Just keeps getting better as you turn the pages.
Stories that can make you believe that doing cocaine all day in a cheap motel is fun or that catching bugs is a great way to spend your childhood.
Parsons’ debut collection is not long on plot, but wisdom and humor are so thick on the ground you could find a sentence worth quoting on every page. “The first rule of filing is…nothing comes before something.” “There are tricks to coping with a surly person you’ve brought into the world. Focus on the positive.” “I have no idea why sports and religion intermingle—they just do. It seems some people take Jesus for a jock.” Two characters at the Starlite motel in Houston: “There are only two things people do in places like this….And we’ve already done all the drugs.” Only they haven’t—co-workers Jill and Rick are taking a holiday from their lives and from their spouses (code-named Eyelash and Kneecap at a previous happy hour), and new baggies of powder keep turning up right till quittin’ time. They are one of many memorable pairs in these stories, several of which are about the blurry line between friendship and love. The narrator of “Glow Hunter” is crazy about her friend Bo, who is just “more brightly lit than the rest of us.…I’ve seen strangers stop what they’re doing to watch her shake sugar into her tea.” Bo and the narrator have both been involved with a guy named Jeff, but what they really want is each other. The narrator of “Black Light” is in love with a point guard on the girls basketball team; she is counseled, then consoled by her older brother. (“ 'Dick,' he said, done with subtlety. 'She needs dick.' ”) Comparisons have been made to Denis Johnson, Karen Russell, Carmen Maria Machado…and we’ll add Angela Carter. The Angela Carter of Lubbock, Texas. It has a ring to it.
Just keeps getting better as you turn the pages.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56350-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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