This week I continue my series American Odd with an essay about “The Book of the SubGenius” by J.R. “Bob” Dobbs. Continue reading American Odd: The Book of the SubGenius, by J.R. “Bob” Dobbs
This week I review Seth Kaufman’s new collection of darkly satirical short stories, The War Against Boredom. Continue reading CCLaP Fridays: The War Against Boredom, by Seth Kaufman
This week I write about Zippy the Pinhead for my ongoing essay series, American Odd. Are we having fun yet? Continue reading American Odd: Zippy Stories, by Bill Griffith
Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives chronicled a literary movement named “the Visceral Realists.” Crow: from the Life and Songs of the Crow by Ted Hughes offers the reader a kind of visceral realism. The poetry cycle recounts the life and times of Crow, a folkloric character, comedian and trickster. The collection ranges across various types of poems: fairy tales, lullabies, legends, comedic shtick, and parody. Like the crows one sees everyday, Crow scrabbles in waste, carrion, and garbage. He is a scavenger, appropriating things, a collector of junk. The poem titles bear this out, “Oedipus Crow,” “Crow Tyrannosaurus,” and … Continue reading Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, by Ted Hughes
The slim novel Aberration of Starlight by Gilbert Sorrentino traces the events one summer in 1939 through the perspectives of four different characters. The title is taken from an astrological phenomenon involving the movement of both the observer and the subject under observation. Right from the start, Sorrentino will upend the reader’s expectations. The four characters lives become revealed through various narrative techniques. These include letters, question-and-answer, and stream of consciousness. The four main characters are Billy Recco, the son of Marie Recco. He idolizes Tom Thebus, a salesman wooing Marie, much to the chagrin of Marie’s father, John McGrath. … Continue reading Aberration of Starlight (1980) by Gilbert Sorrentino
In the black heart of the Great Depression, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler rose to power, Louis-Ferdinand Cèline set the French literary scene afire with Journey to the End of the Night. By turns darkly comical, hallucinatory, and picaresque, the novel charts the misadventures of Bardamu. From the trenches of the First World War to French colonial Africa to New York City and Detroit, Bardamu experiences each place with his own jaundiced eyes. Eventually he returns back to suburban Paris, a small-time doctor working with impoverished patients. Bardamu is not alone. His friend, one Robinson, accompanies him as … Continue reading Journey to the End of the Night (1932), by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The Driftless Area Review 