his brother and their cat in their crappy apartment, and interacts with the other lumpen proletariats of the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago where he lives (and where, by the way, I live too -- in fact, I'm pretty sure the main character's place is supposed to be just a few blocks from my own apartment). And then if this wasn't enough, Pink was also recently accused by a prominent critic of being racist when it came to his portrayal of these Uptown down-and-outers; and that has led to one of those famed curse-laden full-out flame wars that will spill over into four or five different blogs and Tumblr accounts and Twitter feeds, and that has brought a newfound notoriety to this book that didn't exist before. So is Rontel racist? No, not really -- it's just that Pink did a bad job with the phonetic spelling of these characters' dialogue, which is why I always urge writers to skip writing phonetic dialogue whatsoever. (Trust your audience -- they'll know what you're trying to accomplish with your regional dialogue, even without such excruciating lines as, "When y'have beewd-uh, don't haffa cut ew face in duh mo'nin.") No, the real problem is that Pink simply doesn't have much of interest to actually say; for while this is competently written, it just really doesn't add up to much by the end, and since he's not really that good yet at building deeply complex characters either, he doesn't have the excuse for skipping a plot like the masters of character-heavy novels have. This is the part of the whole situation that makes me feel out of touch -- because all of the writers just mentioned are like this, which as a heavy reader I just don't find very compelling, yet these meandering, hyper-bland, pop-culture-infused books are the revered darlings of such heavy-hittting intellectual organizations like HTMLGiant, which means there simply must be something there that my 44-year-old ass is not seeing. Although I enjoy checking out the work of all these writers, I encourage them to really dig within themselves and find some much more substantial things to write about in the future; because funny clothes and Twitter wars can only get an artist so far, and one day when they wake up and realize they're no longer young and sexy and funny and go out a lot and drink a lot, their audience is suddenly going to have no more tolerance for their flighty plotless stories, which as a veteran of the poetry slam in the 1990s is something I know a little bit about, believe me. Rontel comes recommended, but it's only a limited recommendation today, a short read but one you should take with a grain of salt, from a writer who's talented enough to tackle deeper and more significant work and now needs to sit down and actually do so. Out of 10: 8.0(less) | Notes are private!
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| May 2013
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Mar 08, 2013
| Paperback
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| 4.71
| 28
| Jan 01, 2012
| Jul 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Chicago-based Heiko Julien is part of that whole young super-duper-indie lit crowd that includes Tao Lin, Jordan Castro, Megan Boyle and more, who I'm really fascinated by precisely because they make me feel so freaking old; I like to imagine all of them hanging out on a Tuesday night at some loft party I'll never get invited to, wearing '80s sweatbands and doing coke with app developers who moonlight as supermodels. I mean, that's certainly how Julien's latest short book I Am Ready to Die a Violent Death comes off, as if you have stumbled into some real-life Wes Anderson movie, which to be clear I mean as a good thing; his writing is so sharp as to sometimes be incomprehensible, and so ridiculously self-deprecatory that you think it might actually be coming full circle and making fun of you, and that you're just too stupid to catch on. I mean, here, look...  Right? I don't know what the f-ck to do with a page like that, writing that is not quite prose and not quite poetry but a sorta drunken Twitter hybrid of the two; so I guess I'll just sit back and enjoy the ride, even though a lot of it goes over my head so fast as to give me windburn. It's like this with all these writers I just mentioned, which is what makes them simultaneously so controversial and so popular among the hipster-lit crowd in Brooklyn and at HTMLGiant; and so that makes it easy to both make fun of and take seriously Julien's work, depending on what mood you're in, because you sense that it might just be the next big wave of the arts, and that you should perhaps be a little threatened by that fact. And hey, you'll at least finally be in on some underground thing a lot sooner than it took you to catch on to the Harlem Shake. You sad, old loser. Out of 10: 8.0, or 9.0 for fans of experimental literature(less) | Notes are private!
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| Mar 06, 2013
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Mar 06, 2013
| ebook
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| 5.00
| 2
| Feb 10, 2013
| Feb 10, 2013
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CCLaP is hiring book reviewers. And we're paying. Things with CCLaP have simply gotten too big for me to be able to single-handedly write all 150 book...more CCLaP is hiring book reviewers. And we're paying. Things with CCLaP have simply gotten too big for me to be able to single-handedly write all 150 book reviews a year that our blog publishes; so I'm looking to bring on three other people besides myself and existing staff writer Karl Wolff, so that each of us writes at least one thousand-word essay a week about a book we've recently read, plus as many short one-paragraph reviews during the week that people might want to post. The way we're paying these reviewers, then, is to gather up all the material at our blog each month and publish it as a magazine -- the magazine you're seeing on this webpage, in fact -- give it out for free at the blog but charge $5 at Amazon and iTunes, and $20 for a paper copy, then give each writer $1 of every copy sold of that issue. So how much does that mean? Well, I don't know at this point, and you should absolutely be prepared for that number to maybe be "zero" at first; but I'm hoping if we all work together to help spread the word, it'll be more like several hundred dollars that each of us will be making per month for writing book reviews. So that means I'm being very particular over which three people I'll be taking on to fill those slots, because there is very definitely a "CCLaP ethos" at the blog that I want to carefully maintain. And what exactly is the CCLaP ethos? Well, the short answer is to read my own book reviews and do exactly like them; but the long answer is perhaps best defined through a series of contradictory questions… --Are your existing reviews smart without being pretentious? --Are they informative without being academic? --Are they funny but not silly? --Are they opinionated but not judgmental? --Do they express why some people might legitimately like the book and others legitimately dislike it? --Do they take themselves seriously, but not too seriously? --Do they have a natural flow that takes the reader from A to B to C? --Do they cover a mix of obscure and popular titles? --Are they friendly (and sometimes forgiving) towards basement-press and self-published work? --And can you consistently crank out a thousand-word piece every week that adheres to all this? If you said yes to all the above, please contact me here at Goodreads, and send me links to the five book reviews of yours you'd most like me to read; and also make sure to check out this magazine (which like I said has a free version at the blog), to make sure you really do know what you're getting yourself into. I sincerely look forward to hearing from you. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Mar 04, 2013
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Mar 04, 2013
| ebook
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| 1467563056
| 9781467563055
| 5.00
| 7
| Feb 26, 2013
| Feb 26, 2013
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I find it difficult to do analytical reviews of poetry, which is why my arts center doesn't accept such work; but I did at least want to mention here...more
I find it difficult to do analytical reviews of poetry, which is why my arts center doesn't accept such work; but I did at least want to mention here that I recently had a chance to read through this latest by my friend Ryan Bradley, and that I enjoyed it quite a bit. The pieces are more of the "story cut into funny looking lines" kind of poetry, veering from dark to funny and back again, and I found it a great thing to read at bed at night, a few pieces at a time before falling asleep. Strongly recommended for those who like this genre. (less)
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| Mar 19, 2013
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Feb 27, 2013
| Paperback
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| 4.41
| 22
| Mar 11, 2013
| Mar 11, 2013
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) APOLOGIA: A deliberately all-positive critical essay, usually written in an effort to get others to believe in a specific thing the author believes Why I Signed 'Historia, Historia' -- An Apologia. I've read and reviewed 150 books a year, every single year, since CCLaP opened in 2007, which means that I should be crossing the thousand-title count any day now; and that means I've read multiple versions of just about every story type there is now, and am familiar now with every trope in all of them. And so that makes it very refreshing to come across a manuscript like Eleanor Stanford's Historia, Historia; because Peace Corps memoirs are surprisingly one of the most trope-filled story types out there, and it's always a relief to find one that takes a really unique approach to telling its story. And I say 'surprising,' of course, because stories about the Peace Corps always have so much adventure and intensity and life-changing lessons built into them, and they always feel like such unique experiences to the people who go through them; but much like one's first international backpacking trip, ironically these unique experiences tend to repeat in their details from one person to the next, diluting the enjoyment with each retelling until you're finally greeting each new Peace Corps memoir someone's given you with a resigned shrug. What Eleanor does, though, is dispense altogether with the usual beats of the early-twenties journal-like autobiographical Peace Corps book -- there are no overly detailed descriptions of fellow hippie undergrads, no comic misunderstandings among the locals -- and instead delves straight into meaty stuff about the culture and history of the Cape Verde Islands off western Africa where she ended up, and about the Portuguese-derived creole language they speak. And that's because Eleanor is now a thirtysomething professional who's greatly admired in the academic community, whose previous book was published by the prestigious Carnegie Mellon Press, so she knows how to approach a book like this in a much more engaging and unique way; she has the fastidiousness of a journalist but the outlook of a poet, so can pen essays that are as moving as they are informative. And so as she drops us in the middle of this environment, we also learn about its colonial history and slavery legacy, how its history as a formerly uninhabited land that is still barely self-sustaining shapes the very personalities of the people who live there, and all kinds of other fascinating things about the sociology and geology of this often magical place. Granted, we see all this through the eyes of someone formally associated with the Peace Corps organization, and this story is as much about that process and all its ups and downs as it is anything else; but it's a case here of its total being bigger than a mere sum of its parts, a Lonely Planet guide mixed with a graduate thesis and blended with a coffeehouse poetry reading until reaching a smooth, cool puree. But then the final kicker to it all, and the reason it passed that last hurdle and ended up getting signed, is that it's even more than all this -- it's also a gripping personal tale along the lines of Marya Hornbacher's Pulitzer-nominated Wasted (in fact, Ms. Hornbacher was kind enough to provide this book with a pre-publication blurb), about the sudden eating disorder Eleanor developed while in Cape Verde, despite never having a history with this subject at any point in her past. And this is an extremely difficult thing to pull off, to combine a very mainstream-friendly format like this with the intellectual finery of the academic side; because let's face it, a lot more of these personal-essay collections turn out instead like that Augusten Burroughs dreck I can't stand reading, a style which simply must be tempered with exacting language and finessed research to be palatable at all. Eleanor does that here, which results in a powerful and deeply rewarding reading experience; and both I and all of CCLaP's assistant editors immediately knew we had something special on our hands when we saw this, after arriving in our mailbox as a cold submission out of the blue back last autumn, part of that glut of submissions we got right after an extremely flattering profile of us ran in last fall's Poets & Writers magazine. I think it's no coincidence that the last author we published, the fellow unique essayist and celebrated academe Kevin Haworth, turns out to have several common friends with Eleanor, and that they've ended up hitting it off; both of their books are very similar, I feel, attempts at combining several different types of storytelling to form a hybrid that traditional academic publishers don't quite know what to do with. And I love being able to put out books like these, because despite my well-known disdain for MFA programs and the like, I actually love writers who have a high knowledge of and a lot of creativity about language itself -- I mean, don't get me wrong, I love me my absurdist science-fiction bizarro comic-tragedies too (*cough cough* Mason Johnson's Sad Robot Stories coming this summer *cough cough*), but I get a special treat out of publishing the kind of extremely smart academic writer who many times falls through the cracks of the traditional academic presses. Eleanor is one of those people, and Historia, Historia is going to be the next great read in your life for people like me who love this kind of work, so I urge you to go download a free copy or order a paper edition right this moment. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Feb 25, 2013
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Feb 25, 2013
| ebook
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| 4.50
| 2
| Aug 2012
| Aug 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Regular readers will remember what an unexpected fan I became of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, back when I first read it a few years ago as part of the "CCLaP 100" essay series on literary classics; and with this being a Victorian-Age public-domain work, there are of course dozens of unofficial sequels floating around out there. One of those is called Jim Hawkins and the Curse of Treasure Island, an unusually faithful sequel that tries extra-hard to mimic the exact language and tone of the original, first put out about a decade ago by "Francis Bryan;" but as it's become clear because of a new reprinting last year, that's actually the pen-name of revered British man of letters Frank Delaney, a Booker judge and the literary director of the Edinburgh Festival who has produced a host of popular documentaries for the BBC over the decades, and who among other things is in the middle of doing a 25-YEAR PODCAST where he examines James Joyce's Ulysses one line at a time. So it makes sense that this homage to Stevenson would be unusually spot-on in its voice and subject matter, because this is what Delaney does, is treat classic literature very, very seriously; and I have to say, it was just as much a delight to read as the original, and feels very much like a lost sequel by Stevenson himself that maybe just happened to surface within the last few years. Granted, if you're not a natural fan of Victorian action tales, you can pretty safely skip this; but if you are, you should absolutely put this on your must-read list right away. Out of 10: 8.5, or 9.5 for fans of Victorian thrillers (less) | Notes are private!
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| Feb 20, 2013
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Feb 20, 2013
| ebook
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| 9780981748146
| unknown
| 4.33
| 6
| Oct 01, 2012
| 2012
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The editor and publisher of this anthology are both personal friends of mine, so it'd be an ethical conflict for me to purport to do an "objective" re...more
The editor and publisher of this anthology are both personal friends of mine, so it'd be an ethical conflict for me to purport to do an "objective" review of it here (although make no mistake, I loved it); so instead I'll direct you to a recent podcast interview I did with them, where we talked for 45 minutes about this book's origins, the process of putting it together, and a breakdown of the stories found within: http://www.cclapcenter.com/2013/01/cc... (less)
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| Jan 24, 2013
| Mar 08, 2013
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Jan 24, 2013
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| 0062122681
| 9780062122681
| 4.05
| 374
| Jul 10, 2012
| Jul 10, 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I know a number of the people involved with this book, so it wouldn't really be ethically right for me to purport to do an "objective" review of it; but I at least wanted to make a mention of it here at the blog, mostly because it finally came up to the top of my to-read list last week, after first entering way back in July. (July! Shame on me! I am so sorry to all you authors that it's taking me so long to get through your books right now; but we're about to start bringing on additional reviewers soon, so we'll finally be getting that list whittled down to size before too long.) Anyway, this is an anthology of all-new work by some incredibly impressive writers, and edited by genre heroes Sam Weller and Mort Castle, all in honor of the recently passed Ray Bradbury, a Chicago-area native (for those who didn't know) who had one of the most interesting and varied literary careers of the entire Mid-Century Modernist era. And indeed, I think a big reason why it was so easy for Weller and Castle to attract the likes of such heavy hitters as Margaret Atwood, Dave Eggers, Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Alice Hoffman, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Joe Meno, Bonnie Jo Campbell and a lot more is precisely because Bradbury had a career that was so hard to define, a man who dipped his influential toes into horror, science-fiction, crime, Young Adult, even hippie weirdness without ever being trapped in one or another, and I think it's natural for writers to be inspired by this and want to occasionally do some Bradburian walking off the beaten path themselves. It's such a fitting and loving tribute because it's so smart and dense on its own, and Weller and Castle are to be commended for putting together one of the most entertaining compilations I've read in a while. It comes strongly recommended. Out of 10: N/A(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 24, 2013
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Jan 24, 2013
| Paperback
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| 1401237770
| 9781401237776
| 4.27
| 841
| Apr 2012
| Mar 26, 2013
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) So what led me recently to reading a monthly superhero comic book again for literally the first time in decades? Two simultaneous events, really: first,I mentioned here recently how I've decided to read all 300 issues of DC Vertigo's legendary Hellblazer that got made before its "cancellation," although it's not really being cancelled but rather just "rebooted," that in fact the entire shared DC Universe recently got completely set back to zero by the company, both in an attempt to simplify their titles' byzantine continuance problems and in an attempt to drum up a little publicity, which has also had me wondering lately what some of these post-reboot "New 52" titles are actually like; and right at the same time, I heard a fascinating and entertaining interview with one of these New 52 authors, Batman's Scott Snyder, on Kevin Smith's surprisingly riveting "Fatman on Batman" podcast, which got me really curious to specifically read the Batman stories that have come out since the reboot. And so I picked up the two graphic novels comprising the first 12-issue story arc, The Court of Owls and The City of Owls, which were…well, pretty much exactly what I was expecting -- good for what they are, but ultimately designed to primarily appeal to teenage boys, exactly as superhero comics have done since they were invented. So as such, then, most adult readers will find this grand conspiracy story (in which it's revealed that a secret society has actually ruled Gotham since its beginning, right under the nose of Batman without him ever having a clue, which takes him most of these twelve issues to process) to pack as much punch as a well-done YA novel, but not really enough to satisfy most grown-ups. And I have to confess, that's kind of refreshing, in the same kind of way it's been recently as well to realize that my friend's nine-year-old sons are obsessed with Star Wars: The Clone Wars in a way that my middle-aged brain will never understand; that after several decades where adults' and children's artistic choices were unhealthily mingled into this giant communal man-child pop-culture stew, it's nice to see things starting to go back to the way they've always been before Generation X, where we as a culture clearly understand that stories about laser guns and masked crime fighters are supposed to appeal primarily to teenagers and younger. I'm not saying a grown-up can't guiltily enjoy a superhero story now and again, just that I'm glad to check in with these monthly comics for the first time in a long time and see that they're back to being primarily geared towards the "whizz-bang-crash" crowd; and that combined with the flabbergasting increase in quality, regarding both production and drawing style, makes these New 52 Batmans a real winner for parents who want to pick up something smart and lively for their preteen sons, on par with the rebooted Doctor Who in terms of both intelligence and legitimate scares but undeniably made with kids in mind. Out of 10: 8.5, or 9.5 for teenage boys (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 21, 2013
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Jan 21, 2013
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 1401235417
| 9781401235413
| 4.35
| 5,016
| Sep 2011
| May 09, 2012
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) So what led me recently to reading a monthly superhero comic book again for literally the first time in decades? Two simultaneous events, really: first,I mentioned here recently how I've decided to read all 300 issues of DC Vertigo's legendary Hellblazer that got made before its "cancellation," although it's not really being cancelled but rather just "rebooted," that in fact the entire shared DC Universe recently got completely set back to zero by the company, both in an attempt to simplify their titles' byzantine continuance problems and in an attempt to drum up a little publicity, which has also had me wondering lately what some of these post-reboot "New 52" titles are actually like; and right at the same time, I heard a fascinating and entertaining interview with one of these New 52 authors, Batman's Scott Snyder, on Kevin Smith's surprisingly riveting "Fatman on Batman" podcast, which got me really curious to specifically read the Batman stories that have come out since the reboot. And so I picked up the two graphic novels comprising the first 12-issue story arc, The Court of Owls and The City of Owls, which were…well, pretty much exactly what I was expecting -- good for what they are, but ultimately designed to primarily appeal to teenage boys, exactly as superhero comics have done since they were invented. So as such, then, most adult readers will find this grand conspiracy story (in which it's revealed that a secret society has actually ruled Gotham since its beginning, right under the nose of Batman without him ever having a clue, which takes him most of these twelve issues to process) to pack as much punch as a well-done YA novel, but not really enough to satisfy most grown-ups. And I have to confess, that's kind of refreshing, in the same kind of way it's been recently as well to realize that my friend's nine-year-old sons are obsessed with Star Wars: The Clone Wars in a way that my middle-aged brain will never understand; that after several decades where adults' and children's artistic choices were unhealthily mingled into this giant communal man-child pop-culture stew, it's nice to see things starting to go back to the way they've always been before Generation X, where we as a culture clearly understand that stories about laser guns and masked crime fighters are supposed to appeal primarily to teenagers and younger. I'm not saying a grown-up can't guiltily enjoy a superhero story now and again, just that I'm glad to check in with these monthly comics for the first time in a long time and see that they're back to being primarily geared towards the "whizz-bang-crash" crowd; and that combined with the flabbergasting increase in quality, regarding both production and drawing style, makes these New 52 Batmans a real winner for parents who want to pick up something smart and lively for their preteen sons, on par with the rebooted Doctor Who in terms of both intelligence and legitimate scares but undeniably made with kids in mind. Out of 10: 8.5, or 9.5 for teenage boys (less) | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
| not set
| Jan 21, 2013
|
Jan 21, 2013
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0062099477
| 9780062099471
| 3.26
| 369
| Jun 12, 2012
| Jun 12, 2012
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Former Chicagoan Elizabeth Crane is just a little too good a personal friend for me to claim I could do an "objective" review of her newest book, last year's We Only Know So Much (BONUS: Listen to my 2007 podcast interview with Crane); but I wanted to get a mention of it up here anyway because I enjoyed it so much, another solid winner in what's always a delightful career. A contemporary human-interest dramedy firmly in the Franzen dysfunctional-family vein, the story is peopled with more eccentric weirdos than a Wes Anderson film -- the wife having an affair with a guy who then dies, the husband obsessed with getting Alzheimer's, the vapid daughter, the nerdy son, the senile grandfather and the pissy 98-year-old great-grandmother -- and Crane builds an interesting, event-filled plot for all of them to go through, the kind of entertaining and charming novel that sleeper low-budget Hollywood hits get adapted from. Given that Crane is mostly known at this point for her short stories, I love seeing her expand here into full novel territory, and this quiet yet sophisticated tale is sure to strike a chord with fans of Jennifer Egan and the like. Out of 10: N/A(less) | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
| not set
| Jan 16, 2013
|
Jan 16, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1594481520
| 9781594481529
| 3.62
| 2,309
| Sep 06, 2005
| Sep 06, 2005
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I had the pleasure of getting to talk with legendary author George Saunders for CCLaP's podcast last week, a rare treat given how in demand he is on this latest tour even among the major media; but that meant I had to do some serious cramming in the few weeks leading up to our talk, in that (I guiltily confess) I only became aware of his existence a month ago, because of a passionate recommendation from my friend and Chicago science-fiction author Mark R. Brand, with Saunders' new book, tour, and interview opportunity being merely a fortuitous coincidence. And that's because the vast majority of Saunders' output has been short stories, while regulars know that my own reading habits veer almost 100 percent to full novels, which means he's simply and unfortunately been off my radar this whole time; but of course I'm happy to make room in my life for exquisite short-fiction writers once I learn about them (see for example my revelation after reading John Cheever for the first time a few years ago), which means that I tore through all seven books now of his career in just a few weeks recently, so I thought I'd get one large essay posted here about all of them at once, instead of doing a separate small review for each book. And indeed, as I mentioned during the podcast as well, like Cheever I think Saunders' work is going to be at its most powerful once his career is over, and all the stories collected into one giant volume that a person reads all at once, instead of debating the merits of one individual collection over another. And in fact this is something else I said in the podcast, that I find it fun to think of Saunders' stories as essentially interchangeable tales in one big comic-book-style shared universe, albeit the most f-cked-up shared universe you'll ever spend time in: a possibly post-apocalyptic America, although whether through slow erosion or one big doomsday event is hard to determine, where the only businesses that still thrive are outlandish theme parks designed for the amusement of the now "natural betters" of our new Mad Max society, and staffed by the permanent class of have-nots which now includes a large population of genetically modified freaks, a place where ghosts are real and magic exists and the new normal is extreme cruelty at all times for all other humans left in the wreckage of a crumbled United States. And so if you look at the four story collections that Saunders has now put out -- 1996's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 2000's Pastoralia, 2006's In Persuasion Nation and this year's Tenth of December -- you'll see that the vast majority of all these pieces fit at least somewhat into the general paradigm just described, although with others that are much more realistic in tone but still with the same unbelievable cruelty and darkness, many of them set among racially tense situations in eroding post-industrial cities. Yeah, sounds like a big barrel of laughs, right? And in fact this was the biggest surprise for me as well when first reading them, that Saunders is not just on the stranger side of the bizarro* subgenre, but is one of the most wrist-slashingly depressing authors you will ever find, yet this Guggenheim and MacArthur grant winner is regularly on the bestseller lists, has appeared on David Letterman and The Daily Show, gets published on a steady basis in such hugely mainstream magazines as The New Yorker and GQ, and is adored by literally millions of fans out there, many of whom would never open the cover of a book from Eraserhead Press to save their life. And that's because Saunders never talks about these things specifically to be depressing, but rather as a way of highlighting how important simple humanity is to our lives, the simple act of being humane and optimistic about the world, which he does not by writing about the humane acts themselves but what a world without them would look like. And that's a clever and admirable thing to do, because it means he sneaks in sideways to the points he wants to make, not beating us over the head but forcing us to really stop and think about what he's truly trying to say, to examine why we get so upset when this fundamental humanity is missing from the stories we're reading. Ultimately Saunders believes in celebrating life, in trying to be as helpful and open-minded to strangers as you can, in being as positive about the world at large as you can stand; but like the Existentialists of Mid-Century Modernism, he examines this subject by looking at worst-case scenarios, and by showing us what exactly we miss out of in life when this positivity and love is gone. *(For those who are new to CCLaP, "bizarro" is a hard-to-define term but one we reference here a lot; also sometimes known as "gonzo" fiction, sometimes as "The New Weird," a lot of it comes from either the wackier or more prurient edges of such existing genres as science-fiction, horror and erotica, while some of it is more like Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs, a conceptual cloud of strangeness that has a huge cult following in the world of basement presses and genre conventions, as well as such literary social networks as Goodreads.com. If you want to think of famous examples, think of people like Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner, Will Self, Chuck Palahniuk, Blake Butler, China Mieville…and, uh, George Saunders!) Now, of course, in all honesty, there are also a few clunkers scattered here and there in these collections as well, which is simply to be expected in a career that now spans twenty years; and when it comes to the small number of other books he's put out besides story collections, I have to confess that I found those to be a much iffier proposition. For example, there's the 2000 children's book The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, cute enough but as inessential to an adult as any children's book is; then there's his one collection of nonfiction essays, 2007's The Braindead Megaphone, an uneven compilation of random pieces which includes some real gems (one of the best being that GQ piece mentioned, where Saunders is sent George-Plimpton-style to Dubai, and instead of the usual decrying of the ultra-rich he is surprisingly charmed by all the vacationing middle-class families), but that has an equal amount of throwaway pieces done for highly specific commissions; and then there's the only stand-alone fiction book of his career so far, the 2005 novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, which I have to confess is the only thing of Saunders' career that I actively disliked -- written in the middle of the Bush atrocities, it's obviously an attempt to do an Animal Farm-style satire about those years, but is labored in its execution, too on the nose, and in general has too much of a "quirky for the sake of being quirky" vibe, the exact thing that can most quickly kill a piece of bizarro fiction. (But then again, we perhaps shouldn't blame Saunders for this; as I've talked about many times here in the past, it seems that no indignant artist was able to write satirically about Bush in the middle of the Bush Years without producing an overly obvious ranting screed, whether that's Saunders or George Clooney or Michael Moore or Robert Redford. No wonder no good books about Nazis came out until after World War Two; as we all learned in the early 2000s, it's nearly impossible to actually live under a fascist regime and also be subtle and clever in your critique of it.) But those are all small quibbles, of course; Saunders' bread and butter is in his short fiction, and I'm convinced that he will eventually be known as one of the best short-fiction authors in history, joining a surprisingly small list that includes such luminaries as Cheever, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, GK Chesterton and more. Plus, as a fan of edgy and strange work, I'm thrilled that a guy like Saunders is out there, serving as a gateway of sorts between mainstream society and an entire rabbithole of basement-press bizarro titles that's just waiting for newly inspired fans to tumble down. If you're going to pick up your first Saunders book soon, go ahead and pick up the newest, Tenth of December, because it's just as good as all the others and particularly easy to find right now; but I also encourage you to dig deeper into this remarkable author's career, and to see just how far he'll pull you into the murky depths of ambiguous morality before coming bobbing back to the surface. It's been a true treat to become a fan of his work this year, and I urge you to become one as well. Out of 10 (Tenth of December): 9.6(less) | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
| not set
| Jan 16, 2013
|
Jan 16, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 159448256X
| 9781594482564
| 3.89
| 1,960
| Sep 04, 2007
| Sep 04, 2007
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I had the pleasure of getting to talk with legendary author George Saunders for CCLaP's podcast last week, a rare treat given how in demand he is on this latest tour even among the major media; but that meant I had to do some serious cramming in the few weeks leading up to our talk, in that (I guiltily confess) I only became aware of his existence a month ago, because of a passionate recommendation from my friend and Chicago science-fiction author Mark R. Brand, with Saunders' new book, tour, and interview opportunity being merely a fortuitous coincidence. And that's because the vast majority of Saunders' output has been short stories, while regulars know that my own reading habits veer almost 100 percent to full novels, which means he's simply and unfortunately been off my radar this whole time; but of course I'm happy to make room in my life for exquisite short-fiction writers once I learn about them (see for example my revelation after reading John Cheever for the first time a few years ago), which means that I tore through all seven books now of his career in just a few weeks recently, so I thought I'd get one large essay posted here about all of them at once, instead of doing a separate small review for each book. And indeed, as I mentioned during the podcast as well, like Cheever I think Saunders' work is going to be at its most powerful once his career is over, and all the stories collected into one giant volume that a person reads all at once, instead of debating the merits of one individual collection over another. And in fact this is something else I said in the podcast, that I find it fun to think of Saunders' stories as essentially interchangeable tales in one big comic-book-style shared universe, albeit the most f-cked-up shared universe you'll ever spend time in: a possibly post-apocalyptic America, although whether through slow erosion or one big doomsday event is hard to determine, where the only businesses that still thrive are outlandish theme parks designed for the amusement of the now "natural betters" of our new Mad Max society, and staffed by the permanent class of have-nots which now includes a large population of genetically modified freaks, a place where ghosts are real and magic exists and the new normal is extreme cruelty at all times for all other humans left in the wreckage of a crumbled United States. And so if you look at the four story collections that Saunders has now put out -- 1996's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 2000's Pastoralia, 2006's In Persuasion Nation and this year's Tenth of December -- you'll see that the vast majority of all these pieces fit at least somewhat into the general paradigm just described, although with others that are much more realistic in tone but still with the same unbelievable cruelty and darkness, many of them set among racially tense situations in eroding post-industrial cities. Yeah, sounds like a big barrel of laughs, right? And in fact this was the biggest surprise for me as well when first reading them, that Saunders is not just on the stranger side of the bizarro* subgenre, but is one of the most wrist-slashingly depressing authors you will ever find, yet this Guggenheim and MacArthur grant winner is regularly on the bestseller lists, has appeared on David Letterman and The Daily Show, gets published on a steady basis in such hugely mainstream magazines as The New Yorker and GQ, and is adored by literally millions of fans out there, many of whom would never open the cover of a book from Eraserhead Press to save their life. And that's because Saunders never talks about these things specifically to be depressing, but rather as a way of highlighting how important simple humanity is to our lives, the simple act of being humane and optimistic about the world, which he does not by writing about the humane acts themselves but what a world without them would look like. And that's a clever and admirable thing to do, because it means he sneaks in sideways to the points he wants to make, not beating us over the head but forcing us to really stop and think about what he's truly trying to say, to examine why we get so upset when this fundamental humanity is missing from the stories we're reading. Ultimately Saunders believes in celebrating life, in trying to be as helpful and open-minded to strangers as you can, in being as positive about the world at large as you can stand; but like the Existentialists of Mid-Century Modernism, he examines this subject by looking at worst-case scenarios, and by showing us what exactly we miss out of in life when this positivity and love is gone. *(For those who are new to CCLaP, "bizarro" is a hard-to-define term but one we reference here a lot; also sometimes known as "gonzo" fiction, sometimes as "The New Weird," a lot of it comes from either the wackier or more prurient edges of such existing genres as science-fiction, horror and erotica, while some of it is more like Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs, a conceptual cloud of strangeness that has a huge cult following in the world of basement presses and genre conventions, as well as such literary social networks as Goodreads.com. If you want to think of famous examples, think of people like Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner, Will Self, Chuck Palahniuk, Blake Butler, China Mieville…and, uh, George Saunders!) Now, of course, in all honesty, there are also a few clunkers scattered here and there in these collections as well, which is simply to be expected in a career that now spans twenty years; and when it comes to the small number of other books he's put out besides story collections, I have to confess that I found those to be a much iffier proposition. For example, there's the 2000 children's book The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, cute enough but as inessential to an adult as any children's book is; then there's his one collection of nonfiction essays, 2007's The Braindead Megaphone, an uneven compilation of random pieces which includes some real gems (one of the best being that GQ piece mentioned, where Saunders is sent George-Plimpton-style to Dubai, and instead of the usual decrying of the ultra-rich he is surprisingly charmed by all the vacationing middle-class families), but that has an equal amount of throwaway pieces done for highly specific commissions; and then there's the only stand-alone fiction book of his career so far, the 2005 novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, which I have to confess is the only thing of Saunders' career that I actively disliked -- written in the middle of the Bush atrocities, it's obviously an attempt to do an Animal Farm-style satire about those years, but is labored in its execution, too on the nose, and in general has too much of a "quirky for the sake of being quirky" vibe, the exact thing that can most quickly kill a piece of bizarro fiction. (But then again, we perhaps shouldn't blame Saunders for this; as I've talked about many times here in the past, it seems that no indignant artist was able to write satirically about Bush in the middle of the Bush Years without producing an overly obvious ranting screed, whether that's Saunders or George Clooney or Michael Moore or Robert Redford. No wonder no good books about Nazis came out until after World War Two; as we all learned in the early 2000s, it's nearly impossible to actually live under a fascist regime and also be subtle and clever in your critique of it.) But those are all small quibbles, of course; Saunders' bread and butter is in his short fiction, and I'm convinced that he will eventually be known as one of the best short-fiction authors in history, joining a surprisingly small list that includes such luminaries as Cheever, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, GK Chesterton and more. Plus, as a fan of edgy and strange work, I'm thrilled that a guy like Saunders is out there, serving as a gateway of sorts between mainstream society and an entire rabbithole of basement-press bizarro titles that's just waiting for newly inspired fans to tumble down. If you're going to pick up your first Saunders book soon, go ahead and pick up the newest, Tenth of December, because it's just as good as all the others and particularly easy to find right now; but I also encourage you to dig deeper into this remarkable author's career, and to see just how far he'll pull you into the murky depths of ambiguous morality before coming bobbing back to the surface. It's been a true treat to become a fan of his work this year, and I urge you to become one as well. Out of 10 (Tenth of December): 9.6(less) | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
| not set
| Jan 16, 2013
|
Jan 16, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1932416374
| 9781932416374
| 4.08
| 1,056
| 2000
| Mar 29, 2006
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I had the pleasure of getting to talk with legendary author George Saunders for CCLaP's podcast last week, a rare treat given how in demand he is on this latest tour even among the major media; but that meant I had to do some serious cramming in the few weeks leading up to our talk, in that (I guiltily confess) I only became aware of his existence a month ago, because of a passionate recommendation from my friend and Chicago science-fiction author Mark R. Brand, with Saunders' new book, tour, and interview opportunity being merely a fortuitous coincidence. And that's because the vast majority of Saunders' output has been short stories, while regulars know that my own reading habits veer almost 100 percent to full novels, which means he's simply and unfortunately been off my radar this whole time; but of course I'm happy to make room in my life for exquisite short-fiction writers once I learn about them (see for example my revelation after reading John Cheever for the first time a few years ago), which means that I tore through all seven books now of his career in just a few weeks recently, so I thought I'd get one large essay posted here about all of them at once, instead of doing a separate small review for each book. And indeed, as I mentioned during the podcast as well, like Cheever I think Saunders' work is going to be at its most powerful once his career is over, and all the stories collected into one giant volume that a person reads all at once, instead of debating the merits of one individual collection over another. And in fact this is something else I said in the podcast, that I find it fun to think of Saunders' stories as essentially interchangeable tales in one big comic-book-style shared universe, albeit the most f-cked-up shared universe you'll ever spend time in: a possibly post-apocalyptic America, although whether through slow erosion or one big doomsday event is hard to determine, where the only businesses that still thrive are outlandish theme parks designed for the amusement of the now "natural betters" of our new Mad Max society, and staffed by the permanent class of have-nots which now includes a large population of genetically modified freaks, a place where ghosts are real and magic exists and the new normal is extreme cruelty at all times for all other humans left in the wreckage of a crumbled United States. And so if you look at the four story collections that Saunders has now put out -- 1996's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 2000's Pastoralia, 2006's In Persuasion Nation and this year's Tenth of December -- you'll see that the vast majority of all these pieces fit at least somewhat into the general paradigm just described, although with others that are much more realistic in tone but still with the same unbelievable cruelty and darkness, many of them set among racially tense situations in eroding post-industrial cities. Yeah, sounds like a big barrel of laughs, right? And in fact this was the biggest surprise for me as well when first reading them, that Saunders is not just on the stranger side of the bizarro* subgenre, but is one of the most wrist-slashingly depressing authors you will ever find, yet this Guggenheim and MacArthur grant winner is regularly on the bestseller lists, has appeared on David Letterman and The Daily Show, gets published on a steady basis in such hugely mainstream magazines as The New Yorker and GQ, and is adored by literally millions of fans out there, many of whom would never open the cover of a book from Eraserhead Press to save their life. And that's because Saunders never talks about these things specifically to be depressing, but rather as a way of highlighting how important simple humanity is to our lives, the simple act of being humane and optimistic about the world, which he does not by writing about the humane acts themselves but what a world without them would look like. And that's a clever and admirable thing to do, because it means he sneaks in sideways to the points he wants to make, not beating us over the head but forcing us to really stop and think about what he's truly trying to say, to examine why we get so upset when this fundamental humanity is missing from the stories we're reading. Ultimately Saunders believes in celebrating life, in trying to be as helpful and open-minded to strangers as you can, in being as positive about the world at large as you can stand; but like the Existentialists of Mid-Century Modernism, he examines this subject by looking at worst-case scenarios, and by showing us what exactly we miss out of in life when this positivity and love is gone. *(For those who are new to CCLaP, "bizarro" is a hard-to-define term but one we reference here a lot; also sometimes known as "gonzo" fiction, sometimes as "The New Weird," a lot of it comes from either the wackier or more prurient edges of such existing genres as science-fiction, horror and erotica, while some of it is more like Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs, a conceptual cloud of strangeness that has a huge cult following in the world of basement presses and genre conventions, as well as such literary social networks as Goodreads.com. If you want to think of famous examples, think of people like Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner, Will Self, Chuck Palahniuk, Blake Butler, China Mieville…and, uh, George Saunders!) Now, of course, in all honesty, there are also a few clunkers scattered here and there in these collections as well, which is simply to be expected in a career that now spans twenty years; and when it comes to the small number of other books he's put out besides story collections, I have to confess that I found those to be a much iffier proposition. For example, there's the 2000 children's book The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, cute enough but as inessential to an adult as any children's book is; then there's his one collection of nonfiction essays, 2007's The Braindead Megaphone, an uneven compilation of random pieces which includes some real gems (one of the best being that GQ piece mentioned, where Saunders is sent George-Plimpton-style to Dubai, and instead of the usual decrying of the ultra-rich he is surprisingly charmed by all the vacationing middle-class families), but that has an equal amount of throwaway pieces done for highly specific commissions; and then there's the only stand-alone fiction book of his career so far, the 2005 novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, which I have to confess is the only thing of Saunders' career that I actively disliked -- written in the middle of the Bush atrocities, it's obviously an attempt to do an Animal Farm-style satire about those years, but is labored in its execution, too on the nose, and in general has too much of a "quirky for the sake of being quirky" vibe, the exact thing that can most quickly kill a piece of bizarro fiction. (But then again, we perhaps shouldn't blame Saunders for this; as I've talked about many times here in the past, it seems that no indignant artist was able to write satirically about Bush in the middle of the Bush Years without producing an overly obvious ranting screed, whether that's Saunders or George Clooney or Michael Moore or Robert Redford. No wonder no good books about Nazis came out until after World War Two; as we all learned in the early 2000s, it's nearly impossible to actually live under a fascist regime and also be subtle and clever in your critique of it.) But those are all small quibbles, of course; Saunders' bread and butter is in his short fiction, and I'm convinced that he will eventually be known as one of the best short-fiction authors in history, joining a surprisingly small list that includes such luminaries as Cheever, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, GK Chesterton and more. Plus, as a fan of edgy and strange work, I'm thrilled that a guy like Saunders is out there, serving as a gateway of sorts between mainstream society and an entire rabbithole of basement-press bizarro titles that's just waiting for newly inspired fans to tumble down. If you're going to pick up your first Saunders book soon, go ahead and pick up the newest, Tenth of December, because it's just as good as all the others and particularly easy to find right now; but I also encourage you to dig deeper into this remarkable author's career, and to see just how far he'll pull you into the murky depths of ambiguous morality before coming bobbing back to the surface. It's been a true treat to become a fan of his work this year, and I urge you to become one as well. Out of 10 (Tenth of December): 9.6(less) | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
| not set
| Jan 16, 2013
|
Jan 16, 2013
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 159448242X
| 9781594482427
| 4.05
| 3,053
| 2006
| Mar 06, 2007
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I had the pleasure of getting to talk with legendary author George Saunders for CCLaP's podcast last week, a rare treat given how in demand he is on this latest tour even among the major media; but that meant I had to do some serious cramming in the few weeks leading up to our talk, in that (I guiltily confess) I only became aware of his existence a month ago, because of a passionate recommendation from my friend and Chicago science-fiction author Mark R. Brand, with Saunders' new book, tour, and interview opportunity being merely a fortuitous coincidence. And that's because the vast majority of Saunders' output has been short stories, while regulars know that my own reading habits veer almost 100 percent to full novels, which means he's simply and unfortunately been off my radar this whole time; but of course I'm happy to make room in my life for exquisite short-fiction writers once I learn about them (see for example my revelation after reading John Cheever for the first time a few years ago), which means that I tore through all seven books now of his career in just a few weeks recently, so I thought I'd get one large essay posted here about all of them at once, instead of doing a separate small review for each book. And indeed, as I mentioned during the podcast as well, like Cheever I think Saunders' work is going to be at its most powerful once his career is over, and all the stories collected into one giant volume that a person reads all at once, instead of debating the merits of one individual collection over another. And in fact this is something else I said in the podcast, that I find it fun to think of Saunders' stories as essentially interchangeable tales in one big comic-book-style shared universe, albeit the most f-cked-up shared universe you'll ever spend time in: a possibly post-apocalyptic America, although whether through slow erosion or one big doomsday event is hard to determine, where the only businesses that still thrive are outlandish theme parks designed for the amusement of the now "natural betters" of our new Mad Max society, and staffed by the permanent class of have-nots which now includes a large population of genetically modified freaks, a place where ghosts are real and magic exists and the new normal is extreme cruelty at all times for all other humans left in the wreckage of a crumbled United States. And so if you look at the four story collections that Saunders has now put out -- 1996's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 2000's Pastoralia, 2006's In Persuasion Nation and this year's Tenth of December -- you'll see that the vast majority of all these pieces fit at least somewhat into the general paradigm just described, although with others that are much more realistic in tone but still with the same unbelievable cruelty and darkness, many of them set among racially tense situations in eroding post-industrial cities. Yeah, sounds like a big barrel of laughs, right? And in fact this was the biggest surprise for me as well when first reading them, that Saunders is not just on the stranger side of the bizarro* subgenre, but is one of the most wrist-slashingly depressing authors you will ever find, yet this Guggenheim and MacArthur grant winner is regularly on the bestseller lists, has appeared on David Letterman and The Daily Show, gets published on a steady basis in such hugely mainstream magazines as The New Yorker and GQ, and is adored by literally millions of fans out there, many of whom would never open the cover of a book from Eraserhead Press to save their life. And that's because Saunders never talks about these things specifically to be depressing, but rather as a way of highlighting how important simple humanity is to our lives, the simple act of being humane and optimistic about the world, which he does not by writing about the humane acts themselves but what a world without them would look like. And that's a clever and admirable thing to do, because it means he sneaks in sideways to the points he wants to make, not beating us over the head but forcing us to really stop and think about what he's truly trying to say, to examine why we get so upset when this fundamental humanity is missing from the stories we're reading. Ultimately Saunders believes in celebrating life, in trying to be as helpful and open-minded to strangers as you can, in being as positive about the world at large as you can stand; but like the Existentialists of Mid-Century Modernism, he examines this subject by looking at worst-case scenarios, and by showing us what exactly we miss out of in life when this positivity and love is gone. *(For those who are new to CCLaP, "bizarro" is a hard-to-define term but one we reference here a lot; also sometimes known as "gonzo" fiction, sometimes as "The New Weird," a lot of it comes from either the wackier or more prurient edges of such existing genres as science-fiction, horror and erotica, while some of it is more like Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs, a conceptual cloud of strangeness that has a huge cult following in the world of basement presses and genre conventions, as well as such literary social networks as Goodreads.com. If you want to think of famous examples, think of people like Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner, Will Self, Chuck Palahniuk, Blake Butler, China Mieville…and, uh, George Saunders!) Now, of course, in all honesty, there are also a few clunkers scattered here and there in these collections as well, which is simply to be expected in a career that now spans twenty years; and when it comes to the small number of other books he's put out besides story collections, I have to confess that I found those to be a much iffier proposition. For example, there's the 2000 children's book The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, cute enough but as inessential to an adult as any children's book is; then there's his one collection of nonfiction essays, 2007's The Braindead Megaphone, an uneven compilation of random pieces which includes some real gems (one of the best being that GQ piece mentioned, where Saunders is sent George-Plimpton-style to Dubai, and instead of the usual decrying of the ultra-rich he is surprisingly charmed by all the vacationing middle-class families), but that has an equal amount of throwaway pieces done for highly specific commissions; and then there's the only stand-alone fiction book of his career so far, the 2005 novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, which I have to confess is the only thing of Saunders' career that I actively disliked -- written in the middle of the Bush atrocities, it's obviously an attempt to do an Animal Farm-style satire about those years, but is labored in its execution, too on the nose, and in general has too much of a "quirky for the sake of being quirky" vibe, the exact thing that can most quickly kill a piece of bizarro fiction. (But then again, we perhaps shouldn't blame Saunders for this; as I've talked about many times here in the past, it seems that no indignant artist was able to write satirically about Bush in the middle of the Bush Years without producing an overly obvious ranting screed, whether that's Saunders or George Clooney or Michael Moore or Robert Redford. No wonder no good books about Nazis came out until after World War Two; as we all learned in the early 2000s, it's nearly impossible to actually live under a fascist regime and also be subtle and clever in your critique of it.) But those are all small quibbles, of course; Saunders' bread and butter is in his short fiction, and I'm convinced that he will eventually be known as one of the best short-fiction authors in history, joining a surprisingly small list that includes such luminaries as Cheever, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, GK Chesterton and more. Plus, as a fan of edgy and strange work, I'm thrilled that a guy like Saunders is out there, serving as a gateway of sorts between mainstream society and an entire rabbithole of basement-press bizarro titles that's just waiting for newly inspired fans to tumble down. If you're going to pick up your first Saunders book soon, go ahead and pick up the newest, Tenth of December, because it's just as good as all the others and particularly easy to find right now; but I also encourage you to dig deeper into this remarkable author's career, and to see just how far he'll pull you into the murky depths of ambiguous morality before coming bobbing back to the surface. It's been a true treat to become a fan of his work this year, and I urge you to become one as well. Out of 10 (Tenth of December): 9.6(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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| not set
| Jan 16, 2013
|
Jan 16, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0812993802
| 9780812993806
| 4.08
| 6,061
| Oct 31, 2011
| Jan 08, 2013
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I had the pleasure of getting to talk with legendary author George Saunders for CCLaP's podcast last week, a rare treat given how in demand he is on this latest tour even among the major media; but that meant I had to do some serious cramming in the few weeks leading up to our talk, in that (I guiltily confess) I only became aware of his existence a month ago, because of a passionate recommendation from my friend and Chicago science-fiction author Mark R. Brand, with Saunders' new book, tour, and interview opportunity being merely a fortuitous coincidence. And that's because the vast majority of Saunders' output has been short stories, while regulars know that my own reading habits veer almost 100 percent to full novels, which means he's simply and unfortunately been off my radar this whole time; but of course I'm happy to make room in my life for exquisite short-fiction writers once I learn about them (see for example my revelation after reading John Cheever for the first time a few years ago), which means that I tore through all seven books now of his career in just a few weeks recently, so I thought I'd get one large essay posted here about all of them at once, instead of doing a separate small review for each book. And indeed, as I mentioned during the podcast as well, like Cheever I think Saunders' work is going to be at its most powerful once his career is over, and all the stories collected into one giant volume that a person reads all at once, instead of debating the merits of one individual collection over another. And in fact this is something else I said in the podcast, that I find it fun to think of Saunders' stories as essentially interchangeable tales in one big comic-book-style shared universe, albeit the most f-cked-up shared universe you'll ever spend time in: a possibly post-apocalyptic America, although whether through slow erosion or one big doomsday event is hard to determine, where the only businesses that still thrive are outlandish theme parks designed for the amusement of the now "natural betters" of our new Mad Max society, and staffed by the permanent class of have-nots which now includes a large population of genetically modified freaks, a place where ghosts are real and magic exists and the new normal is extreme cruelty at all times for all other humans left in the wreckage of a crumbled United States. And so if you look at the four story collections that Saunders has now put out -- 1996's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 2000's Pastoralia, 2006's In Persuasion Nation and this year's Tenth of December -- you'll see that the vast majority of all these pieces fit at least somewhat into the general paradigm just described, although with others that are much more realistic in tone but still with the same unbelievable cruelty and darkness, many of them set among racially tense situations in eroding post-industrial cities. Yeah, sounds like a big barrel of laughs, right? And in fact this was the biggest surprise for me as well when first reading them, that Saunders is not just on the stranger side of the bizarro* subgenre, but is one of the most wrist-slashingly depressing authors you will ever find, yet this Guggenheim and MacArthur grant winner is regularly on the bestseller lists, has appeared on David Letterman and The Daily Show, gets published on a steady basis in such hugely mainstream magazines as The New Yorker and GQ, and is adored by literally millions of fans out there, many of whom would never open the cover of a book from Eraserhead Press to save their life. And that's because Saunders never talks about these things specifically to be depressing, but rather as a way of highlighting how important simple humanity is to our lives, the simple act of being humane and optimistic about the world, which he does not by writing about the humane acts themselves but what a world without them would look like. And that's a clever and admirable thing to do, because it means he sneaks in sideways to the points he wants to make, not beating us over the head but forcing us to really stop and think about what he's truly trying to say, to examine why we get so upset when this fundamental humanity is missing from the stories we're reading. Ultimately Saunders believes in celebrating life, in trying to be as helpful and open-minded to strangers as you can, in being as positive about the world at large as you can stand; but like the Existentialists of Mid-Century Modernism, he examines this subject by looking at worst-case scenarios, and by showing us what exactly we miss out of in life when this positivity and love is gone. *(For those who are new to CCLaP, "bizarro" is a hard-to-define term but one we reference here a lot; also sometimes known as "gonzo" fiction, sometimes as "The New Weird," a lot of it comes from either the wackier or more prurient edges of such existing genres as science-fiction, horror and erotica, while some of it is more like Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs, a conceptual cloud of strangeness that has a huge cult following in the world of basement presses and genre conventions, as well as such literary social networks as Goodreads.com. If you want to think of famous examples, think of people like Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner, Will Self, Chuck Palahniuk, Blake Butler, China Mieville…and, uh, George Saunders!) Now, of course, in all honesty, there are also a few clunkers scattered here and there in these collections as well, which is simply to be expected in a career that now spans twenty years; and when it comes to the small number of other books he's put out besides story collections, I have to confess that I found those to be a much iffier proposition. For example, there's the 2000 children's book The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, cute enough but as inessential to an adult as any children's book is; then there's his one collection of nonfiction essays, 2007's The Braindead Megaphone, an uneven compilation of random pieces which includes some real gems (one of the best being that GQ piece mentioned, where Saunders is sent George-Plimpton-style to Dubai, and instead of the usual decrying of the ultra-rich he is surprisingly charmed by all the vacationing middle-class families), but that has an equal amount of throwaway pieces done for highly specific commissions; and then there's the only stand-alone fiction book of his career so far, the 2005 novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, which I have to confess is the only thing of Saunders' career that I actively disliked -- written in the middle of the Bush atrocities, it's obviously an attempt to do an Animal Farm-style satire about those years, but is labored in its execution, too on the nose, and in general has too much of a "quirky for the sake of being quirky" vibe, the exact thing that can most quickly kill a piece of bizarro fiction. (But then again, we perhaps shouldn't blame Saunders for this; as I've talked about many times here in the past, it seems that no indignant artist was able to write satirically about Bush in the middle of the Bush Years without producing an overly obvious ranting screed, whether that's Saunders or George Clooney or Michael Moore or Robert Redford. No wonder no good books about Nazis came out until after World War Two; as we all learned in the early 2000s, it's nearly impossible to actually live under a fascist regime and also be subtle and clever in your critique of it.) But those are all small quibbles, of course; Saunders' bread and butter is in his short fiction, and I'm convinced that he will eventually be known as one of the best short-fiction authors in history, joining a surprisingly small list that includes such luminaries as Cheever, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, GK Chesterton and more. Plus, as a fan of edgy and strange work, I'm thrilled that a guy like Saunders is out there, serving as a gateway of sorts between mainstream society and an entire rabbithole of basement-press bizarro titles that's just waiting for newly inspired fans to tumble down. If you're going to pick up your first Saunders book soon, go ahead and pick up the newest, Tenth of December, because it's just as good as all the others and particularly easy to find right now; but I also encourage you to dig deeper into this remarkable author's career, and to see just how far he'll pull you into the murky depths of ambiguous morality before coming bobbing back to the surface. It's been a true treat to become a fan of his work this year, and I urge you to become one as well. Out of 10 (Tenth of December): 9.6(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Jan 07, 2013
| Jan 16, 2013
|
Jan 07, 2013
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0268028931
| 9780268028930
| 4.23
| 13
| Aug 01, 2012
| Sep 15, 2012
|
Back when I was a writer myself in the 1990s, I tended to have a low tolerance for those who assigned too much preciousness to the actual act of writi...more
Back when I was a writer myself in the 1990s, I tended to have a low tolerance for those who assigned too much preciousness to the actual act of writing -- I and my friends instead tended to look at it as just a job like any other, with a certain amount of time you need to dedicate to it each day, and a certain amount of pages to get finished, no matter what your mood or what the circumstances or whether you were doing that on a yellow legal pad on the bus on the way to your soul-killing day job, etc etc. So you can just imagine the reaction I had to Joan Frank's new Because You Have To: A Writing Life, not a guide to the practicalities of writing but rather the fussiest, most artsy topics possible, which forgive the generality but always seem to be written by middle-aged, middle-class women for the benefit of other middle-aged, middle-class women, the kind who will spend hundreds of dollars a year on such creative aids but never seem to actually get anything written; so in this case, for example, an entire essay on when the best time of day is to write, an entire essay on whether to tell your middle-aged friends that you're working on a book, an entire essay on how best to decorate your "writer's studio" and whether to let your kids in when you're officially "on the clock," and on and on like this for 200 pages. I mean, obviously there's an audience for this kind of book, because publishing companies keep pumping them out by the dozen every year, including in this case a respected academic press like Notre Dame; but unfortunately I am not one of those audience members, nor do I suspect are many of CCLaP's readers, which is why I can comfortably recommend that all of you skip this title altogether, and pick up a more practical guide if you're looking for advice on actually writing a better manuscript. Out of 10: 6.9(less) | Notes are private!
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| not set
| Dec 21, 2012
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Dec 21, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0983071411
| 9780983071419
| 4.33
| 6
| Jul 13, 2012
| Jul 13, 2012
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Peace Corps memoirs are surprisingly tricky to pull off, for the same reason that all stories about young people going on international trips are tricky to pull off; because despite the apparent uniqueness embedded in that particular story, these "unique" elements in fact tend to repeat themselves from one story like this to the next, meaning that it's more important than ever that that author infuse that story with the kinds of great literary touches that mark a superior writer, unfortunately missing in most of these cases because of the young authors mostly being dilettantes who happen to have one interesting true story on their hands. And all of this is certainly the case with Eric Kiefer's disappointing The Soft Exile, which sets the wrong tone even from the very first page, in that the author decided to start this realistic story with a bit of absurdist humor, thus making it unclear what the overall tone of the book is supposed to be in the first place. (It's mostly the real-sounding story of a young man who spends two years in Mongolia; but the reason he makes this decision is because of calling a suicide prevention hotline one night in despair and being berated by a volunteer for being a worthless American douchebag, such a silly and unrealistic touch that it can only be treated as a bizarro comedy, making it difficult to figure out whether the rest of the ho-hum story is supposed to also be absurdist or a straightahead memoir.) Like many of these kinds of stories, huge portions of The Soft Exile read not like a three-act novel but rather as letters home to family, filled with the kinds of inconsequential details that someone's parents might enjoy learning but not a stranger reading a full-length book; and also like a lot of these kinds of stories, our main character often comes across as clueless about and sometimes even perversely proud of his douchebaggy white-middle-class behavior, making this ironically an anti-villain story* only without the author being aware that that's what he's writing. (*Anti-villain story: When a main narrator starts out as likeable if not strange, but slowly becomes more and more despicable as the book continues, done on purpose in such famous examples as A Confederacy of Dunces but often accidentally in Peace Corps memoirs and other "rah rah frat boys!" kind of books.) A valiant effort but a book that widely misses its mark, it does not come recommended to a general audience. Out of 10: 6.4(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Dec 19, 2012
|
Dec 19, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 5555556666666
| unknown
| 4.56
| 9
| Oct 08, 2012
| unknown
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) APOLOGIA: A "critical" essay deliberately kept completely positive, often to convince others to believe the same way the author does about a subject Why I Signed 'Famous Drownings in Literary History' -- An Apologia Like any other small press, CCLaP gets its share of cold submissions; and like any other small press, the majority of them are mediocre to okay, a few are outright terrible, and a tiny little sliver are good enough to sign and publish. We're going to have a lot more of them in 2013, as a recent feature in Poets & Writers magazine has significantly increased our national awareness among unsigned writers, and soon our catalog will not just be dominated by Chicago authors but also ones from New York, California, Florida, Pennsylvania, and various other places; but the first cold submission we ever accepted and published was Kevin Haworth's Famous Drownings in Literary History this past October, which came to us by way of Athens, Ohio, because of Kevin's friend David Ebenbach reportedly having a good experience with us in 2011, when publishing a short story in our group book Amsterdamned If You Do: An Anthology About Setting. And it's not just the first cold submission we ever published, but kind of a miracle that a manuscript of this quality was made available to us in the first place; because to be frank, this college professor's collection of essays about being liberal and creative yet traditionally Jewish in the 21st century is something that could've very easily gotten published through any number of academic presses much more prestigious than us, and in fact it's my understanding that Kevin is the subject of some discussion among his academic peers about his decision to go with a "hipster" commercial outfit rather than the traditional academic-press route. (Or at least, I have to imagine that he's the only person in his circle to have a book published with a comics-style illustration on the cover.) And that's because Kevin's writing is as impeccable as you would expect from a full-time writing academe and a former winner of the Samuel Goldberg Award; analytical yet poetic, with the dry humor of a Sarah Vowell NPR piece but the clipped serious style of Denis Johnson, he weaves together journalistic research and the creatively personal into a kind of addictive hybrid of essay, not traditionally scholarly and not exactly Chuck Klosterman but an engaging, thought-provoking blend of those extremes. And hey, what better subject to tackle these days than the struggle to reconcile a traditional faith with the kind of liberal, creative lifestyle that puts one in touch with a lot of bitter atheists, all while raising a young family as well; especially since it seems that conservatives have claimed a kind of monopoly in the last thirty years on faith and religious belief, and have committed a string of atrocities around the world using logic that a lot of religiously faithful don't believe in at all. Kevin does this in a way that pulls you into the book more and more as you continue, a rare and wonderful thing among a collection of unthemed short pieces like this, and picks subjects that have a strong natural interest of their own: circumcising his son, that son then developing an obsession at the age of five with wearing frilly girls' dresses, the rituals that tie in so closely with Jewish holidays, Israel and Zionism, the black Jews of the African Diaspora, the Catskills in the 1970s, and on and on and on, a cornucopia of funny and serious subjects that you don't have to be Jewish to appreciate, but that helps explain contemporary Jewishness in a way a hundred Wikipedia pages could not. I knew this was a special manuscript the moment I saw it, and thankfully the external world has backed me up since: it was the winner of a grant from the Ohio Arts Council, has received large write-ups in the Chicago Tribune, NYU's The Revealer and Ohio University's Perspectives, and is currently in the running for the prestigious Grub Street Prize (keep your fingers crossed), along with a multitude of praise all over the blogosphere. It was a privilege to put it out, precisely because I knew it was this good, but also because I like having a chance to support manuscripts like these that can be sometimes tough to land at a commercial place: it's not quite academic enough for a lot of academic presses, not quite pop enough for pop presses, something for a thinking person who also wants to be entertained, and I like to think that CCLaP is particularly good at putting out these kinds of stories, the kind that sit on the borders of so many traditional genres and styles. We'll be sending Kevin out this spring on a virtual book tour, to about twenty other litblogs and the like, so just drop me a line and let me know if you'd like to take part; but in the meantime, I hope you'll get a chance to stop by the book's online headquarters if you never have, to either download a free electronic version or order a handmade paper edition. (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Dec 13, 2012
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Dec 13, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 193408137X
| 9781934081372
| 4.71
| 14
| Oct 01, 2012
| 2012
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Other small presses might get more publicity and do flashier things, but I have to say that I've been quietly impressed the last several years with the unassuming Casperian Books, and especially for their habit of picking up great little stories that would otherwise get lost in the shuffle because of their overly general subject matter. Take for example Candi Sary's highly readable Black Crow White Lie, which in synopsis form is a pretty generic dysfunctional-family coming-of-age tale -- namely, preteen boy deals with his alcoholic New Age single mother, who has convinced him that he has special supernatural healing powers, as they shuffle from one motel to the next among the seedier sections of southern California, while she disappears for days at a time to be with her boyfriend and drinking partner. But it's in the details where this book really shines, because Sary has a fine-tuned understanding of what makes a story like this work; among the little moments, that is, like the time Carson spends with a sympathetic tattoo artist in front of his Hollywood shop, or his dealings with the hard but cute girl at school he has a crush on, or his growing sense of empowerment over what seems to be a successful string of actual psychic healings, the truth of which we don't learn until the very end of the book. Eventually, though, this novel does build to a bigger climax, as the now thirteen-year-old Carson makes plans to cross the country by himself so to visit his dead father in a Washington DC military cemetery; and this too is handled in a very satisfying way, as Sary takes all these little character-building moments from before and applies them to what is suddenly a much grander plot, the final kicker that elevates this story above the multitude of only mediocre coming-of-age tales that now exist out there. A former semi-finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, it's easy to see why such mainstream publications as Publishers Weekly has called this "praiseworthy [and] poignant," and I have to admit that this was one of the most emotionally satisfying reads I've had all autumn. It comes strongly recommended to one and all. Out of 10: 9.2(less) | Notes are private!
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| not set
| Dec 11, 2012
|
Dec 11, 2012
| Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 067002497X
| 9780670024971
| 4.11
| 5,660
| Sep 27, 2012
| Nov 08, 2012
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) So here was a quick read I couldn't pass up when randomly coming across it at my neighborhood library the other day -- a new compilation of around 50 classic Grimm Brothers fairytales (some famous but most obscure), done for the 200th anniversary of these tales' first publications, edited and sometimes slightly altered by popular "Narnia for atheists" children's author Philip Pullman. "But wait," I hear you saying. "The Grimm Brothers tales are only two hundred years old?" And that of course is part of the problem with supposed "objective" history, and why such new collections are always occasionally welcome; because although the folk tales being told date all the way back to Europe's Middle Ages, the Grimms themselves were modern businessmen who lived in the Victorian Age, and simply the first people who ever thought of actually collecting up all these oral stories and finally committing them to paper, who even just two hundred years later many of us mistakenly conflate with the fictional "Mother Goose" and believe to be the actual Medieval authors of the tales themselves. And as Pullman explains in his illuminating introduction, this is why he too felt free to change some of the details in these stories for this new anthology, because this is exactly what the Grimms did as well, slightly altering the tales from one edition of their massive compendium to the next over the decades in order to better fit the changing morality that occurred over the course of the 19th century; and in fact one of the most interesting things about this book is that Pullman not only compares the various Grimm editions in his smart notes ending each story, but also compares them to the other compilers of fairytales in non-English countries that were going on at the same time, showing that in reality these stories represent a pan-European outlook that influenced the entire continent equally from the years 1000 to 1500, when the invention of movable type finally started bringing definitive linguistic and thus cultural barriers to the geographic lines separating these countries. In fact, about the only "problem" with this book is simply that this research and Pullman's notes tend to be more interesting than the stories themselves -- this is no McGuiresque modern re-imagining of the fairytales, but simply a stripped-down retelling of them, so as such will contain no real surprises to those already familiar with the stories. But that said, for those who have never actually read them before, this makes for a great introduction to the subject, a quickly paced and always interesting volume that most people will be able to finish in full in just a day or two. Out of 10: 8.5(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Dec 04, 2012
|
Dec 04, 2012
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| B003YL4LYI
| 4.19
| 116,624
| 2011
| Jul 12, 2011
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) As regular readers know, it's been a year and a half now since I got seduced into reading what many now refer to as the "Game of Thrones novels" because of the popular TV series, more formally known as "A Song of Ice and Fire" or simply the Westeros novels; it was only for the first in the series that I did a big extended write-up, which I encourage you to check out for the details of how I feel about the entire story overall, with each subsequent novel getting just a small check-in from me here. And in fact, with the finishing of volume 5, A Dance with Dragons, I'm now officially caught up with all the writing that currently exists (a sixth and seventh volume are still expected in the future); but alas, after four thousand pages so far that had kept me surprisingly engaged, given that I'm not a usual fan of fantasy novels, the veneer is finally starting to wear off here around page five thousand. And I suppose the main reason for this is because of a strange decision Martin made for this and the previous volume; that after simultaneously juggling a dozen different major storylines set all around that fictional world in the first three books, for volumes 4 and 5 he decided to split these storylines into two groups and deal with only one in each book, and unfortunately a lot of the stuff I care about the least all ended up here in the second half together. See, the reason that so many usual non-fans of this genre have been getting sucked into this series is because Martin not only keeps the supernatural elements down to a bare minimum, but in fact all of the usual tropes about fantasy that drive us non-fans crazy (the endless weirdo made-up names, the endless faux-Medieval dialogue), delivering instead a fascinatingly complex and realistic look at what the Middle Ages in Western Europe were actually like; so the times when he does most lapse into cartoonishly complicated regal wars and Elfquest-like character names, for example like in all the scenes set with Daenerys Targaryen over in the mysterious eastern continent of their world, my eyes tend to glaze over for good, especially when combined with the fact that nothing has actually happened with Daenerys for the last thousand pages than endless fretting over her newly formed and shakily held kingdom. It still has its charms, and for sure I'll be reading the last volumes as well when they eventually come out; but A Dance with Dragons was the first moment this series started reminding me of its length, and demonstrating why five thousand pages is an awfully long distance to follow a single massive story. Out of 10: 8.0(less) | Notes are private!
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| Nov 29, 2012
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Nov 29, 2012
| Kindle Edition
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| 0983969701
| 9780983969709
| 3.71
| 28
| Oct 01, 2012
| Oct 01, 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Regular readers will remember Robert Jacoby, who last year gave us the interesting sailing oral history Escaping from Reality Without Really Trying; and now Jacoby has a new book out, a fictional novel this time, entitled There Are Reasons Noah Packed No Clothes and concerning the manytimes dysfunctional ways that enforced mental institutions for teens were still working even up to the early 1980s. But alas, although this is a well-written book with a deft stream-of-consciousness touch, which will strongly appeal to those specifically seeking out the subject, unfortunately its Out of 10: 7.5(less) | Notes are private!
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| Oct 24, 2012
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Oct 24, 2012
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| 0983927146
| 9780983927143
| 3.00
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| Apr 13, 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Although I admire the attitudes and goals of Sensitive Skin Books, I have to confess that so far I haven't particularly cared for any of the actual titles by them I've now read, with Carl Watson's Backwards the Drowned Go Dreaming being a perfect example of this; because this tale of down-and-outers is not so much a three-act narrative story as it is an endless string of platitudes and cliches stretched one right after each other for 200 pages, which I find admirable in theory but tiring to actually read. An old-school ode to lumpen-proletarians that shambles without structure from one biker bar and drug den to the next, as our hero takes a Beat-inspired road trip without much of a destination or even purpose, it's this chain of tropes that is precisely the book's main problem; for while Watson is to be commended for admiring and mimicking the typical Mid-Century-Modernist countercultural rambling anti-hero tale, it's also important to note that this type of tale is now edging on 60 years old, and has been so repeated so many times over the decades that simply doing a good job at it is no longer enough to make for a compelling piece of fiction. Well done for what it is, and absolutely a heartfelt ode to the fringes of our society, it unfortunately doesn't bring a single new thing to a story type that most of us have now seen hundreds and hundreds of times, and it should be kept in mind before picking up a copy yourself. Out of 10: 7.5(less) | Notes are private!
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| Oct 17, 2012
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Oct 17, 2012
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