Fast-paced, lewd and extremely unconventional short stories that may appeal to fans of Mark Danielewski and David Foster...
A collection of hyperenergetic, scatological, stream-of-consciousness short stories.
Bird (Catastrophically Consequential, 2012) serves up 12 highly impressionistic stories in this revised edition of his original 2009 collection. The stories range from the frantic Harry Potter parody of “Szczmawgwhore(ts): A Pornographick Bitch-Story” to the sardonic true-crime parody of “Bobby Chushingura,” with its fierce send-up of small-town Middle America (“Bobby had grown up on the wrong side of the tracks of a rural-suburban Rust Belt town populated by wealthy equestrian enthusiasts who were only as sick as their secrets”). Also notable are the almost incoherent psychedelic ramblings of the linked stories “Gothra Schvulkopf and the Daily Grind” and “Gothra Schvulkopf and Her Pumpkin Trolls,” which, even at their most disconnected, are saved by Bird’s skilled pacing and surprisingly lovely turns of phrase: “One can espy an Amazonian jungle creeping along the edge of my bikini line. Little children burn doggie poo in paper bags on my doorstep on Halloween and run away cackling in the harvest moon dry brown leaf rustling night.” Bird is a performance artist in New York City, and many of his stories in this collection would likely be far more effective in performance, where the copious amounts of profanity would likely be funnier than they are on the page. Even so, the narrative swagger Bird brings to stories like “The Travails of Ginger Bocey” (“Her wore them dirty pants with pride, her warn’t no society lady, her life were dirty and she rubbed it in everyone’s face”) gives them a welcome, raunchy life all their own.
Fast-paced, lewd and extremely unconventional short stories that may appeal to fans of Mark Danielewski and David Foster Wallace.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615581705
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Hysterical Dementia
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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