THE BELL TOLLS FOR NO ONE

Name: THE BELL TOLLS FOR NO ONE
Author: Charles Bukowski
ISBN: 978-0-87286-682-9

by Charles Bukowski ; edited by David Stephen Calonne ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 15, 2015

Bukowski’s gift was a sense for the raunchy absurdity of life, his writing a grumble that might turn into a belly laugh or a...

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The uncollected gutbucket ramblings of the grand dirty old man of Los Angeles letters have been gathered in this characteristically filthy, funny compilation.

Bukowski's autobiographical novels (More Notes of a Dirty Old Man, 2011, etc.) often read as a series of strung-together episodes and scatological anecdotes. So the brevity of the pieces collected here, some no more than two or three pages, suit Bukowski well. A majority of the stories appeared as the column “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” in the LA Free Press. Others, which ran in Oui and Hustler, represent perhaps the final gasp of a literary tradition that began in the 1950s and ’60s when the raunchier skin magazines were open to work by established writers. To the uninitiated, Bukowski can seem off-puttingly vulgar. And while you can detect a wounded romantic beneath the Lothario, Bukowski’s alter egos were not gents when it came to women. Best to think of his work as a series of dirty Road Runner cartoons in which Bukowski is the coyote taking one damn kick in the pants—front- and backside—after another. At its worst (the hijack fantasy “Fly the Friendly Skies”), Bukowski’s sensibility is ugly and coarse. But when he is swinging, there is a companionable ease to his blunt, profane vernacular.

Bukowski’s gift was a sense for the raunchy absurdity of life, his writing a grumble that might turn into a belly laugh or a racking cough but that always throbbed with vital energy.

Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-87286-682-9

Page Count: 225

Publisher: City Lights

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015

Categories:

SHORT STORIES

- BOOK REVIEW
ON DRINKING
by Charles Bukowski ; edited by Abel Debritto

- BOOK REVIEW
ON CATS
by Charles Bukowski edited by Abel Debritto

- BOOK REVIEW
ON WRITING
by Charles Bukowski edited by Abel Debritto

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WHAT IS NOT YOURS IS NOT YOURS

by Helen Oyeyemi ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 8, 2016

For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations,...

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These nine casually interlocking stories, set in a familiar yet surreal contemporary world, overflow with the cerebral humor and fantastical plots that readers have come to expect from Oyeyemi (Boy Snow Bird, 2014).

The opener, "Books and Roses," sets the tone: stories within stories and a fittingly cockeyed view of Gaudi’s architecture as two women in Barcelona share their experiences in abandonment while searching for the loved ones who left them behind. Most of the volume takes place in England, with nods toward Eastern Europe. In " 'Sorry' Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea," weight-loss clinician Anton becomes increasingly involved in raising his boyfriend’s two adolescent daughters, Aisha and Dayang, while fishsitting for a traveling friend. The story seems straightforward until Anton’s friend falls in long-distance love with a mystery woman who's entered his locked house without a key and Anton’s co-worker Tyche helps Aisha recover from a crisis in disillusionment by casting a spell from the Greek goddess Hecate. Tyche returns as a student puppeteer in "Is Your Blood as Red as This?," which layers creepy echoes of Pinocchio onto realistically genuine adolescent sexual confusion. Readers realize Tyche’s fellow students Radha and Myrna have ended up sexually happy-ever-after when they pop up in "Presence" to lend their shared apartment to a psychologist so she and her grief-counselor husband can carry out the ironically eponymous science-fiction experiment that forces the psychologist to accept the absences in her life. While Aisha appears as a filmmaker employing puppets in "Freddy Barrandov Checks…In?," Dayang stars as ingénue in "A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society," a post-feminist romantic comedy about warring men's and women’s societies at Cambridge. Several stories are pure fairy tale, like "Dornicka and the St. Martin’s Day Goose," a twisted take on "Little Red Riding Hood,” and "Drownings," in which good intentions defeat a murderous tyrant.

For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations, Oyeyemi’s stories are often cheerfully sentimental.

Pub Date: March 8, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-59463-463-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016

Categories:

SHORT STORIES

- BOOK REVIEW
A NEW NEW ME
by Helen Oyeyemi

- BOOK REVIEW
PARASOL AGAINST THE AXE
by Helen Oyeyemi

- BOOK REVIEW
PEACES
by Helen Oyeyemi

THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY

THE FINCA VIGIA EDITION

by Ernest Hemingway ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1987

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What's most worthy in this hefty, three-part volume of still more Hemingway is that it contains (in its first section) all the stories that appeared together in the 1938 (and now out of print) The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. After this, however, the pieces themselves and the grounds for their inclusion become more shaky. The second section includes stories that have been previously published but that haven't appeared in collections—including two segments (from 1934 and 1936) that later found their way into To Have and Have Not (1937) and the "story-within-a-story" that appeared in the recent The garden of Eden. Part three—frequently of more interest for Flemingway-voyeurs than for its self-evident merits—consists of previously unpublished work, including a lengthy outtake ("The Strange Country") from Islands in the Stream (1970), and two poor-to-middling Michigan stories (actually pieces, again, from an unfinished novel). Moments of interest, but luckiest are those who still have their copies of The First Forty-Nine.