edited by C.D. Rose ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 4, 2014
In presenting his failures, Rose makes highly literate and arcane references to a vast number of authors and literary...
Rose poses as the “editor” of this book, a series of clever (and occasionally hilarious) literary vignettes about authors whose careers never quite panned out owing to personal, cultural or artistic failings.
The novel has a distinctly Borges-ian feel to it, and Borges himself is referenced numerous times, both in the introduction and some of the 52 entries. We meet authors who will never, alas, be household names. In fact, Rose has a great deal of fun making up names for his putative literary failures. We meet Hermann von Abwärts, for example, who’s written a “frankly derivative” manuscript entitled The Sorrows of Young Hermann and who is beaten over the head with his work by illiterate thugs. Another author memorable for being unmemorable is Lord Frederick Rathole (pronounced “Rath-ole”), who designs an octagonal library with sides of differing lengths. Undeterred, Rathole “dismissed the builders, insisting his vision worked on a higher degree of non-Euclidean geometry.” Wendy Wenning is an author so ruthless in editing her work that she first removes all the adjectives (which she sees as “enemies”), then relative clauses and passive voice. As she keeps paring, she eventually gets to the final stage, and when she pushes the “print” button, discovers that what emerges is a blank sheet of paper. Similar to Wenning is Virgil Haack (a delightful pun), who, “convinced that less was certainly more,” puts a single word on the only page of his novel: the letter “I.”
In presenting his failures, Rose makes highly literate and arcane references to a vast number of authors and literary theoreticians, and it’s great fun for the reader to become part of the game.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61219-378-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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