Garrett Zecker's Blog, page 4

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...

New Publication: “Step Aside, Gray Lady.”

A new publication was published today, “Step Aside, Gray Lady: Ishmael Reed and Carla Blank’s Reckoning with Bigotry on Broadway”

Ishmael Reed and Carla Blank’s Bigotry on Broadway is a collection of essays that presents a scathing indictment of the stark whiteness of the Great White Way, and the ways in which we have been conditioned to accept some of the more overtly sinister examples of marginalization from its history, show storylines, casting, and the momentum that continues to carry rac...

The Hidden Passions: Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman

Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service is a brutal, labyrinthine novel about a young woman navigating a maze of sexual expectations of herself and society. When Eve, a young queer woman in a long-term relationship opens the door to a complicated affair that challenges her identity as much as her boundaries, she has to examine and reflect on the ways in which we reflect on what it means to serve, to submit, to explore, and to live up to the mores and boundaries of where our own identities lie reflecte...

Inseparable by Simone de Beauvoir, Translated by Sandra Smith

This is a candid and gorgeous portrait of an intimate relationship between two young women at the height of stepping into the sophisticated and confusing emotional lives of adulthood. We follow Sylvie through the navigation of her ten years with her best friend and confidante Andrée. From understanding the ins and outs of the post-World War I period, to philosophizing on love both romantic and platonic, to trying to outsmart the adults’ expectations of them in a world that cared very little for ...

After the Lights Go Out by John Vercher

John Vercher’s After the Lights Go Out is a stunning sophomore release from the Edgar and Anthony Award-nominated author of Three-Fifths. I absolutely loved the grittiness and social commentary of Three-Fifths and looked forward to his latest release with great anticipation. After the Lights Go Out is a fight novel, and honestly, I think it is the first one that I’ve ever read. Knowing what I know about fight cinema, however, it’s clear that the heart and strength of Vercher’s character-driven s...

Fan Fiction by Brent Spiner

Brent Spiner is known as a lot of things – Lt. Commander Data, Dr. Brackish Okun, Devlin Bowman, Dr. Strom, and, well more television doctors than one can possibly count and a villainous Stromboli (similarly a doctor of terror) in a horrifying Pinocchio reboot that came out just as George W. Bush stepped into office. 

He is also one hell of a guy. As I stepped into experiencing his new role as writer of prose, I knew I was getting into something great. His personable nature and dedication to ...