The Pushcart Prize's 20th anniversary is a cause for celebration and concern. No devoted reader can criticize the Pushcart Prize's raison d'àtre: to recognize the best stories, poems, and essays published by small presses and literary magazines and bring them to a wider audience. This 20th collection contains much to delight, a spectral range of voices: lyrical, brutal, naive, devious. Debra Spark's ``Last Things'' is a shockingly, admirably honest account of her sister's early death from cancer. The homespun narrator of Marie Sheppard Williams's ``Wilma Bremer's Funeral'' is a quietly authentic creation. Poetry ranges from Diann Blakely Shoaf's dizzying ``Solo, New Orleans'' to an elegant canto selected from Robert Pinsky's new translation of Dante's Inferno. A few selections, like ``False Water Society'' by Ben Marcus, are utterly baffling. Such a rich collection should send all writers scurrying to their desks, thrilled with fresh energy. But will it prove worth it? The powers behind Pushcart sometimes feel like a private club; this year's winners are too often listed as nominators for other pieces in the same anthology. Literary lions like Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and John Barth seem to have been included not for the merit of their curiously self-conscious pieces but to lend literary weight to the group. In his introduction, Henderson (Her Father: A Memoir, p. 1079, etc.) writes of Rick Moody's ``The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven'': ``Lee [Smith] and I picked Rick's novellathe longest piece ever to run hereafter Rick was excused from the room.'' Cozy, but discouraging to the ranks of the undiscovered. The Pushcart Prize, ideally, should both celebrate noncommercial literature and inspire those who will ensure its continued health in an increasingly bottom-line world. In its 20th year, it is more successful on the first count than the second.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-916366-99-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
