Reviews

Bookshots: "Dissident Gardens" by Jonathan Lethem

September 10th, 2013

Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review Title: Dissident Gardens Who wrote it? If you think your family's fucked up, a few hours spent with Rose and Miriam and Communist Cousin Lennie will let you know...you don't have it anywhere near as bad as the members of the Zimmer family. Jonathan Lethem, the brilliant, wonderful author of Motherless Brooklyn, one of my favorite books.

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Bookshots: "The Thicket" by Joe R. Lansdale

September 9th, 2013

Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review Title: The Thicket Who wrote it? Joe R. Lansdale, best known for the novella Bubba Ho-Tep and the cult novel Cold in July.

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'The Willow Tree' by Hubert Selby, Jr.

July 29th, 2013

My girlfriend and I were walking with two friends in Slovenia, at night, when two drunk guys started calling after us. They followed us for a little while, talking to one of the women in my group. She ignored them and mumbled, "Let's just keep walking." The guys tried again, and one of them grabbed her arm. She yanked it away and walked on. So the guy who had grabbed her waited for her to turn away from him, lifted his foot, and kicked her to the ground.

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"I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)" by Chuck Klosterman

July 9th, 2013

Chuck Klosterman is a grownup now.

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"Joyland" by Stephen King

June 27th, 2013

In the world of Stephen King, there are many voices. He is known of course for his classic horror, books like Carrie, Salem’s Lot, and The Shining. He is also famous for writing epic tomes that span space and time, such as The Stand, and It. He even dabbles in whatever The Dark Tower series is—steampunk western noir with a splash of fantasy and science fiction.

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'Lionel Asbo: State of England' by Martin Amis

August 28th, 2012

Martin Amis’ new novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England, might as well have a big red target printed across its very fetching dust jacket. Amis, one of the bright literary lights of Eighties England, now endures more flak than adulation, seemingly emerging to make one more wrong-headed comment, or signify his disconnection with modern times.

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Rock Icons Revisited: Two New Books About Reggie and Fred

August 17th, 2012

A buck-toothed African and a pasty-skinned Brit walk into a bar... While the mind conjures stereotypical images of two diametrically-opposed figures, in fact the similarities between these particular men are stunning.

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"That’s How I Roll" by Andrew Vachss

May 9th, 2012

Reading Andrew Vachss is similar to listening to Ray Wylie Hubbard fused with Nick Cave. It’s brutal, grindhouse and poetic. Laying an atmosphere of the down trodden, harmed and misshapen. He writes about characters who some like to pretend do not exist. Their actions are sometimes hard to digest, but they’re plausible. He’s written more than twenty books (his Burke and Cross characters being his most popular), and deviled in comic books, essays for the glossies, and big newspapers.

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"The Wind Through the Keyhole" by Stephen King

April 27th, 2012

Seven years after the publication of the ostensibly last book in his Dark Tower series, Stephen King revisits the epic, fully realized universe his fans have been following for decades. Well, sort of.

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'Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces' by Cory MacLauchlin

April 11th, 2012

If you didn't know already, it's in the book's subtitle: the tale of John Kennedy Toole's life is a sad one. His A Confederacy of Dunces, published over a decade after Toole's death, won the Pulitzer Prize and is now heralded as a comic masterpiece of the twentieth century. Still, he died thinking himself a failure.

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