by Jeff Roberts ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 1936
A patchy and intermittently sharp-eyed collection.
A self-proclaimed “student of the human condition” reflects in writer’s workshop-style prose on the effects of breakups, haplessness and sorrow.
Roberts’ primarily gloomy collection opens with story “Relativity,” whose central theme of relationship discordance resonates throughout the book. Several stories integrate the family framework into the narrative. The author poignantly juxtaposes the birth of a baby girl with a dying old man and his family in “The Red and the Black”; the male narrator in “A Question of Perspective” correlates his teenage son’s laziness with the moral collapse of his neighborhood; a young Republican’s tragic family life unceremoniously unravels in “Most Likely to Succeed”; and a laid-off employee and his wife enjoy crisp hindsight in “Valentine’s Day 2005.” Young children appear in several tales that, while light on plot, still shine with deft characterization and emotion. A young boy’s gleeful mischief in “Tadpoles” is trumped by a devastating math grade while a girl’s dying kitten reinvigorates her divorced father’s helplessness in the melancholy “Cosette.” However, several of these correlated yarns incorporate prose that lapses into awkward territory: “When a striking scene catches your eye, your mind always paints it in colors pulled from a pallet [sic] based in its own reality.” An alternating point of view is jarring in both “The Triptych,” an aimless tale of a man who flees after a fight with his wife, and “Most Likely to Succeed,” about a young Republican’s fall from grace. The inclusion of an essay Roberts wrote for his alma mater newsletter is simply inexplicable. Written during his time at the University of Iowa, Roberts’collection is ultimately uneven, though the author admits to having included both the “immature as well as the overcooked” works into the project. However, Roberts demonstrates a talent for tapping into the fault lines of human landscapes and the brittleness of relationships that are felled with a single word.
A patchy and intermittently sharp-eyed collection.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 1936
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Best Books Of 2015
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National Book Award Finalist
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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