by Josh Wilde ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Readers need not be professional gamblers to enjoy these tales, which ridicule the pastime with great affection.
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Wilde debuts with a collection of gambling-related satirical pieces populated by characters who take risks in casinos and in life.
The author knows a good deal about casinos and their patrons, and his book’s first chapter examines the quirks of online gambling. In it, Wilde’s gambler friend Melvin gets a nice haul on the internet that he plans on taking to Las Vegas, but he later realizes that he may actually prefer the virtual gaming. Other pieces poke fun at internet reliance: Wilde’s job at the website Gambling City, for example, entails meeting the staff, including a programmer who speaks only in the computer languages COBOL and BASIC. The author also lampoons how some online casinos avoid paying out winnings by claiming that an internal audit is prohibiting payment or by simply declaring bankruptcy. Later chapters target brick-and-mortar casinos and other forms of gambling. The short, fun opening pieces feature real-life people (including the author himself and the occasional U.S. president) intermingling with caricatures (such as a lawyer named Arthur Ripoff). A few recurring figures add to the enjoyment, such as customer-service representative Kathy, who’s looking for love through customer correspondence; ex–hit man Big Tony at Gambling City; and U.S. Sen. Jon Killjoy, whose determination to ban online gambling makes him the collection’s villain. Wilde also offers parodies of Shakespeare plays, movies, and TV shows while still maintaining his overall theme; in one, the management of the MGM Grand wants to hire the A-Team. The book ends with a series of conventional but entertaining short stories. In “Police, Poker, and Panties,” for instance, an Alabama cop plays poker in order to help her solve a string of armed robberies. The easygoing prose is primarily taken up with dialogue, typically Wilde’s. Some jokes, however, become repetitive, such as when casinos habitually declare customers “bonus abusers.” One tale about the author taking a trip to McDonald’s is humorous but predictable: Wilde has a coupon for a free Big Mac, but a restaurant employee tries his hardest not to give him the burger.
Readers need not be professional gamblers to enjoy these tales, which ridicule the pastime with great affection.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5455-9297-7
Page Count: 522
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Russell Banks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2013
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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by Louis L’Amour ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 11, 1999
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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