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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 |
date
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date purchased | owned | purchase location | condition | format | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0765329476
| 9780765329479
| 3.71
| 456
| Nov 13, 2012
| Nov 13, 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.) 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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1
| not set
| Apr 17, 2013
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Apr 17, 2013
| Paperback
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| 9781939987051
| 4.00
| 5
| Dec 01, 2012
| Apr 01, 2013
|
I'm the publisher of this book! Longer essay on the reasons I signed it coming soon!
| Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Apr 02, 2013
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Apr 02, 2013
| Hardcover
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| 1621050793
| 9781621050797
| 4.04
| 115
| Feb 01, 2013
| Feb 01, 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 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!
| none
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1
| not set
| May 2013
|
Mar 08, 2013
| Paperback
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| 4.71
| 28
| Jan 01, 2012
| Jul 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.) 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!
| none
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1
| not set
| Mar 06, 2013
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Mar 06, 2013
| ebook
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| 5.00
| 8
| Jul 21, 2012
| Jul 21, 2012
|
This tender but surprisingly creepy coming-of-age tale exemplifies Mason's work in a nutshell -- charming yet edgy, funny yet dark, not quite indie-we...more
This tender but surprisingly creepy coming-of-age tale exemplifies Mason's work in a nutshell -- charming yet edgy, funny yet dark, not quite indie-weird but not quite mainstream-friendly -- and it was the strength of this particular piece that largely led me to signing him to my publishing company, for the even more powerful "Sad Robot Stories" coming out later this year. A major new young voice in the Chicago literary community, Mason's star is definitely on the rise these days, and this particular story is a fine example of why people go so nuts for his work. (less)
| Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Mar 05, 2013
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Mar 05, 2013
| ebook
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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!
| none
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1
| not set
| Feb 25, 2013
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Feb 25, 2013
| ebook
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| 9780981748146
| unknown
| 4.33
| 6
| Oct 01, 2012
| 2012
|
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)
| Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Jan 24, 2013
| Mar 08, 2013
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Jan 24, 2013
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| 0062122681
| 9780062122681
| 4.05
| 375
| 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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| not set
| Jan 24, 2013
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Jan 24, 2013
| Paperback
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| 1594481520
| 9781594481529
| 3.62
| 2,312
| Sep 06, 2005
| Sep 06, 2005
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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 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!
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1
| not set
| Jan 16, 2013
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Jan 16, 2013
| Paperback
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| 159448256X
| 9781594482564
| 3.89
| 1,963
| 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
| |||||||||||||||
| 159448242X
| 9781594482427
| 4.05
| 3,056
| 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
|
1
| not set
| Jan 16, 2013
|
Jan 16, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0747553866
| 9780747553861
| 4.15
| 5,402
| May 08, 2000
| 2001
|
(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
| |||||||||||||||
| 0099595818
| 9780099595816
| 4.25
| 5,277
| 1996
| Feb 06, 1997
|
(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
| |||||||||||||||
| 0812993802
| 9780812993806
| 4.07
| 6,134
| 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!
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Jan 07, 2013
| Hardcover
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| 5555556666666
| unknown
| 4.40
| 10
| Oct 08, 2012
| unknown
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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.) 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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| not set
| Dec 13, 2012
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Dec 13, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1401212697
| 9781401212698
| 3.93
| 964
| May 02, 2007
| May 02, 2007
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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.) DC Comics imprint Vertigo recently announced the coming cancellation of one of their flagship titles, John Constantine, Hellblazer*; and that has inspired me to finally read all 300 issues that will eventually make up the run (or at least as many of them that the Chicago Public Library carries), after reading individual issues here and there over the decades but never really becoming a regular fan. After all, this was one of the seven original comics from the late 1980s that convinced DC to launch Vertigo in the first place (and the only one still being published to this day), after coming to realize that a growing amount of their titles were starting to display a level of sophistication and edginess simply inappropriate for younger readers; and it could be argued that Constantine is the most well-loved of them all among actual comics creators, in that this grumpy, good-looking Brit with one foot always in the supernatural world is the one Vertigo legacy character most allowed to display an acerbic wit and world-weary attitude about the fantastical things going on around him, which is like catnip among an industry of writers whose jobs mostly revolve about the latest derring-do escapades of shiny happy superheroes. I started my epic read with the first two graphic novels, Original Sins and The Devil You Know, comprising the first thirteen standalone issues from way back in 1988 and '89, both of them primarily written by Jamie Delano and drawn/inked by a variety of artists; but I have to admit with a little sadness that these are really starting to show their age, including purple prose that is much too overblown simply because Delano could now get away with it, illustrations that sometimes belie the pro/am state the comics industry was still in during the '80s, and a manytimes laughable obsession with such trendy targets as yuppies, Margaret Thatcher, London skinheads and other such instantly datable subjects. But much like my fellow CCLaP critic Oriana Leckert when she first disappointingly read Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns 25 years after it too first came out, perhaps my own disappointment with the first year of Hellblazer is actually a very good thing; because it means that the comics industry as a whole has been greatly expanding and maturing in those resulting 25 years, that it has reached such a level of legitimate sophistication that these first experiments from the start of this maturation now seem clunky and childish in comparison. I'm going to continue reading, because I'm fascinated to see how this title changes once taken over in the '90s by such industry legends as Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis and Brian Azzarello, and I also recommend these early volumes to anyone like me who's interested in seeing the long and slow morphing of both this title and comics in general as an art form; but certainly you should keep your expectations low when picking up these first collections, and understand that they were being produced in an age still dominated by campy TV Batman and throwaway titles still sold literally on spinner racks at drugstores. Out of 10: 7.5 *Let's make it clear, however, that John Constantine as a character will still be going through new adventures, although to explain this to the uninitiated takes a few minutes. See, in 2011 DC made the unprecedented decision to literally cancel every comic their company was producing, reboot the entire shared universe where their stories collectively took place, and relaunch the "DC Universe" under a series of brand-new titles, collectively known as the "New 52." Then at the same time, they also decided to turn Vertigo into an entirely creator-owned comics line, and to take all the DC-owned characters in Vertigo titles and pull them back into DC comics; and so in practical terms that means that the character will now be appearing in a post-reboot comic put out by DC simply known as Constantine, the character itself rolled back to his early twenties in age (he had been aging in real time in Hellblazer, making him in his late fifties when the original title was cancelled), and now no longer beholden to any of the plot developments from these previous 25 years of stories. Which like all "New 52" decisions has been controversial among DC's original aging customer base (i.e. me and all my Gen-X hipster-douchebag friends), but that has had new issues selling to young people again like hotcakes, which of course was the whole point of the reboot in the first place. (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Dec 12, 2012
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Dec 12, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1563890526
| 9781563890529
| 4.07
| 5,837
| 1992
| Oct 01, 1997
|
(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.) DC Comics imprint Vertigo recently announced the coming cancellation of one of their flagship titles, John Constantine, Hellblazer*; and that has inspired me to finally read all 300 issues that will eventually make up the run (or at least as many of them that the Chicago Public Library carries), after reading individual issues here and there over the decades but never really becoming a regular fan. After all, this was one of the seven original comics from the late 1980s that convinced DC to launch Vertigo in the first place (and the only one still being published to this day), after coming to realize that a growing amount of their titles were starting to display a level of sophistication and edginess simply inappropriate for younger readers; and it could be argued that Constantine is the most well-loved of them all among actual comics creators, in that this grumpy, good-looking Brit with one foot always in the supernatural world is the one Vertigo legacy character most allowed to display an acerbic wit and world-weary attitude about the fantastical things going on around him, which is like catnip among an industry of writers whose jobs mostly revolve about the latest derring-do escapades of shiny happy superheroes. I started my epic read with the first two graphic novels, Original Sins and The Devil You Know, comprising the first thirteen standalone issues from way back in 1988 and '89, both of them primarily written by Jamie Delano and drawn/inked by a variety of artists; but I have to admit with a little sadness that these are really starting to show their age, including purple prose that is much too overblown simply because Delano could now get away with it, illustrations that sometimes belie the pro/am state the comics industry was still in during the '80s, and a manytimes laughable obsession with such trendy targets as yuppies, Margaret Thatcher, London skinheads and other such instantly datable subjects. But much like my fellow CCLaP critic Oriana Leckert when she first disappointingly read Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns 25 years after it too first came out, perhaps my own disappointment with the first year of Hellblazer is actually a very good thing; because it means that the comics industry as a whole has been greatly expanding and maturing in those resulting 25 years, that it has reached such a level of legitimate sophistication that these first experiments from the start of this maturation now seem clunky and childish in comparison. I'm going to continue reading, because I'm fascinated to see how this title changes once taken over in the '90s by such industry legends as Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis and Brian Azzarello, and I also recommend these early volumes to anyone like me who's interested in seeing the long and slow morphing of both this title and comics in general as an art form; but certainly you should keep your expectations low when picking up these first collections, and understand that they were being produced in an age still dominated by campy TV Batman and throwaway titles still sold literally on spinner racks at drugstores. Out of 10: 7.5 *Let's make it clear, however, that John Constantine as a character will still be going through new adventures, although to explain this to the uninitiated takes a few minutes. See, in 2011 DC made the unprecedented decision to literally cancel every comic their company was producing, reboot the entire shared universe where their stories collectively took place, and relaunch the "DC Universe" under a series of brand-new titles, collectively known as the "New 52." Then at the same time, they also decided to turn Vertigo into an entirely creator-owned comics line, and to take all the DC-owned characters in Vertigo titles and pull them back into DC comics; and so in practical terms that means that the character will now be appearing in a post-reboot comic put out by DC simply known as Constantine, the character itself rolled back to his early twenties in age (he had been aging in real time in Hellblazer, making him in his late fifties when the original title was cancelled), and now no longer beholden to any of the plot developments from these previous 25 years of stories. Which like all "New 52" decisions has been controversial among DC's original aging customer base (i.e. me and all my Gen-X hipster-douchebag friends), but that has had new issues selling to young people again like hotcakes, which of course was the whole point of the reboot in the first place. (less) | Notes are private!
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| not set
| Dec 12, 2012
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Dec 12, 2012
| Paperback
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| B009MRR6CM
| 4.40
| 10
| Oct 08, 2012
| Oct 08, 2012
|
I was the editor and publisher of this book! Essay on the process coming soon!
| Notes are private!
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| not set
| Oct 08, 2012
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Oct 08, 2012
| Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0241144779
| 9780241144770
| 3.56
| 2,064
| 2011
| Feb 12, 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.) Regular readers know that I've been on a bit of a reading kick for contemporary philosopher Alain de Botton, ever since hearing him impressively speak on a recent episode of the "On Being" podcast; and after first tackling his older book How Proust Can Change Your Life, I thought I'd now skip ahead and review one of his latest, the 2011 practical self-help book Religion for Atheists which had been the whole reason he was on the "On Being" podcast in the first place. (And in fact, de Botton has really put his money where his mouth is with this book, recently opening a literal "church for atheists" in a storefront space in central London called The School of Life; and it's technically that that he was on the podcast to promote.) The title basically describes the entire argument of the book -- that there are plenty of secular functions and roles that organized religion provides society, apart and away from its spiritual aspects, that atheists would be wise to adopt in their own lives for more happiness -- and while some of these roles are pretty easy to guess at (providing a sense of ritual in our lives, providing a communal space for like-minded individuals), there are others here that come as a pleasing surprise; for example, that religions provide an excuse for people to design moral codes of behavior that all who attend must adhere to (or in other words, think about how nice it'd be at your next dinner party to be able to declare your apartment a "hipster-douchebag-free zone" or to ban all talk about politics), or that religions provide a way to aesthetically celebrate the lessons in life that are most important for us. A thought-provoking book, but one always grounded in practical advice on how to actually implement these changes in real life, it comes strongly recommended to all my fellow atheists, and I can guarantee that some of its lessons will have a strong impact on the way that CCLaP runs its eventual physical headquarters here in Chicago. Out of 10: 9.1(less) | Notes are private!
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| Oct 06, 2012
| Nov 26, 2012
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Oct 06, 2012
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0679779159
| 9780679779155
| 3.77
| 4,199
| 1997
| Apr 28, 1998
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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.) I recently had the chance to hear philosopher Alain de Botton talk on the "On Being" podcast, and found him to be really fascinating; much like the Existentialists of Mid-Century Modernism, he's a "spiritual atheist" who has dedicated his career towards the pursuit of meaningful ritual and ethical code-building but without the need of a supernatural higher power, even going so far as to start an "atheist church" called The School of Life out of a storefront retail space in the middle of London. And so that has prompted me to go back and read some of his older books; and what better to have come up free at first at the local library than his slim and funny 1997 volume How Proust Can Change Your Life, because this just happens to be one of the reading projects I've been contemplating taking on after finally finishing the CCLaP 100 essay series, is to finally take on the daunting seven-volume In Search of Lost Time from this famed digressor and recluse. Ah, but that's one of the first things you learn when reading de Botton's part-biography, part-life guide, is that Marcel Proust was not exactly a recluse at all, despite the famed stories about writing huge parts of his massive multi-part novel while laying in bed for sometimes 16 straight hours at a time (indeed, he was a well-known socializer and party-thrower during his own lifetime, and particularly known for leaving giant tips at high-end restaurants), nor according to de Botton should we be particularly daunted by Proust's giant novel, which has picked up a bad reputation precisely because of its digressive nature (after all, the entire thing starts with a thirty-page reminiscence of childhood sensations, all brought on by the narrator one day eating a type of cookie that he used to enjoy as a kid), but in reality a highly readable and enjoyable book for us sophisticated 21st-century audiences, much more used to this hopping around in time and space than the Early Modernist critics who first labeled this book as "difficult." A delightful little guide that spends most of its time highlighting the very human issues that Proust surprisingly championed (the joy of friendship, the mysteries of the mundane, the effort to revel in life no matter what your circumstances), this is also a fine introduction to the work of de Botton himself, and I have to say that I'm eagerly looking forward to making my way through the next book of his that has freed itself up at the library this week, 2011's Religion for Atheists. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Sep 20, 2012
| Oct 10, 2012
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Sep 20, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 188896314X
| 9781888963144
| 4.39
| 13,850
| 2004
| Nov 01, 2010
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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.) It was through CCLaP critic Oriana Leckert's write-up for her Jugs & Capes essay series last year (book version finally coming next week!) that first brought Jeff Smith's epic comic Bone to my attention, plus of course the fevered recommendations I'd sometimes hear from the edges of the comics-loving crowd around me; so when the Chicago Public Library recently acquired a copy of the full 1,500-page omnibus edition, I thought it was finally time for me to sit down and check it out myself. And oh, am I glad I did, for all the passionate fanboy things you hear about it is true; done by a guy who grew up with dual obsessions for Walt Kelly's Pogo and JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, it's a massive saga that combines both, the tale of three silly cartoon characters from "the next universe over" who stumble one day into the middle of a realistically drawn fantasy epic among the neighbors they never knew they had. So as such, then, there are a whole number of things going on here to admire, that don't sound like they'd go together in one book but somehow do -- the surrealistic expressive perfection of such 1930s cartoons as Krazy Kat and early Disney, the sweeping landscapes of representational drawing, a contemporary sensibility when it comes to dramatic highlights, all married to a story complex enough for a 1,500 page narrative -- and while I'm not a particularly obsessive fan of either Pogo or Lord of the Rings, I sure found myself becoming one of Smith's attempt to bring them together, a project that can be equally loved in a subtle, knowing way by adults (think of the difference between watching Chuck Jones at ten versus thirty) and in a straightforward, surface-level way by the actual ten-year-olds. (And indeed, in what has come as a shock to the indie-zinester creator, one of Bone's largest audiences has turned out to be actual kids, so much so that Scholastic recently paid a hefty sum for the reprint rights, and are spending the next decade re-publishing the entire run now in full color and marketed directly to pre-teens.) So then flush with heady excitement over this new find, I also pulled up on Netflix a documentary that's been made about Smith and the Bone phenomenon, 2009's The Cartoonist; although I'm happy to report that it turns out to be about a lot more than just that, in reality a great overlook at the entire indie-comics explosion that happened in the 1990s, everything from confessional art-school kids to a new superhero publisher, all the way to such hard-to-classify projects as Bone or Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. It turns out that Smith was part of a little clique of self-publishing cartoonists back then, who banded together in various smart ways in order to help each other stay afloat -- sharing expenses at conventions, promoting each other's work -- making this not just a narrow film about the comic itself and how it came about (although there's plenty of that too, including the revelation that Smith has been casually doodling the "Bone" characters since literally a child, and that in high school and college he really did put them through a series of adventures in their own world that are only briefly referenced in this newest epic), but also a bigger documentary about the DIY spirit, the changing face of small business, the trials and tribulations of self-publishing, and a lot more. Granted, the production values are not high -- it features lots of talking head shots, lots of personal offices being used as set backgrounds, and all the other things one associates with cheap quickie docs found in many DVD extras -- but the content more than makes up for it, especially when coming right on the heels of reading the book for the first time like I did. Both come very strongly recommended. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Sep 20, 2012
| Nov 07, 2012
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Sep 20, 2012
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| 0312420110
| 9780312420116
| 3.50
| 208
| Jan 01, 1967
| Jun 01, 2002
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(As of summer 2012, a first-edition copy of this book is being sold through the rare-book service at the arts organization I own, the Chicago Center f...more
(As of summer 2012, a first-edition copy of this book is being sold through the rare-book service at the arts organization I own, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks]. Here below is the description I wrote for its listing.) Known affectionately by her fans as "The Dark Lady of American Letters," like many writers the late Susan Sontag is almost equally known for her personality, celebrity and controversial views as for her varied body of work itself. A serious academe even at an early age, who had logged in time at the University of Chicago, University of Paris and Oxford all by 25, Sontag was known as a distinctly European-style intellectual who spent her life championing the challenging countercultural writers of that continent; celebrated mostly for her heady critical essays, among other achievements she was the person to coin the word "camp" as a positive term for "so bad it's good," a virtual pillar of the entire Postmodern era, plus came up with an entirely new way for us to envision the relationship between photography and us as its subjects and viewers, an obsession that even bled into Sontag's personal life, in that this notorious bisexual was romantically involved with famed photographer Annie Liebowitz for the entire last decade of her life. But despite all this, interestingly Sontag primarily considered herself a novelist, odd to realize given that she only wrote four of them in her long career, two near the beginning and two near the end. 1967's experimental Death Kit was the second, and only the third book of her career overall, after 1963's similarly groundbreaking The Benefactor and the essay collection Against Interpretation in 1966, considered one of her most famous books because of containing the aforementioned "camp" essay. And indeed, there's a lot to be said for one online reviewer's sum-up of Death Kit as "what Kafka would've written if he had been a '60s hippie;" after all, Sontag always saw her formative years in continental Europe as the most important period of her life, the years when she first fell in love with Kafka himself and other cutting-edge Modernist European artists, a love that would not just stay with her the rest of her life but in many ways help define her in the eyes of American audiences. A sometimes nonsensical, dreamlike tale just dripping with symbolism throughout, it is perhaps the story of a pissy corporate executive who loses his temper one evening on a delayed commuter train, manages to sneak off the stopped train, in a fit of rage kills the wisecracking employee trying to clear the tracks, and sneaks back on board without anyone noticing, spending the rest of the story in an existential cloud of guilt and deep thoughts; or maybe none of this actually happened, and what we're really watching is our unreliable narrator experience a complete snap from reality "American Psycho" style. In any case, there is also Diddy's sexual obsession with an easy blind girl to contend with, the travails of his microscope-manufacturing job, and all kinds of tangents to be had about the nature of humanity, the slippery definition of "truth," and all kinds of other Big Issues. A book almost guaranteed to go up in value as the years continue, this a must-have for those interested in the history of countercultural intellectual thought, as well as Postmodernist literary history in general.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Jul 25, 2012
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Jul 25, 2012
| Paperback
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| 193854501X
| 9781938545016
| 4.39
| 18
| Sep 17, 2012
| Sep 17, 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.) As regular readers know, I've been tearing through a book a day this December, in an attempt to whittle down my now gigantic to-read list before the holidays are over and I have to get back to regular CCLaP work; and regulars also know that I've been saving up all my "bleh" reviews and running them right before Christmas, in the hopes that the smaller audience at the blog during the holidays will lessen the impact of these so-so to terrible write-ups. And that's because in many of these cases, the books being criticized are not necessarily that bad from an objective standpoint, but just hit a bad nerve when it comes to me in particular; and perhaps there's no greater example of this than Kent Evans' A Crash Course on the Anatomy of Robots, which even the author admits a few pages in is not much more than a blatant ripoff of McSweeney's founder Dave Eggers, one of the dozens of twee metafictional Postmodernist moments that I know other people love, but to me is like fingernails down a f-cking chalkboard. Essentially the rambling story of a hipster douchebag, and all the hipster-douchebag things he does -- backpacking trips through southeast Asia, falling ass-backwards into easy sex with models, complaining about the "artist's life" while working a series of high-paying corporate gigs, a complete inability to see even the slightest amount of hypocrisy in that -- which of course is written in second person, and of course contains byzantine chapter titles for extra-annoying effect, there is so much navel-gazing going on here that even orange groves in Florida are starting to get nervous; and by the time I got to the part where Damien and his friends claim that a human-rights violation has taken place against their buddy, because the police dared to arrest him simply because he was breaking the law, I decided that I had had enough with these Brooklyn poseurs and their unacknowledged-entitlement misadventures. Like I said, this book has received a lot of praise, so obviously there's a legitimate audience out there for it, and I don't mean to imply that it's badly written because it's not; it just concerns one of those subjects that I not only dislike but that literally sets my nerves on edge, and I think it no coincidence that the author proudly mentions in his bio his past involvement with the 1990s performance-poetry community, because so many of the writers who set my nerves on edge seem to come from this background. Consider yourself warned. Out of 10: 4.4(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Jul 09, 2012
| Dec 21, 2012
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Jul 09, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1617750794
| 9781617750793
| 3.57
| 30
| Jul 17, 2012
| Jul 03, 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, I know, you haven't been seeing very many reviews this year from our buddies at Akashic Books, which is because they simply haven't been sending very many books this year; and that's a shame, because it seems like every time I pick a new one up by them, at the very least it's still okay but much more often some of my favorite reads of the year. Take this most recent double-header, for example, the "soft apocalypse" noir thrillers The Dewey Decimal System and The Nervous System by former Shudder To Think guitarist Nathan Larson, which turns out to contain one of the most inventive post-apocalyptic milieus I've ever come across (and I read a lot of post-apocalyptic novels); two tales concerning a black former soldier with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, who has recently moved into the New York Public Library with the goal of manually reshelving all its books, within a Manhattan that after an endless series of coordinated terrorist attacks in the near future has voluntarily emptied to roughly one-tenth the population it once was, like The Yiddish Policeman's Union these use simple crime-novel plots as a sly way to explore this expansive alt-history universe, even while layering in an ultra-slow reveal concerning "Dewey"s actual past, the terrible eugenics experiments performed on him by the US military, and why it is that he can't remember any of it, despite still having an autonomic sense memory of how to speak Korean (for one example) or how to kill a man with his bare hands (for another). Two of the most legitimately exciting novels I've read in a long time, these had the rare ability to completely suck me out of my daily reality while I was in the middle of reading them, something that doesn't happen to me much anymore now that I read 150 books a year; and I always take that as an extremely good sign, taut genre actioners that belie the usual tropes of their genres, and which will undoubtedly be making our Best Of The Year lists come December. Out of 10: 9.7(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Jul 02, 2012
| Aug 28, 2012
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Jul 02, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1617750107
| 9781617750106
| 3.13
| 179
| Jan 01, 2011
| Apr 19, 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.] I know, I know, you haven't been seeing very many reviews this year from our buddies at Akashic Books, which is because they simply haven't been sending very many books this year; and that's a shame, because it seems like every time I pick a new one up by them, at the very least it's still okay but much more often some of my favorite reads of the year. Take this most recent double-header, for example, the "soft apocalypse" noir thrillers The Dewey Decimal System and The Nervous System by former Shudder To Think guitarist Nathan Larson, which turns out to contain one of the most inventive post-apocalyptic milieus I've ever come across (and I read a lot of post-apocalyptic novels); two tales concerning a black former soldier with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, who has recently moved into the New York Public Library with the goal of manually reshelving all its books, within a Manhattan that after an endless series of coordinated terrorist attacks in the near future has voluntarily emptied to roughly one-tenth the population it once was, like The Yiddish Policeman's Union these use simple crime-novel plots as a sly way to explore this expansive alt-history universe, even while layering in an ultra-slow reveal concerning "Dewey"s actual past, the terrible eugenics experiments performed on him by the US military, and why it is that he can't remember any of it, despite still having an autonomic sense memory of how to speak Korean (for one example) or how to kill a man with his bare hands (for another). Two of the most legitimately exciting novels I've read in a long time, these had the rare ability to completely suck me out of my daily reality while I was in the middle of reading them, something that doesn't happen to me much anymore now that I read 150 books a year; and I always take that as an extremely good sign, taut genre actioners that belie the usual tropes of their genres, and which will undoubtedly be making our Best Of The Year lists come December. Out of 10: 9.7(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Jul 02, 2012
| Aug 28, 2012
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Jul 02, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1897141467
| 9781897141465
| 4.57
| 14
| Apr 15, 2012
| Apr 15, 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.) It's been a while since we've heard from our friends at Pedlar Press, a small Canadian publisher dedicated to experimental yet mainstream-accessible work, and who are right now putting out some of the best designed mass-produced paperbacks in the entire Western indie world; but their latest recently showed up here not too long ago, Anne Fleming's story collection Gay Dwarves of America, and I have to admit that this may be one of the best ones they've put out yet. See, unlike most of the Pedlar titles I've reviewed here, Fleming's manuscript doesn't start out deeply experimental and then with crowdpleasing aspects added to it, but is instead a collection of mainstream stories about such banal subjects as suburban teenagers acting stupid while bored, then adds an engaging experimentalism to the dialogue, style and even plot turns, making this a highly entertaining yet dark-tinged and thought-provoking tome, the kind of extremely well-written human-interest fiction you might otherwise see at a place like McSweeney's. A bit too precious here and there, which is why it isn't getting a higher score (I could've done without the story containing just one word per page, for example), it's nonetheless a highly readable and satisfying collection from a press known precisely for such collections, and comes today with a big recommendation. Out of 10: 9.0(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Jul 02, 2012
| Jul 20, 2012
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Jul 02, 2012
| Paperback
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| 9780982744093
| unknown
| 4.00
| 30
| Mar 27, 2012
| Mar 27, 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'm proud to count author Ryan Bradley, who's also the owner of Artistically Declined Press, as a friend of mine, which would make it an ethical conflict if I tried to pass off my review of his latest book, Code for Failure, as "objective;" I did however want to get a mention of it posted here online anyway, because this little book turned out to be really quite great, and I wanted to make sure it came to your attention as well. So consider my positive bias now announced! In reality a sneaky memoir of Bradley's time as a go-nowhere slacker at a small Oregon gas station, after leaving school but before taking up literature as a profession, it's designed as a series of one-page mini-stories about the weird and interesting experiences he had while there; but don't let these funny little anecdotes fool you, in that the manuscript added together paints a rather devastating emotional portrait of alienation, ennui and bad decisions, rife with the kinds of casual-sex disasters you would expect when sad small-town middle-aged women clumsily try to seduce beefy 22-year-old gas pumpers. Greater as a whole than as a sum of its parts, this fast-paced book affected me more profoundly than I was expecting it to, and I'm looking forward to the day that Bradley finally sits down and writes that masterpiece of a full novel that we all know he has in him. It comes strongly recommended today, despite my personal connection to the author. (less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Jun 27, 2012
| Nov 15, 2012
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Jun 27, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1617750751
| 9781617750755
| 3.25
| 1,051
| Jun 28, 2012
| Jul 03, 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 know that I am a longtime fan of Chicago contemporary lit legend Joe Meno, one of only a handful of local authors here right now to have broken through into national-scale reputation, media attention and resulting sales; and there have been projects of his in the past that I've really loved, and ones I found only so-so, and ones I thought…er, not so so-so, so I'm never exactly sure what I'm going to get when I dive into a new one. But this latest, from our friends at the great Akashic Books and being released just this week, is a different thing altogether from anything else in this shapeshifter's career -- deliberately small and intimate, and easy to dismiss at first as the meaningless musings of hipster douchebags, by the end it manages to be rather wistful, heartbreaking and melancholy, a sneakily tight manuscript that gets better and better the farther you read. Essentially the full beginning-to-end tale of one of those torrid three-week romantic relationships that litter so many of our pasts, and set among good-looking twentysomething art-school dropouts because, hey, why not, Meno's point here is to look at one of these people who sometimes just randomly blows into our lives for a bit, changes it profoundly, then just as randomly leaves again for the entire rest of your life; and by following it in its full messy glory, Meno's bigger point is to remind us of why these experiences are so important, why we remember them so nostalgically and positively for nearly the rest of our lives. Set during the Great Chicago Blizzard of 1999, the entire book has a muted and closed-in tone that serves its Before Sunrise feel well; and although Meno occasionally leans on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl tropes a bit too much (she has doe eyes and a thrift-store coat! She bicycles in the snow! She does impromptu absurdist performance art on the el!), by humanizing her in a sophisticated and complex way he largely avoids the biggest sins of that cliche, making this a quickly paced charmer that I suspect will eventually be one of the most popular titles of his career. A novel just begging to get adapted into the quirky movie debut of the next big national indie-film darling, it comes strongly recommended to existing fans of Garden State and (500) Days of Summer; and don't forget that I recently had a chance to sit down and talk with Meno here in Chicago for nearly an hour almost exclusively just about this book for the CCLaP Podcast, so I hope you'll get a chance to check that out as well when it's available next week. Out of 10: 9.4(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| May 29, 2012
| Jun 27, 2012
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May 29, 2012
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 1932664084
| 9781932664089
| 4.16
| 48,771
| Jul 28, 2004
| Aug 24, 2004
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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.) I was a huge fan of the Scott Pilgrim movie when it came out a few years ago, but had never gotten a chance to read any of the actual graphic novels it was based on; so I was extremely glad to receive a review copy of the new color edition of volume one earlier this year, which for those who don't know is merely the first of six parts making up the entire saga of this twentysomething Toronto slacker and indie-rocker. And indeed, perhaps the biggest surprise is how little the film changes any of the story found in the original book, many times simply copying entire scenes word-for-word and action-for-action; and that's a big testament to O'Malley's strength as a writer, within a medium that is instead mostly known for the strength of its images. Although that said, another big surprise is just how differently this exact same dialogue and action actually comes across, depending on who's handling the material; for while filmmaker Edgar Wright infuses every second of the movie version with a sheen of surreal absurdism, O'Malley clearly means for the book version to be mostly a grounded character study with just a few absurd touches thrown in, a fascinating example of how two very different visions can come out of the exact same written manuscript. Well worth your time if you're a comics fan (but of course you already knew that -- the black-and-white version of this book has been out for almost a decade now), even usual non-fans would be wise to take advantage of this new color print run of the entire series, and to check out what many call one of the best examples ever of what this medium is capable of when the artist in question is firing on all cylinders. Out of 10: 9.1(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| May 29, 2012
| Sep 20, 2012
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May 29, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1597803944
| 9781597803946
| 3.79
| 34
| Feb 01, 2012
| Feb 06, 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.) This technothriller by W.G. Marshall posits a well-worn idea at its core (a freak accident turns a couple of people into six-thousand-foot-high giants, at which point all hell breaks loose), but easily elevates itself above most other stories of this kind by taking an ultra-realistic and scientifically accurate look at just what such an occurrence might actually be like in the real world; so not only are our normal-sized heroes battling the giants themselves, but also the now human-sized and unstoppable bacteria that was on these people's skin when the transformation took place, the airplane-crashing waves of superheated air that come with each exhalation by the giants, not to mention the simple challenge of trying to communicate with a creature whose ear alone is the size of a skyscraper, making even the most powerful amplifier ever made effectively non-comprehensible. So as such, then, readers shouldn't expect anything above Jerry Bruckheimer level in terms of characterization and plot; but I have to admit that I found this to be a real rollicking delight anyway, merely from the pure audaciousness of its mundanely disgusting details (ugh, igloo-sized piles of dandruff, UGH) and the breakneck speed in which it introduces these details. A strong contender for CCLaP's Guilty Pleasure Awards at the end of this year, it comes strongly recommended to Michael Crichton fans and other lovers of simply-told but fantastically imagined what-if stories. Out of 10: 8.8(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| May 03, 2012
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May 03, 2012
| Paperback
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