Garrett Zecker's Blog, page 3

A Cultural Wasteland, an interview with Robert Lopez released

Garrett’s interview with Robert Lopez, author of A Better Class of People (2022) was released at The Collidescope today.

Check it out at A Cultural Wasteland: An Interview with Robert Lopez

Check out Garrett’s review at On The Subway to Work with A Better Class of People

A Life Shaped By Trauma, Lessons by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan’s newest novel breaks down a lot of mores surrounding our culture in the vibrancy of the twentieth century. It is chronologically thematic as much as it is emotionally jarring; McEwan turns the tides of abuse to reflect the rarely seen ways in which men can be just as the victims of emasculation and use by women as women are. This is a book of a life of a man whose confusing sexual and emotional abuse in his childhood becomes a vein that runs through the rest of his experiences and c...

KosherSoul by Michael W. Twitty

This was one of my favorite books that I read this year. This is Twitty’s second book in what he envisioned as a trilogy of books that cover his work as a food historian that began with The Cooking Gene. This one in particular explores his identity as a black, gay, Jewish man in a world where being marginalized in one area is enough as it is. He describes growing up in Baltimore and his path to creating a vibrant fusion of flavors and cultural road markers while investigating how we interact as ...

My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson

A beautiful book that seems so true to life and vibrant that it feels much more like a memoir than a novel, My Government Means to Kill Me is an incredible portrait of what it meant to be a participant, advocate, and activist in the 1980s gay community of New York City. Perhaps it isn’t surprising as the narrator of this novel, like Newson, grew up in Indianapolis and moved to New York, and ended up working at a hospice for patients with AIDS.  

I found this to be a relentlessly moving novel ...

The Summer of Ulysses – Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book and Arroyo’s new illustrated Ulysses

Two books that I made my way through this summer were the newly illustrated Eduardo Arroyo edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Kevin Birmingham’s biography of the book itself, The Most Dangerous Book.

While I have read Ulysses several times in this lifetime, I am always looking for a new excuse to pick it up and have a different experience with one of my favorite books of all time. The text is widely spaced in this large, heavy edition, and while I couldn’t pinpoint where it seemed that in o...

Toxic Gonzo Live! Happy Birthday, Wanda June by Kurt Vonnegut

I never knew that Kurt Vonnegut had two plays in his repertoire… but after reading Casey Sherman’s Helltown (see my Goodreads review of that, as well – it was excellent!) where he describes the opening of Wanda June on Broadway while Vonnegut was going through a divorce and doing a pavement-pounding investigation of a man that may have dated his daughter before going on to be Cape Cod’s most notorious serial killer, I had to pick it up. 

After picking it up, I decided I had to stage it – and ...

Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra

While Anthony Marra has had a wonderfully successful career prior to Mercury Pictures Presents, this was the first book of his that I have read. It is immediately apparent that Marra is a writer with a unique knack for building vibrant environments of historical geography and cultural characterization that I can only compare to the Russian greats. The scenery and scope of Mercury pictures make a character of Italy and the early Hollywood era and its indie studios fighting for dominance, but the ...

Helltown by Casey Sherman

Casey Sherman is a juggernaut in New England true crime, but I am not at all a reader of true crime. When Sourcebooks, the publishers of Helltown, asked if they could send me an ARC of his newest book the week it came out, I accepted thinking that I would enjoy this story of a serial killer on Cape Cod. Little did I know that I would be absolutely enthralled with this story that not only examined the lives of the killer, his victims, and the main prosecutor in the case, but also pulled in an ama...

New Publication: “On The Subway To Work With A Better Class of People, by Robert Lopez”

“There is a book in here I read every day. I start at the beginning and read on through till the end. Each time it is like I am reading it anew as I can never remember what the story is about. It’s almost like every day the book tells me a different story.” 

The magic in Robert Lopez’s body of work consists of the brief, little burst of lightning in a sentence, a phrase, a four-paragraph micro-story. While A Better Class of People (Dzanc, 2022) is Lopez’s fourth short novel, it is the first t...

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

This is already my favorite book I have read this year. Sure, it’s a little bit far into the year for me to start thinking about the books I loved, but this Wes Anderson-y story about a smart young woman planning her demise in the opening pages captured me from the opening sentences and evoked a colorful cast of middle-class characters living in a Hercule Poirotian eight-unit condo building at 7 Rue de Grenelle on the Left Bank. I had this on my Kindle for quite some time having bought it on a d...