Wilson’s amusing tales explore the fine line between desire and disgust.
A set of stories about embarrassing moments, including disappointing sexual experiences.
“Everybody who’s had sex more than a time or two has had lousy sex,” debut author Wilson writes. This short, humorous collection of anecdotes effectively aims to normalize such moments and help readers find humor in their own lives by laughing at others’. Wilson says that she collected the sex-related stories, which make up most of the book, from both friends and strangers, and she renders them here as first-person narratives. (However, she fictionalizes people’s names, identifying information, and sometimes chronologies of events.) For instance, in “The Fairy Queen,” set in 1999, a 25-year-old woman named Roseanne recounts fooling around with Scott, who dressed her as a fairy for a photo shoot, complete with body makeup and hair woven into the headboard. After she confused flower tendrils for a spider, she lashed out and inadvertently knocked him over. Pinned to the bed, she could do little to help when he hit his head—and then his mother walked in. Many other pieces here are similarly outlandish, hilarious, and excruciating in equal measure. Intestinal distress and a malfunctioning sunroof spoil a tryst in a cemetery in “Stayin’ Alive,” for example, and flatulence ensures that a date can’t get too serious in “The Battle Below the Clouds.” In several tales, Wilson presents women who can’t reconcile themselves to their partners’ fantasies; in one, a woman’s boyfriend begs her to try anal sex with him, but she can’t overcome her aversion to the idea. The best story in the collection, however, is “The Adjunct,” in which the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson convince a literature professor to dump a former student who’s merely using her for sex. A brief second section contains David Sedaris–like accounts of other, nonsexual awkward moments; of these, the scatological “The Funeral Weekend” is a highlight.
Wilson’s amusing tales explore the fine line between desire and disgust.Pub Date: March 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9976355-6-0
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Wandering in the Words Press
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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