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    <user id="708858">
    <name><![CDATA[John]]></name>
    <location><![CDATA[Des Moines, IA]]></location>        
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  <id type="integer">15378</id>
  <isbn>0316166340</isbn>
  <isbn13>9780316166348</isbn13>
  <ratings_count type="integer">94</ratings_count>
  <text_reviews_count type="integer">26</text_reviews_count>
  <title>Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas</title>
  <average_rating></average_rating>
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  <link>http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15378.Right_Livelihoods_Three_Novellas</link>
<author>
  <id type="integer">2278</id>
  <name>Rick Moody</name>
  <ratings_count type="integer">4204</ratings_count>
  <text_reviews_count type="integer">448</text_reviews_count>
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    <rating>5</rating>
  <votes>0</votes>
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  <shelves>
        <shelf name="novellas--edgy---magnificent" />
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  <recommended_for><![CDATA[readers who like a laugh &amp; a challenge]]></recommended_for>
  <recommended_by><![CDATA[many &amp; McSweeney's]]></recommended_by>
  <read_at>Wed Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007</read_at>
  <date_added>Mon Jul 28 18:54:57 -0700 2008</date_added>
  <date_updated>Mon Jul 28 20:03:26 -0700 2008</date_updated>
  <read_count></read_count>
    <body><![CDATA[Moody has contributed a number of glittering nuggets to our literature, and is best known for the more restrained early novels, made into movies.  Yet in that longer form, I'd choose PURPLE AMERICA as his most feisty and moving, and for Goodreads I'll put my shoulder behind the wheel of these three novellas.  I'd characterize the set as a triangulated vision (triangulated, in keeping with the classic menage-a-trois for novellas, established by John Barth in CHIMERA) of groaning WASP America's ever-more-destructive looniness.  This climaxes in &quot;The Albertine Notes,&quot; a keening post-apocalyptic New York counterpoint to Proust's swooning recollection of his lost dream lover and, with her, of a collapsing European order.   But that referential capsule summary does a disservice to the imagination and dramaturgy at play in &quot;Notes,&quot; and in Moody's entire trio of catastrophes, always a fascinating skeleton-dance.  The work seems one of those in which a rare talent has found a new way to his express his storytelling gift, and so to refresh his sensibility, and at the same time it vivifies anew the notion of the monitory artist, part hectoring Jeremiah and part head-over-heels jive artist, delivering dire warnings via belly laugh, rich personalities, and the skilled manipulation of surprises.   ]]></body>
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