I couldn't finish this novel within a novel. The first half, about the manned-mission to Mars told in the first person was completely captivating--funny, moving and filled with Vonnegut-styled content and absurdity. (The book is dedicated to Vonnegut.) But the second part, which shifts back to ea...
This novel has all the makings of a book that I would love: space exploration: Mars colonization; astronaut zombies; dystopian futures; cousin IT on a killing ramage (really!); hell, it is even dedicated to Kurt Vonnegut. Knowing nothing about Rick Moody (he wrote Garden State (the book not the m...
On the outset, Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm appears to be a Generation X era relic about what it was like to grow up in the 1970’s. Any serious reader has probably read at least one of these type of stories before; stories chock full of ironic kitsch and facile observations on how screwed up the Me...
From the author of The Ice Storm, who has been lauded as the gutsiest writer of his generation (Atlanta Journal-Constitution), comes three sublime novellas about yearning.
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Exuberance is the perfect descriptor for Elkin’s works. Like his bunkmate Bill Gass, his fictions swing to their own rhythms, refuse to conform to any cosily crafted preconception of a satisfying sellable sentence, and demonstrate a fearless dexterity over the English language that would make any...
Set in the fictional seaside town of St. Bostolphs, Massachusetts, we meet the Wapshot family. Written with such flair, we get to know many of the Wapshots at a deep level and wonder if we haven’t met them all personally at some of our own family gatherings.The Wapshots face birth and death, fina...
Tuna on shish kebab and pineapple slices in large stainless-steel serving cisterns arranged on a buffet table. At the edge of the snack bar, the undergrad who gave golf lessons, in chefs hat and lei, carving a roast pig. The carcass had menaced the staff from the walk-in kitchen fridge for upward...
An assisted-living-style hotel always has cotton balls in a little ceramic dish in the bathroom, and a scale, because the elderly lobbyists who stay in a hotel like this, lobbyists for the concrete industry or for pork-products trade groups, are constantly worrying about the extra fifteen. The Du...
During the junk bond. The bike messenger was Mercury himself, traversing the city in Lycra shorts, sunglasses, tank top. You could make a living at it; you could make fifty thousand dollars a year if you had the heart of a warrior. These nomads flanked the traffic on the avenues from midtown to t...