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Split Brain

Name: Split Brain
Author: Kyle Hemmings
ISBN: 978-1-5375-1906-7

A COLLECTION OF SHORT PROSE

by Kyle Hemmings ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2016

A bold, if opaque, collection that often feels like avant-garde poetry compressed from stanzas to paragraphs.

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A short fiction and poetry specialist collects 33 pieces of experimental, surreal, and mildly otherworldly prose.

Hemmings (Saints in Limbo, 2016, etc.) is also a poet, and these short works (some only paragraphs)—highly experimental, many previously published by small presses and in flash-fiction anthologies—oftentimes blur the line between narrative and verse. Indeed, one short-short that purports to be an excerpt from a longer piece (“Cat People Among Us”) is virtually indistinguishable from the bulk of the items, having very little to offer in the way of a standard beginning-middle-end structure. That said, there is as much here to intrigue readers as well as to infuriate them: strange Twilight Zone synchronicities such as the recurring imagery of department store mannequins (and what their private lives and thoughts might be like), surrealism, the year 1971, weirdly bereaved/dead parents, an on-again, off-again flame named Alice White, and a UFO-obsessed boho chick named Zin, who might well be the ideal readership for this type of material. (She dies of a brain tumor at the end of “Dancing the Alien,” one of the more linear tales, becoming the Hemmingsian version of Jenny from Erich Segal’s Love Story.) In “We Married for the Right Reasons,” the author channels the voice of doomed Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick during her short marriage to fellow addict Michael Post—better have an Internet search engine fired up for all the missing background information. “Buzz Fly,” perhaps the most conventional of the unconventional set, describes a 1971 gathering of increasingly disillusioned counterculture types whose time together is shattered by a freak aviation tragedy. More typical is this micro-narrative: “Trouble was disguised as bare trees. My father must have plunged-dived into his reflection, maybe dreaming of a new route to China. My mother sat at the window, paralyzed in her own frozen seas. She never asked for a tablespoon of love. The sled dogs waited, soft-eyed, panting like thieves.”

A bold, if opaque, collection that often feels like avant-garde poetry compressed from stanzas to paragraphs.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5375-1906-7

Page Count: 92

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FUTURE WARS
by Kyle Hemmings

- BOOK REVIEW
PHANTASIZER
by Kyle Hemmings

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- SEEN & HEARD
Salinger Focus of NYPL Exhibit

- SEEN & HEARD
NYC Mayoral Candidates Name Favorite Gotham Books

- APPRECIATIONS
Holden Caulfield: Forever Young

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JURASSIC PARK

by Michael Crichton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 1990

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Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.