THIS IS HOW IT REALLY SOUNDS

Name: THIS IS HOW IT REALLY SOUNDS
Author: Stuart Archer Cohen
ISBN: 978-1-250-04882-0

by Stuart Archer Cohen ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2015

Anyone who's bet his or her future on Wall Street, strapped on a pair of skis or savored a well-told story will want to read...

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An impressive and dramatic novel about three men who share a surname and intertwining fortunes.

Pete Harrington is a fading rock star who's shocked to find his fancy car being repossessed. Harry Harrington used to be the best “extreme skier” in the world, dominating a sport few knew existed. Wall Street financier and greed-hound Peter Harrington has “amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in five short years” through legal tactics that have hurt many other investors. He has made “more in interest each day doing nothing than most people earned working all year.” Meanwhile, Pete’s $8 million holdings have shrunk to $400,000 due to a poor investment—in Crossroads Partners, an enterprise set up by Peter. Now Pete must sell off costly tchotchkes to pay off his debts, as “fifteen years of his life turned into yellow tags at a secondhand store.” He becomes obsessed with payback. Pete wants more than anything else to walk up to Peter and sock him in the nose. “Once in a while somebody’s got to kick the crap out of greed,” he says. He hires an old CIA retiree, Charlie Pico, to teach him how to deliver the best possible punch. Meanwhile, friends remind Pete that he'll be committing assault, so maybe he can do the deed in China? Pete is a sympathetic jerk whose odyssey is fun to follow as he trains for the big confrontation and recalls a fight he once had with the bass player from the rock band Uncle Sam’s Erection. Harry’s storyline is less tightly connected to the others, with dazzling skiing scenes in which he courts death and races megaton-sized avalanches.

Anyone who's bet his or her future on Wall Street, strapped on a pair of skis or savored a well-told story will want to read this one.

Pub Date: April 21, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-250-04882-0

Page Count: 368

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.