Bahahahaha.
The life of Julie Feller as seen through three decades of letters and emails from her family.
Born in the New Yorker’s “Shouts and Murmurs” column, Fogel’s debut starts with a letter sent to summer camp by her protagonist’s father, a neurologist with a dopey sense of humor, followed by an apology note from her mother the psychoanalyst. The heroine of this epistolary novel is revealed wholly through letters, with titles that are part of the joke: “Your Sister Said Something Racist to Your Dad’s New Girlfriend,” “Your Hot Cousin Paul and His Friends Might Want to Chill Later,” “Your Grandma Rose is Really Looking Forward to Her Son’s Gay Beach Wedding,” and “Your Mom Wanted to Run Her First Yelp Review By You,” among others. We follow the Fellers and their running gags through three decades of correspondence. Highlights: her father’s attitude toward her “career” writing celebrity stories for the Huffington Post; her mother's inability to understand computer basics and frequent trips to the Apple Store; her wacky sister, the star of the book, who writes in text-speak: “Heya, Just tried to leave u a voice mail but I think yr phone is dead. Or u are probably busy w/ mom helping her make arrangements for the funeral ugh.” “Anyway I don’t think u got much of a chance to talk to Bridger cuz you had yr hands full with mom (omg when she was singing along and dancing to that ‘aint no mountain high enough aint no valley low enough’ song and everyone was like GO BARBARA! GO BARBARA!...)” The letters from Julie’s NordicTrack, her dead gerbil, and her IUD remind us that some “Shouts and Murmurs” columns are kind of dumb, and the letters from Dad’s Chinese second wife themselves seem vaguely racist, or at least politically incorrect, but u prob won’t mind b/c other parts are so funny.
Bahahahaha.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62779-793-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.
Hailed as heroes on a stateside tour before returning to Iraq, Bravo Squad discovers just what it has been fighting for.
Though the shellshocked humor will likely conjure comparisons with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, the debut novel by Fountain (following his story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, 2006) focuses even more on the cross-promotional media monster that America has become than it does on the absurdities of war. The entire novel takes place over a single Thanksgiving Day, when the eight soldiers (with their memories of the two who didn’t make it) find themselves at the promotional center of an all-American extravaganza, a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys football game. Providing the novel with its moral compass is protagonist Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old virgin from small-town Texas who has been inflated into some kind of cross between John Wayne and Audie Murphy for his role in a rescue mission documented by an embedded Fox News camera. In two days, the Pentagon-sponsored “Victory Tour” will end and Bravo will return to the business as usual of war. In the meantime, they are dealing with a producer trying to negotiate a film deal (“Think Rocky meets Platoon,” though Hilary Swank is rumored to be attached), glad-handing with the corporate elite of Cowboy fandom (and ownership), and suffering collateral damage during a halftime spectacle with Beyoncé. Over the course of this long, alcohol-fueled day, Billy finds himself torn, as he falls in love (and lust) with a devout Christian cheerleader and listens to his sister try to persuade him that he has done his duty and should refuse to go back. As “Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives,” Billy and his foxhole brethren discover treachery and betrayal beyond anything they’ve experienced on the battlefield.
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-088559-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.
Glück’s international reputation as an accomplished and critically acclaimed contemporary poet makes the arrival of her new volume an eagerly anticipated event. This slender collection meets these expectations with 44 poems that pull the reader into a realm of meditation and memory. She sets most of them in the heat of summer—a time of year when nature seems almost oppressively heavy with life—in order to meditate on the myriad realities posed by life and death. Glück mines common childhood images (a grandmother transforming summer fruit into a cool beverage, two sisters applying fingernail polish in a backyard) to resurrect the intense feelings that accompany awakening to the sensual promises of life, and she desperately explores these resonant images, searching for a path that might reconcile her to the inevitability of death. These musings produce the kinds of spiritual insights that draw so many readers to her work: she suggests that we perceive our experiences most intensely when tempered by memory, and that such experiences somehow provide meaning for our lives. Yet for all her metaphysical sensitivity and poetic craftsmanship, Glück reaffirms our ultimate fate: we all eventually die. Rather than resort to pithy mysticism or self-obsessive angst, she boldly insists that death creeps in the shadows of even our brightest summers. The genius of her poems lies in their ability to sear the summertime onto our souls in such a way that its “light will give us no peace.”
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.Pub Date: April 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018526-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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