Sure to induce chuckles for adult readers looking for a good laugh.
A collection of essays about the intricacies of life, love and sex.
Composed of short stories penned by bloggers and comedy writers, and expertly edited by comedy writers Stanfa and Reinhardt, this collection takes readers on a hilarious journey through the trials and tribulations of sex and intimacy. In “Spirited Engagements,” the nightly noises of a young couple in love at an inn are presumed to be the paranormal racket of a resident ghost; in “The Thing at the End of a Sentence,” a young woman visiting the Ukraine receives a painfully public, embarrassing gift of tampons. The stories tend to dig into those most intimate moments while sharing tales of humility and humor. In particular, Lisa Brower’s story about trying to please her military husband upon his return home from duty offers some knee-slapping, laugh-out-loud comedy. Per her husband’s fantasy, she decides to surprise him by donning a rubber outfit, which goes terribly wrong: She “was starting to resemble a breaded cutlet, and the powerful rubber stench of the dress was making me dizzy.” Though authored by different writers—the majority of whom are female—the stories are seamlessly woven together and flow smoothly in tone from one essay to the next, which should appeal to anyone who’s traversed the world of dating and relationships. Despite some of the outlandish premises, most of the dexterously crafted stories are highly relatable and will resonate with readers of all backgrounds.
Sure to induce chuckles for adult readers looking for a good laugh.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615679174
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Pandora's Boxes
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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