Garrett Zecker's Blog, page 3

“Freedom in the Realms of Eccentricity” published at The Collidescope

“Freedom in the Realms of Eccentricity,” Garrett’s review of Lance Olsen’s recently published novel about the final month’s of David Bowie’s life Always Crashing in the Same Car was published today at The Collidescope.

The last eighteen months of David Bowie’s life were an enigma to his fans, his death and hidden diagnosis coming to us just as shockingly as they did to his closest friends, family, and collaborators. As he was aware of his terminal end, he continued to quietly work on his swan...

The Tyranny of Desire by Morty Shallman

Shallman’s The Tyrrany of Desire is a laugh-out-loud riot that seemed to come out of nowhere. It tells the story of grade-A loser Puchy Mushkin. He has a lot going wrong every day. His jobs, lovers, and even daily routines scream dead-end Coen Brothers schlimazel. But he has one thing going for him that no one seems to believe, even himself – a truly, horrifying giant… er… personal endowment. In fact, if there was some way to describe the opposite of an Achilles heel, in its most literal sense, ...

The Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi

I am a huge fan of certain narratives from countries that tend to tell different stories than the tired tropes and structures of our western sensibilities. When artists can experiment with new structures and forms, I find that I gain a lot of insight as a writer into how to add new scope and sequence to my own work. Murakami is a master at this, engaging and fun with a splash of pop culture and a structure that sometimes makes no sense until the end when it becomes clear what his goals were in t...

Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig, Review published

Garrett’s newest off-site review of Jen Craig’s Panthers and the Museum of Fire was published today at The Collidescope.

Jen Craig’s Panthers and the Museum of Fire is a quiet, introspective work of autofiction that explores the internal emotional fallout surrounding the death of those closest to us. Our narrator learns of the death of Sarah, a friend from her younger school days, by receiving the manuscript of her unpublished novel. The narrator reflects that Sarah’s work is “a feast of word...

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

I want to start this with a dream that plagued me for most of my marriage. I never talked about it with my spouse, but in hindsight, and the fact that I haven’t had it since my divorce close to five years ago, it is so obvious as a metaphor – a metaphor that is so beautifully spelled out in Miller’s Death of a Salesman. 

In my dream, I would be home alone in the house, usually in the basement. It was one place in the home that was relegated to being my space, however, it was unfinished and co...

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...