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AT NIGHT ONLY

Name: AT NIGHT ONLY
Author: Christopher Stoddard
ISBN: 978-0-9976432-1-3

by Christopher Stoddard ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 19, 2018

A depressingly beautiful portrait of the metropolitan human.

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An unnamed narrator experiences the violent tides of a contemporary drug-infused life in New York City.

Living in Williamsburg with a shiba inu named Max, an unnamed and genderless narrator struggles with a series of addictions: romance, drugs, and career. “Me, immortal teenager: always awkward and anxious, forever lonely, constantly desirous of Yes’s from No’s as if I were the deserving exception.” Steeped in both the art world and the advertising industry, the narrator experiences life through a cloud of medicine (“pop two lithium, one Zoloft, and two Klonopin”) and consequently functions as would a ghost haunting his own stomping grounds. The narrator spends time with Pedro, a supremely controversial performance artist who throws themed art parties with names like “Fuck My Mother,” encouraging decadent, uninhibited sexual behavior. The narrator does whatever Pedro requests, including drug cocktails and weeklong benders. The two engage romantically only to realize that their compatibility is just as ephemeral as their high. In the second part, the narrator seems to put a damper on the party scene, this time dating Jacques, an emerging actor who has violent tantrums that only rough sex and emotional outcries can calm. As the narrator attempts to go off meds, their relationship becomes exceptionally codependent, though Jacques is much better at staying away. The comedown affects every aspect of the narrator’s life and induces a series of highly disruptive and murderous episodes. Stoddard (Limiters, 2014, etc.) has created an addictive and intoxicating environment for his readers. The lack of pronouns and overwhelming use of action verbs give the text a depersonalized effervescence that penetrates the reader’s mind with almost no difficulty. As a result, the narrator could be anyone who happens to read this story, but most importantly, the narrator embodies a version of New York that we seldom talk about.

A depressingly beautiful portrait of the metropolitan human.

Pub Date: June 19, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-9976432-1-3

Page Count: 188

Publisher: Itna Press

Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.