Jason has
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| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
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date purchased | owned | purchase location | condition | format | ||
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| 9781939987099
| 5.00
| 1
| Jun 10, 2013
| Jun 10, 2013
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This is the latest from my publishing company, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, slated for release on June 10th, 2013. At that point...more
This is the latest from my publishing company, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, slated for release on June 10th, 2013. At that point I will get a longer essay up here, explaining why I decided to sign this book in the first place. Don't mistake this version for the other "Mountainfit" listing here at Goodreads; that other one is for a slightly different version Sethi self-published last year!(less)
| Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| May 15, 2013
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May 15, 2013
| Hardcover
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| 9781939987082
| 4.75
| 4
| May 27, 2013
| May 27, 2013
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This is CCLaP's newest book, being released on May 27th. At that point I will get a more substantial essay posted here, all about the book and why I d...more
This is CCLaP's newest book, being released on May 27th. At that point I will get a more substantial essay posted here, all about the book and why I decided to sign it in the first place. We'll be making a strong push towards getting copies of the book into the hands of every person who adds this to their library, so I hope you'll have a chance to do so in the coming weeks.(less)
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| May 10, 2013
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May 10, 2013
| Hardcover
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| 0765329476
| 9780765329479
| 3.71
| 449
| Nov 13, 2012
| Nov 13, 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The Inexplicables is the fourth book I've now read in Cherie Priest's remarkable "Clockwork Century" steampunk series, and in fact a quote from one of my earlier reviews ended up making the front cover of this one; and that surprised and delighted me but also felt very natural, because this is one of my favorite genre series of all time by now, and I look forward to the point seemingly every year when Priest has a brand-new volume done and ready to come out. They all take place in a what-if Victorian America in the late 1800s with just layers upon layers of fantastical details piled on: there's a giant wall around the ruined remains of the former Seattle, for example, because a mad scientist once ruptured an underground cave during a bank heist and released a heavy gas that turns people into zombies; but like a first-person-shooter videogame, there are also miles of underground tunnels, businesses and residences under this gassed zombie wasteland, full of outlaws and Chinamen who take this gas and distill it into a heroin-like drug that is then shipped across America in giant armed dirigibles; and in the meanwhile, the Civil War is still going on decades after it did in real life, because here the South develops railroads, submarines and robots to help even out the fight; and in the latest development in this speculative universe, it turns out that none other than Bigfoot has managed to accidentally enter the walled wasteland of downtown Seattle, and that the poisonous gas is slowly turning him into an unstoppable force of violence. And that's what makes these books so delightful; for while her characterizations are not much more than minimally solid enough to pass muster, it's Priest's plotting skills that are her real forte, delivering exciting after exciting tale that in epic scope has now taken us all the way across the United States and back, this newest volume set back in the walled Seattle where the story began. Breathtaking in its pacing, and such a mega-pastiche that you'll be in awe simply over how well she melds it all together, this is the literal definition of an intellectual's guilty pleasure, and should be highly enjoyed by one and all if read with this attitude. Highly recommended, as are all her books. Out of 10: 8.9, or 9.9 for steampunk fans (less) | Notes are private!
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| Apr 17, 2013
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Apr 17, 2013
| Paperback
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| 9781939987051
| 4.00
| 5
| Dec 01, 2012
| Apr 01, 2013
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I'm the publisher of this book! Longer essay on the reasons I signed it coming soon!
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| Apr 02, 2013
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Apr 02, 2013
| Hardcover
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| 5.00
| 8
| Jul 21, 2012
| Jul 21, 2012
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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)
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| Mar 05, 2013
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Mar 05, 2013
| ebook
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| 5.00
| 2
| Feb 10, 2013
| Feb 10, 2013
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CCLaP is hiring book reviewers. And we're paying. Things with CCLaP have simply gotten too big for me to be able to single-handedly write all 150 book...more CCLaP is hiring book reviewers. And we're paying. Things with CCLaP have simply gotten too big for me to be able to single-handedly write all 150 book reviews a year that our blog publishes; so I'm looking to bring on three other people besides myself and existing staff writer Karl Wolff, so that each of us writes at least one thousand-word essay a week about a book we've recently read, plus as many short one-paragraph reviews during the week that people might want to post. The way we're paying these reviewers, then, is to gather up all the material at our blog each month and publish it as a magazine -- the magazine you're seeing on this webpage, in fact -- give it out for free at the blog but charge $5 at Amazon and iTunes, and $20 for a paper copy, then give each writer $1 of every copy sold of that issue. So how much does that mean? Well, I don't know at this point, and you should absolutely be prepared for that number to maybe be "zero" at first; but I'm hoping if we all work together to help spread the word, it'll be more like several hundred dollars that each of us will be making per month for writing book reviews. So that means I'm being very particular over which three people I'll be taking on to fill those slots, because there is very definitely a "CCLaP ethos" at the blog that I want to carefully maintain. And what exactly is the CCLaP ethos? Well, the short answer is to read my own book reviews and do exactly like them; but the long answer is perhaps best defined through a series of contradictory questions… --Are your existing reviews smart without being pretentious? --Are they informative without being academic? --Are they funny but not silly? --Are they opinionated but not judgmental? --Do they express why some people might legitimately like the book and others legitimately dislike it? --Do they take themselves seriously, but not too seriously? --Do they have a natural flow that takes the reader from A to B to C? --Do they cover a mix of obscure and popular titles? --Are they friendly (and sometimes forgiving) towards basement-press and self-published work? --And can you consistently crank out a thousand-word piece every week that adheres to all this? If you said yes to all the above, please contact me here at Goodreads, and send me links to the five book reviews of yours you'd most like me to read; and also make sure to check out this magazine (which like I said has a free version at the blog), to make sure you really do know what you're getting yourself into. I sincerely look forward to hearing from you. (less) | Notes are private!
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1
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| Mar 04, 2013
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Mar 04, 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!
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1
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| Feb 25, 2013
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Feb 25, 2013
| ebook
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| 4.50
| 2
| Aug 2012
| Aug 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Regular readers will remember what an unexpected fan I became of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, back when I first read it a few years ago as part of the "CCLaP 100" essay series on literary classics; and with this being a Victorian-Age public-domain work, there are of course dozens of unofficial sequels floating around out there. One of those is called Jim Hawkins and the Curse of Treasure Island, an unusually faithful sequel that tries extra-hard to mimic the exact language and tone of the original, first put out about a decade ago by "Francis Bryan;" but as it's become clear because of a new reprinting last year, that's actually the pen-name of revered British man of letters Frank Delaney, a Booker judge and the literary director of the Edinburgh Festival who has produced a host of popular documentaries for the BBC over the decades, and who among other things is in the middle of doing a 25-YEAR PODCAST where he examines James Joyce's Ulysses one line at a time. So it makes sense that this homage to Stevenson would be unusually spot-on in its voice and subject matter, because this is what Delaney does, is treat classic literature very, very seriously; and I have to say, it was just as much a delight to read as the original, and feels very much like a lost sequel by Stevenson himself that maybe just happened to surface within the last few years. Granted, if you're not a natural fan of Victorian action tales, you can pretty safely skip this; but if you are, you should absolutely put this on your must-read list right away. Out of 10: 8.5, or 9.5 for fans of Victorian thrillers (less) | Notes are private!
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1
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| Feb 20, 2013
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Feb 20, 2013
| ebook
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| 9780981748146
| unknown
| 4.33
| 6
| Oct 01, 2012
| 2012
|
The editor and publisher of this anthology are both personal friends of mine, so it'd be an ethical conflict for me to purport to do an "objective" re...more
The editor and publisher of this anthology are both personal friends of mine, so it'd be an ethical conflict for me to purport to do an "objective" review of it here (although make no mistake, I loved it); so instead I'll direct you to a recent podcast interview I did with them, where we talked for 45 minutes about this book's origins, the process of putting it together, and a breakdown of the stories found within: http://www.cclapcenter.com/2013/01/cc... (less)
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1
| Jan 24, 2013
| Mar 08, 2013
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Jan 24, 2013
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| 0062122681
| 9780062122681
| 4.05
| 374
| Jul 10, 2012
| Jul 10, 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I know a number of the people involved with this book, so it wouldn't really be ethically right for me to purport to do an "objective" review of it; but I at least wanted to make a mention of it here at the blog, mostly because it finally came up to the top of my to-read list last week, after first entering way back in July. (July! Shame on me! I am so sorry to all you authors that it's taking me so long to get through your books right now; but we're about to start bringing on additional reviewers soon, so we'll finally be getting that list whittled down to size before too long.) Anyway, this is an anthology of all-new work by some incredibly impressive writers, and edited by genre heroes Sam Weller and Mort Castle, all in honor of the recently passed Ray Bradbury, a Chicago-area native (for those who didn't know) who had one of the most interesting and varied literary careers of the entire Mid-Century Modernist era. And indeed, I think a big reason why it was so easy for Weller and Castle to attract the likes of such heavy hitters as Margaret Atwood, Dave Eggers, Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Alice Hoffman, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Joe Meno, Bonnie Jo Campbell and a lot more is precisely because Bradbury had a career that was so hard to define, a man who dipped his influential toes into horror, science-fiction, crime, Young Adult, even hippie weirdness without ever being trapped in one or another, and I think it's natural for writers to be inspired by this and want to occasionally do some Bradburian walking off the beaten path themselves. It's such a fitting and loving tribute because it's so smart and dense on its own, and Weller and Castle are to be commended for putting together one of the most entertaining compilations I've read in a while. It comes strongly recommended. Out of 10: N/A(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 24, 2013
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Jan 24, 2013
| Paperback
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| 0062099477
| 9780062099471
| 3.26
| 369
| Jun 12, 2012
| Jun 12, 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.) Former Chicagoan Elizabeth Crane is just a little too good a personal friend for me to claim I could do an "objective" review of her newest book, last year's We Only Know So Much (BONUS: Listen to my 2007 podcast interview with Crane); but I wanted to get a mention of it up here anyway because I enjoyed it so much, another solid winner in what's always a delightful career. A contemporary human-interest dramedy firmly in the Franzen dysfunctional-family vein, the story is peopled with more eccentric weirdos than a Wes Anderson film -- the wife having an affair with a guy who then dies, the husband obsessed with getting Alzheimer's, the vapid daughter, the nerdy son, the senile grandfather and the pissy 98-year-old great-grandmother -- and Crane builds an interesting, event-filled plot for all of them to go through, the kind of entertaining and charming novel that sleeper low-budget Hollywood hits get adapted from. Given that Crane is mostly known at this point for her short stories, I love seeing her expand here into full novel territory, and this quiet yet sophisticated tale is sure to strike a chord with fans of Jennifer Egan and the like. Out of 10: N/A(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 16, 2013
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Jan 16, 2013
| Paperback
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| 159448242X
| 9781594482427
| 4.05
| 3,050
| 2006
| Mar 06, 2007
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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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| Jan 16, 2013
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Jan 16, 2013
| Paperback
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| 0747553866
| 9780747553861
| 4.15
| 5,390
| 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
| 5,261
| 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
| 4.08
| 6,031
| Oct 31, 2011
| Jan 08, 2013
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I had the pleasure of getting to talk with legendary author George Saunders for CCLaP's podcast last week, a rare treat given how in demand he is on this latest tour even among the major media; but that meant I had to do some serious cramming in the few weeks leading up to our talk, in that (I guiltily confess) I only became aware of his existence a month ago, because of a passionate recommendation from my friend and Chicago science-fiction author Mark R. Brand, with Saunders' new book, tour, and interview opportunity being merely a fortuitous coincidence. And that's because the vast majority of Saunders' output has been short stories, while regulars know that my own reading habits veer almost 100 percent to full novels, which means he's simply and unfortunately been off my radar this whole time; but of course I'm happy to make room in my life for exquisite short-fiction writers once I learn about them (see for example my revelation after reading John Cheever for the first time a few years ago), which means that I tore through all seven books now of his career in just a few weeks recently, so I thought I'd get one large essay posted here about all of them at once, instead of doing a separate small review for each book. And indeed, as I mentioned during the podcast as well, like Cheever I think Saunders' work is going to be at its most powerful once his career is over, and all the stories collected into one giant volume that a person reads all at once, instead of debating the merits of one individual collection over another. And in fact this is something else I said in the podcast, that I find it fun to think of Saunders' stories as essentially interchangeable tales in one big comic-book-style shared universe, albeit the most f-cked-up shared universe you'll ever spend time in: a possibly post-apocalyptic America, although whether through slow erosion or one big doomsday event is hard to determine, where the only businesses that still thrive are outlandish theme parks designed for the amusement of the now "natural betters" of our new Mad Max society, and staffed by the permanent class of have-nots which now includes a large population of genetically modified freaks, a place where ghosts are real and magic exists and the new normal is extreme cruelty at all times for all other humans left in the wreckage of a crumbled United States. And so if you look at the four story collections that Saunders has now put out -- 1996's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 2000's Pastoralia, 2006's In Persuasion Nation and this year's Tenth of December -- you'll see that the vast majority of all these pieces fit at least somewhat into the general paradigm just described, although with others that are much more realistic in tone but still with the same unbelievable cruelty and darkness, many of them set among racially tense situations in eroding post-industrial cities. Yeah, sounds like a big barrel of laughs, right? And in fact this was the biggest surprise for me as well when first reading them, that Saunders is not just on the stranger side of the bizarro* subgenre, but is one of the most wrist-slashingly depressing authors you will ever find, yet this Guggenheim and MacArthur grant winner is regularly on the bestseller lists, has appeared on David Letterman and The Daily Show, gets published on a steady basis in such hugely mainstream magazines as The New Yorker and GQ, and is adored by literally millions of fans out there, many of whom would never open the cover of a book from Eraserhead Press to save their life. And that's because Saunders never talks about these things specifically to be depressing, but rather as a way of highlighting how important simple humanity is to our lives, the simple act of being humane and optimistic about the world, which he does not by writing about the humane acts themselves but what a world without them would look like. And that's a clever and admirable thing to do, because it means he sneaks in sideways to the points he wants to make, not beating us over the head but forcing us to really stop and think about what he's truly trying to say, to examine why we get so upset when this fundamental humanity is missing from the stories we're reading. Ultimately Saunders believes in celebrating life, in trying to be as helpful and open-minded to strangers as you can, in being as positive about the world at large as you can stand; but like the Existentialists of Mid-Century Modernism, he examines this subject by looking at worst-case scenarios, and by showing us what exactly we miss out of in life when this positivity and love is gone. *(For those who are new to CCLaP, "bizarro" is a hard-to-define term but one we reference here a lot; also sometimes known as "gonzo" fiction, sometimes as "The New Weird," a lot of it comes from either the wackier or more prurient edges of such existing genres as science-fiction, horror and erotica, while some of it is more like Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs, a conceptual cloud of strangeness that has a huge cult following in the world of basement presses and genre conventions, as well as such literary social networks as Goodreads.com. If you want to think of famous examples, think of people like Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner, Will Self, Chuck Palahniuk, Blake Butler, China Mieville…and, uh, George Saunders!) Now, of course, in all honesty, there are also a few clunkers scattered here and there in these collections as well, which is simply to be expected in a career that now spans twenty years; and when it comes to the small number of other books he's put out besides story collections, I have to confess that I found those to be a much iffier proposition. For example, there's the 2000 children's book The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, cute enough but as inessential to an adult as any children's book is; then there's his one collection of nonfiction essays, 2007's The Braindead Megaphone, an uneven compilation of random pieces which includes some real gems (one of the best being that GQ piece mentioned, where Saunders is sent George-Plimpton-style to Dubai, and instead of the usual decrying of the ultra-rich he is surprisingly charmed by all the vacationing middle-class families), but that has an equal amount of throwaway pieces done for highly specific commissions; and then there's the only stand-alone fiction book of his career so far, the 2005 novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, which I have to confess is the only thing of Saunders' career that I actively disliked -- written in the middle of the Bush atrocities, it's obviously an attempt to do an Animal Farm-style satire about those years, but is labored in its execution, too on the nose, and in general has too much of a "quirky for the sake of being quirky" vibe, the exact thing that can most quickly kill a piece of bizarro fiction. (But then again, we perhaps shouldn't blame Saunders for this; as I've talked about many times here in the past, it seems that no indignant artist was able to write satirically about Bush in the middle of the Bush Years without producing an overly obvious ranting screed, whether that's Saunders or George Clooney or Michael Moore or Robert Redford. No wonder no good books about Nazis came out until after World War Two; as we all learned in the early 2000s, it's nearly impossible to actually live under a fascist regime and also be subtle and clever in your critique of it.) But those are all small quibbles, of course; Saunders' bread and butter is in his short fiction, and I'm convinced that he will eventually be known as one of the best short-fiction authors in history, joining a surprisingly small list that includes such luminaries as Cheever, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, GK Chesterton and more. Plus, as a fan of edgy and strange work, I'm thrilled that a guy like Saunders is out there, serving as a gateway of sorts between mainstream society and an entire rabbithole of basement-press bizarro titles that's just waiting for newly inspired fans to tumble down. If you're going to pick up your first Saunders book soon, go ahead and pick up the newest, Tenth of December, because it's just as good as all the others and particularly easy to find right now; but I also encourage you to dig deeper into this remarkable author's career, and to see just how far he'll pull you into the murky depths of ambiguous morality before coming bobbing back to the surface. It's been a true treat to become a fan of his work this year, and I urge you to become one as well. Out of 10 (Tenth of December): 9.6(less) | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
| Jan 07, 2013
| Jan 16, 2013
|
Jan 07, 2013
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 5555556666666
| unknown
| 4.56
| 9
| Oct 08, 2012
| unknown
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) APOLOGIA: A "critical" essay deliberately kept completely positive, often to convince others to believe the same way the author does about a subject Why I Signed 'Famous Drownings in Literary History' -- An Apologia Like any other small press, CCLaP gets its share of cold submissions; and like any other small press, the majority of them are mediocre to okay, a few are outright terrible, and a tiny little sliver are good enough to sign and publish. We're going to have a lot more of them in 2013, as a recent feature in Poets & Writers magazine has significantly increased our national awareness among unsigned writers, and soon our catalog will not just be dominated by Chicago authors but also ones from New York, California, Florida, Pennsylvania, and various other places; but the first cold submission we ever accepted and published was Kevin Haworth's Famous Drownings in Literary History this past October, which came to us by way of Athens, Ohio, because of Kevin's friend David Ebenbach reportedly having a good experience with us in 2011, when publishing a short story in our group book Amsterdamned If You Do: An Anthology About Setting. And it's not just the first cold submission we ever published, but kind of a miracle that a manuscript of this quality was made available to us in the first place; because to be frank, this college professor's collection of essays about being liberal and creative yet traditionally Jewish in the 21st century is something that could've very easily gotten published through any number of academic presses much more prestigious than us, and in fact it's my understanding that Kevin is the subject of some discussion among his academic peers about his decision to go with a "hipster" commercial outfit rather than the traditional academic-press route. (Or at least, I have to imagine that he's the only person in his circle to have a book published with a comics-style illustration on the cover.) And that's because Kevin's writing is as impeccable as you would expect from a full-time writing academe and a former winner of the Samuel Goldberg Award; analytical yet poetic, with the dry humor of a Sarah Vowell NPR piece but the clipped serious style of Denis Johnson, he weaves together journalistic research and the creatively personal into a kind of addictive hybrid of essay, not traditionally scholarly and not exactly Chuck Klosterman but an engaging, thought-provoking blend of those extremes. And hey, what better subject to tackle these days than the struggle to reconcile a traditional faith with the kind of liberal, creative lifestyle that puts one in touch with a lot of bitter atheists, all while raising a young family as well; especially since it seems that conservatives have claimed a kind of monopoly in the last thirty years on faith and religious belief, and have committed a string of atrocities around the world using logic that a lot of religiously faithful don't believe in at all. Kevin does this in a way that pulls you into the book more and more as you continue, a rare and wonderful thing among a collection of unthemed short pieces like this, and picks subjects that have a strong natural interest of their own: circumcising his son, that son then developing an obsession at the age of five with wearing frilly girls' dresses, the rituals that tie in so closely with Jewish holidays, Israel and Zionism, the black Jews of the African Diaspora, the Catskills in the 1970s, and on and on and on, a cornucopia of funny and serious subjects that you don't have to be Jewish to appreciate, but that helps explain contemporary Jewishness in a way a hundred Wikipedia pages could not. I knew this was a special manuscript the moment I saw it, and thankfully the external world has backed me up since: it was the winner of a grant from the Ohio Arts Council, has received large write-ups in the Chicago Tribune, NYU's The Revealer and Ohio University's Perspectives, and is currently in the running for the prestigious Grub Street Prize (keep your fingers crossed), along with a multitude of praise all over the blogosphere. It was a privilege to put it out, precisely because I knew it was this good, but also because I like having a chance to support manuscripts like these that can be sometimes tough to land at a commercial place: it's not quite academic enough for a lot of academic presses, not quite pop enough for pop presses, something for a thinking person who also wants to be entertained, and I like to think that CCLaP is particularly good at putting out these kinds of stories, the kind that sit on the borders of so many traditional genres and styles. We'll be sending Kevin out this spring on a virtual book tour, to about twenty other litblogs and the like, so just drop me a line and let me know if you'd like to take part; but in the meantime, I hope you'll get a chance to stop by the book's online headquarters if you never have, to either download a free electronic version or order a handmade paper edition. (less) | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
| not set
| Dec 13, 2012
|
Dec 13, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 193408137X
| 9781934081372
| 4.71
| 14
| Oct 01, 2012
| 2012
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Other small presses might get more publicity and do flashier things, but I have to say that I've been quietly impressed the last several years with the unassuming Casperian Books, and especially for their habit of picking up great little stories that would otherwise get lost in the shuffle because of their overly general subject matter. Take for example Candi Sary's highly readable Black Crow White Lie, which in synopsis form is a pretty generic dysfunctional-family coming-of-age tale -- namely, preteen boy deals with his alcoholic New Age single mother, who has convinced him that he has special supernatural healing powers, as they shuffle from one motel to the next among the seedier sections of southern California, while she disappears for days at a time to be with her boyfriend and drinking partner. But it's in the details where this book really shines, because Sary has a fine-tuned understanding of what makes a story like this work; among the little moments, that is, like the time Carson spends with a sympathetic tattoo artist in front of his Hollywood shop, or his dealings with the hard but cute girl at school he has a crush on, or his growing sense of empowerment over what seems to be a successful string of actual psychic healings, the truth of which we don't learn until the very end of the book. Eventually, though, this novel does build to a bigger climax, as the now thirteen-year-old Carson makes plans to cross the country by himself so to visit his dead father in a Washington DC military cemetery; and this too is handled in a very satisfying way, as Sary takes all these little character-building moments from before and applies them to what is suddenly a much grander plot, the final kicker that elevates this story above the multitude of only mediocre coming-of-age tales that now exist out there. A former semi-finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, it's easy to see why such mainstream publications as Publishers Weekly has called this "praiseworthy [and] poignant," and I have to admit that this was one of the most emotionally satisfying reads I've had all autumn. It comes strongly recommended to one and all. Out of 10: 9.2(less) | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
| not set
| Dec 11, 2012
|
Dec 11, 2012
| Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 087795707X
| 9780877957072
| 3.83
| 6
| 1985
| May 01, 1985
|
(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.) (In November 2012 CCLaP auctioned off a signed first-edition copy of Sherwood Anderson's Kit Brandon through our eBay account [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks]. Below is the description I wrote for the book's listing.) Sherwood Anderson is better known these days for what he inspired than what he did; like fellow Chicago-connected writer Theodore Dreiser, he came of age as an artist at the end of the Victorian Age but didn't make his name until the decades after, for writing proto-Modernist tales that bridge these two eras just in time to profoundly influence the next generation of Modernists in the '20s and '30s who really cemented the tropes. His most famous is the rough, conceptually experimental story collection Winesburg, Ohio, but he has others that are actually better; take for example 1936's Kit Brandon, a nearly forgotten title now from near the end of his career, when society at large considered him somewhat of a has-been (except for the academic crowd, who never stopped adoring him), but when in hindsight we can now see that he was actually at the peak of his powers. A slippery "oral history" that sounds real but is ultimately fiction, done in the Social Realist style that was so popular at the time, it tells the story of our eponymous hero, a tomboy-beautiful hillbilly girl who at first tries to have a traditional career in the booming new industrial landscape of Appalachia, but who is eventually seduced into the sexy, dangerous world of Prohibition-era bootlegging, eventually becoming a folk legend among locals for the sheer number of times she's able to outwit and out-run the law. As such, then, the main reason to treasure this novel is for the unflinching way it looks at Prohibition itself, informing us of the realities behind both the ban and subsequent rise in moonshine hooch that have now become forgotten in our present nostalgic haze; for as this book makes clear, almost nobody who supported Prohibition back then really thought that the ban would get rid of liquor altogether, but rather that it would simply make it so expensive that the working poor would no longer be able to afford it, thus eliminating the violence and crime among these mostly Irish and German unruly crowds that was the main selling point of Prohibition in the first place. But little did anyone realize just how scarily efficient these working poor would become at first producing mass quantities of cheap grain alcohol in the unwatched back woods of the vast American heartland, then easily shipping it nationwide through a sophisticated corporate-type network that would eventually come to be known as "organized crime;" and that's essentially what this book is, a complex and layered look at all these subjects through the prism of our "Bonnie without Clyde," including the acknowledgement that it was the changing landscape of the Midwest from agricultural to industrial that fueled a lot of this gray-market entrepreneuralism in the first place, and that Prohibition failed essentially because east-coast liberal elites vastly underestimated just how crafty and clever the working poor could actually be when they had to. It's a shame that Anderson never rose to the heights in his own times of such contemporary peers as John Steinbeck and Richard Wright, because his works are more nuanced and have a longer shelf life than most of the Social Realist writers of the period; so let's be grateful that the proper respect has finally been afforded to him in our own times, with this signed first edition being a great addition to any fan's library. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Nov 27, 2012
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Nov 27, 2012
| Paperback
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| B009MRR6CM
| 4.56
| 9
| Oct 08, 2012
| Oct 08, 2012
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I was the editor and publisher of this book! Essay on the process coming soon!
| Notes are private!
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| Oct 08, 2012
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Oct 08, 2012
| Kindle Edition
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| 0241144779
| 9780241144770
| 3.56
| 2,060
| 2011
| Feb 12, 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Regular readers 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
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| 0679779159
| 9780679779155
| 3.77
| 4,194
| 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
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| 188896314X
| 9781888963144
| 4.39
| 13,806
| 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
| Paperback
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| 0983422877
| 9780983422877
| 4.31
| 115
| Sep 30, 2012
| Sep 30, 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.) Today's review comes with a bit of a personal bias; although I don't know author Amber Sparks other than being briefly introduced to her once at a party, her new book of stories has come out through our friends and peers over at Chicago's Curbside Splendor, a group that CCLaP frequently collaborates with for publicity projects and the like. But I wanted to make a mention of it here anyway, because I have to say that I found it really remarkable; and that's extra exceptional for it being a collection of unrelated stories, because I've gone on record many times before about how I find story collections not really worth people's time unless they truly are remarkable. These stories, however, are sharp and surreal, with tight little frameworks and few wasted words, the kind of diamond-hard pieces that raises this story collection to the top of that unending f-cking pile of mediocre ones that now exist in the world; and it comes as no surprise to me that such a collection would come from Curbside, because like so many local presses they have become razor-sharp at finding and nurturing astounding unpublished manuscripts. What a great time it is to be a literary person in Chicago! And I really want to encourage people to put their money where their mouth is, to actually buy and read these books instead of just liking them on Facebook and shouting from a distance, "Good luck with that!" I know the choices for new titles from Chicago publishers can seem overwhelming these days -- thank God they can seem overwhelming these days -- but if you want to boil it down to a very sure bet, May We Shed These Human Bodies definitely deserves to be on the short list. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Dec 05, 2012
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Sep 13, 2012
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| 1597803235
| 9781597803236
| 3.22
| 371
| Nov 01, 2011
| Nov 08, 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.) Whenever I think of the term "cyberpunk," easily my favorite literary genre back in the '80s when I was a teenager, I think of a very specific combination of qualities -- four or five different storylines that all merge into one at the climax, set in a day-after-tomorrow dystopia, one where the dizzying sci-fi inventions of Mid-Century Modernism have been turned on their heads, so that what the author is really exploring is the ways that cutting-edge tech has trickled down in a corrupted and heavily modded form to the street level of the lumpen proletariat, with the story's style and characters heavily influenced by the underground culture of its times (so in the case of classic '80s cyberpunk, for example, American and British punk music, which is how the genre got its name in the first place). And all of these things can be said about Rob Ziegler's contemporary Seed as well, a superlative cyberpunk novel but one you might not even recognize as such at first; for instead of revolving around pale computer hackers in London, Seed's heroes move among the decidedly sweatier circles of Mexican skaters in the American Southwest, and instead of being obsessed with virtual reality, this book deals with the much messier proposition of intelligent wetware and the coming agricultural apocalypse. Set in a world dealing with an unnamed past catastrophe where normal plants can no longer grow properly, the plot in general is fueled by the conceit that one private company eventually became the sole saviors of the entire American populace, by being the first to create an artificial intelligence that not only could genetically engineer seeds that would grow in this post-apocalyptic environment, but also literal living buildings made out of biological skin and bone, maintained by a small army of sub-intelligent clones who all operate under a hive-mind system. The various small storylines we follow throughout the book, then, all deal in one way or another with this central conceit -- there are the scrappy Latino brothers trying to survive in an anarchic, gray-market society, there is the "manager clone" who is thinking of defecting from the company (and taking all its confidential intellectual property with it), there is the disgraced military commander who has been ordered by a now cuckolded White House to go find this runaway clone, and on and on in this vein, each of them giving us a small specific look at this grandly epic universe Ziegler has built up step by step. Now, just to be clear, like most genre novels Seed is filled with things that will drive non-fans of that genre a little crazy -- the dialogue can be a little stilted at times, some of the characters a bit too corny, and of course you need to be into bizarre science-fictional concepts in the first place to enjoy it at all -- and let's also be clear that even SF fans that aren't necessarily into cyberpunk will find some faults with this too, a book that can sometimes fixate too much on the action sequences rather than the "big picture" topics being discussed. But if like me you are a fan of early William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross and other established cyberpunk authors, you will find this an incredibly satisfying read, nearly perfect at hitting all the beats that a story like this needs, while maintaining a fast pace and constantly offering up unique little speculative nuggets for your brain to chew on for a while. (I especially loved the reveal of who exactly is behind all these sinister goings-on at this shadowy company, but for the sake of spoilers I will leave that a surprise.) A book only for a niche audience, but a niche audience who will passionately love it for what it is, Seed will almost certainly be making CCLaP's best-of lists at the end of the year, and it comes strongly recommended to those who think in advance that they might be interested in it. Out of 10: 8.9, or 9.9 for cyberpunk fans (less) | Notes are private!
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Aug 22, 2012
| Hardcover
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| 1842550764
| 9781842550762
| 3.50
| 12
| Jan 01, 2001
| 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.) Regular readers will remember what an unexpected fan I became of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, back when I first read it a few years ago as part of the "CCLaP 100" essay series on literary classics; and with this being a Victorian-Age public-domain work, there are of course dozens of unofficial sequels floating around out there. One of those is called Jim Hawkins and the Curse of Treasure Island, an unusually faithful sequel that tries extra-hard to mimic the exact language and tone of the original, first put out about a decade ago by "Francis Bryan;" but as it's become clear because of a new reprinting last year, that's actually the pen-name of revered British man of letters Frank Delaney, a Booker judge and the literary director of the Edinburgh Festival who has produced a host of popular documentaries for the BBC over the decades, and who among other things is in the middle of doing a 25-YEAR PODCAST where he examines James Joyce's Ulysses one line at a time. So it makes sense that this homage to Stevenson would be unusually spot-on in its voice and subject matter, because this is what Delaney does, is treat classic literature very, very seriously; and I have to say, it was just as much a delight to read as the original, and feels very much like a lost sequel by Stevenson himself that maybe just happened to surface within the last few years. Granted, if you're not a natural fan of Victorian action tales, you can pretty safely skip this; but if you are, you should absolutely put this on your must-read list right away. Out of 10: 8.5, or 9.5 for fans of Victorian thrillers (less) | Notes are private!
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| Aug 09, 2012
| Feb 20, 2013
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Aug 09, 2012
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| 037575976X
| 9780375759765
| 4.05
| 73
| 1977
| Mar 05, 2002
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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.] Recently at a party, someone favorably compared me to Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf; and that inspired me to read his autobiography, because not only did I know barely anything about him, but indeed about the entire formation of the modern American publishing industry, other than the vague realization like many others that there used to be no publishing companies, then at some point a lot, then at some point a few again, which then all got bought up by multinational corporate conglomerates in the 1970s and '80s. And the big surprise is that this turned out to be one of the most riveting and entertaining books I've read in years, precisely because there turned out to be so much drama and so many anecdotes leading to the rise of American literature in the early 20th century into the mainstream powerhouse it now is, and to the establishment and then consolidation of what's now known as the "Big Six" in the publishing world, around for so long and so powerful for so long that we tend to now think of them as unmoving monoliths. But when Random House first started almost a hundred years ago, it was just Cerf and his buddy around, two stockbrokers with naughty sides who enjoyed hanging out with bohemians, and thought it'd be a lot more fun to publish them for a living than work at a bank; and that's essentially how this raconteur's memoirs read, as half business and half drunken party all the time back then, with not only all the eventual giants of the publishing industry turning out to have all been friends, but with all of them essentially flying by the seat of their pants just as the Early Modernist era was starting to take shape, what seems now like a deliberate and crafty plan to change the entire arts community as they knew it, but in reality more like all these people just throwing crap at a wall every day and seeing what stuck. And man, Cerf has just a ton of anecdotes to share here, both praising and pissy in nature, with dozens of pages in this fast-turning and endlessly titillating book devoted to embarrassingly personal tales regarding Theodore Dreiser, Dorothy Parker, James Michener, William Faulkner, Ayn Rand, and the scores of other writers and drinking pals who he almost single-handedly turned into the literary icons we know today. Along the way, then, he also offers up lots of advice for others who want to become editors and publishers, stuff that surprisingly mirrors a lot of the best lessons of the high-tech startup industry: avoid outside money (either loans or investments) as long as you possibly can, treat your talent like the rock stars they are, be funny when your competitors are serious and serious when they're funny, and pounce on those competitors' employees in the cases where they become disgruntled with their working conditions and quit. Bawdy, confessional, laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes jaw-droppingly unbelievable in the sheer audacity of these arts-industry mavericks, this is easily one of the best "insider" books you'll ever read about the publishing industry, and it comes strongly recommended to those like me who are interested in learning more. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jul 31, 2012
| Aug 28, 2012
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Jul 31, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 055358202X
| 9780553582024
| 3.99
| 153,697
| 2005
| Mar 04, 2011
|
(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 posting short reviews these days of all the George R.R. Martin "Game of Thrones" novels, after doing a long write-up about volume one that has turned into one of the most popular things ever posted at this blog. And just like books two and three, I find myself with not a lot to say about this fourth volume that I haven't said already; although I'll reiterate yet again how amazed I am that Martin's been able to hold my interest so profoundly over four thousand pages now and still counting, given that I find the work of even J.R.R. Tolkien himself to mostly be badly written hippie nonsense. I will say this about this particular volume, though, that Martin does a better job here than in any of the previous books at showing the delicate, impossible-to-define relationship between a ruling elite and the unwashed masses who let them be the ruling elite, and how like we saw in Egypt last year, these anonymous masses might put up with a lot of crap for a long time just to suddenly snap en-masse at a moment no one was expecting, especially when mixing in with this volume the rise of the self-righteously pious and religiously militant "Sparrows" that can almost be seen as Martin's take on how Puritans and Rationalists transformed the old English feudal system at the end of the Middle Ages. (Well, almost -- as with everything concerning Westeros, it's impossible to just directly translate events from our real history into their alt-history, although there's a huge amount of similarities, just one of the dozens of details that Martin's fans adore about these books.) It's a big commitment to get to this point in the series, but if you still haven't started this grand saga I encourage you to do so, even if like me you are not much of a fan of the fantasy genre. Out of 10: 9.0(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jul 12, 2012
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Jul 12, 2012
| Mass Market Paperback
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| 0375701907
| 9780375701900
| 4.02
| 11,703
| Jun 17, 1997
| Jun 09, 1998
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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 was all excited when I first stumbled across this in the "New Additions" section of the Chicago Public Library's ebook collection, because I thought I had randomly come across Pulitzer winner Richard Russo's newest title just minutes after it had been announced at the website, and therefore was going to get to check it out before anybody else; but in fact, although it was new to their collection, the book itself is from 1997, and in fact is one of the more well-loved ones of his entire career. A gentle character-based comedy about life among academes in a small college town, like Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys and Jane Smiley's Moo it takes the self-reflective topic of writing professors on a closed campus (usually a no-no in writing guides for beginners) and embraces it for all it's worth, really delving into the quirky little details that come specifically with academic life, but spicing it up with enough interesting plot developments to make it much more than the usual piece of circle-jerking masturbation than the "writing professor writing about writing professors" subgenre usually produces. And of course, in this case things are helped immensely as well by the main character being such a fascinatingly complex and charming curmudgeon, an aging fiction professor who has long ago accepted his fate at the third-tier podunk college where they all gossip and backbite, and who in his very mild way has decided to rage against the machine which is campus pettiness, combining a world-weary attitude with occasional bursts of M*A*S*H-style outrageous actions, including his habit of playing the Motley Fool whenever in front of the local media just to stir up more crap for his overlords on the school's board of directors. I usually have a low tolerance for this kind of metafictional material, but again like Wonder Boys and Moo this is a rare exception, expressly because Russo takes the time and energy to put together a wonderfully entertaining, sometimes legitimately thrilling story to take place in this environment, instead of the usual endless whiny screeds about middle-aged men having affairs with their 19-year-old students. It comes hugely recommended, and makes me even more excited than I was to finally tackle his Pulitzer-winning Empire Falls for the CCLaP 100 later this year. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jul 06, 2012
| Aug 28, 2012
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Jul 06, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0394756959
| 9780394756950
| 3.93
| 2,576
| 1944
| Mar 12, 1988
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(As of July 2012, I am selling a first-edition copy of this book through the rare-book service at my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literat...more
(As of July 2012, I am selling a first-edition copy of this book through the rare-book service at my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks]. Here below is the description I wrote for its listing.) Written in the middle of World War Two and the winner of the 1945 Pulitzer Prize, this was just one of the many high points of the fascinating John Hersey's life, over the course of a long and eventful career. A missionary brat who learned to speak Chinese before he could speak English, he was eventually a Yale football star and once a private secretary to Sinclair Lewis, experiences which made him almost perfect to be a TIME magazine correspondent in Asia as well as Europe during the war, where among other heroics he survived four plane crashes and was commended by the Navy for evacuating freaking soldiers in Guadalcanal. He was most known in his own lifetime for the groundbreaking, hauntingly poetic reporting he did from the aftermath of Hiroshima, eventually assembled into an entire standalone issue of The New Yorker that officially kicked off both the term and era of "New Journalism," a public sensation (once read out loud by ABC Radio over two hours because the printers literally couldn't keep up with demand) that led directly to the first successes of other storytelling journalists like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson a decade later. (Interestingly, New Yorker founder Harold Ross once called the publication of the Hiroshima issue the happiest moment of his professional life, while the event ruined Hersey's relationship with TIME co-founder Henry Luce, who felt that he should've offered it to sister publication Life magazine first*.) But before all that, though, was his first novel, 1944's A Bell for Adano, a thin fictionalization of an actual situation he stumbled across as a war correspondent during America's liberation of Italy. Set in one of the tiny Medieval fishing villages that dot the southern Italian coast, crucial as launching and resupply posts for the inward-bound Americans during the invasion, the book largely follows the fate of one Major Victor Joppolo, back home an Italian-American sanitation-department clerk in the Bronx but here the "temporary mayor" of Adano, essentially the mid-level officer in charge of such medium-term goals as rounding up all the remaining fugitive Fascists, replacing draconian local officials, getting the local judges and police working again, re-establishing infrastructure, food distribution, open commerce, etc. And that's essentially what the story is -- a charmingly slow-paced look at Joppolo's work in this chick-lit-worthy, impossibly magical little Mediterranean town, Hersey's point being to show people back home how the natural "get 'er done" resourcefulness of the average American, combined with the democratic freedoms that so many of us were dying for at that point in the war, repeated over and over in thousands of little situations like this one, was the key to the slow turn in tide that was happening in the war right around this time period. Although certainly "rah-rah U-S-A" in tone throughout, the obvious explanation for its Pulitzer win a year later, popular Broadway adaptation a year after that, and popular Hollywood movie a year after that, the book definitely has its fair share of darkness as well, moral ambiguity over how the town should even start approaching the job of punishing next-door-neighbors for being on the losing side of the war, and plenty of self-critical comments about the lousiness of some Americans over there; see for example the blustery "General Marvin," plainly modeled after real war hero General Patton but here presented as the story's main villain. An amazing start to an amazing career, and a war novel admired by both troops and citizens of the time, its low price here makes it a perfect acquisition for Hersey fans, WW2 buffs, and those compiling a collection of Pulitzer-winning first editions. *Oh, and yet more fascinating trivia about Hersey, a man who's been sadly forgotten by the culture at large and deserves to be re-discovered: he once won the National Jewish Book Award despite not being Jewish; a critical essay on the dullness of grammar school literary samplers directly inspired Dr. Seuss to write The Cat in the Hat; and in the late '60s Hersey became a passionate champion of anti-war protestors, the Black Panthers and other countercultural movements, all while serving as a Yale dean, owner of the school's bulldog mascot, and overseer of the campus's antique letterpress program. Wow!(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jul 05, 2012
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Jul 05, 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!
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| Jul 02, 2012
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Jul 02, 2012
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