Jacob Wren, Families Are Formed Through Copulation

Some books are meant to be taken seriously, some are meant to make you take yourself seriously, and some to make you question the validity of seriousness all together. Jacob Wren’s Families Are Formed Through Copulation is all of these things. Wren’s perspective shifts with the moodiness of someone terminally affected, wounded by the unreasonable demands that our world places on us: to be a functioning member of society who gives back what one has taken, to be responsible for one’s actions, to never become angry or lash out from the weight of life’s unfairness and lies, to have ”regular,” practical goals such as having a nice-sized home, a lush fenced-in backyard overgrown with organic fruits and vegetables, an upstanding occupation, and more importantly, to have children. More »

Published on augusti 1, 2009.
Book Review Books Bookslut
Tags: , ,

Andrea Lambert, Jet Set Desolate

Investigating a difficult time in a difficult place (California: post-millennium), Andrea Lambert’s debut novel Jet Set Desolate is a minor flashback into the unstable, patchy American mode de la vie of a fictional character named Lena Cosentino. Writing from the po-mo perspective of a lone woman in her early thirties, the now alcoholic (although nothing in comparison to Lena’s past bouts with more serious narcotics and other not-so-wise socio-sexual diversions … some worthy of attention, some blown out of proportion) grapples with the remainders of her memories and desires, her failure to assimilate to what America expects of her. Written primarily from Lena’s first-person perspective, the reader is allowed to view Lena’s Bay Area on-the-fringe, bohemian-punk existence firsthand but in retrospect. The reader is reminded of the beginnings of various popular realities that are now well-known to many in their late 20’s or early 30’s—many at-a-loss post-grads from somewhat respectable liberal arts colleges and/or art schools that haven’t exactly panned out like they promised. More »

Published on augusti 1, 2009.
Book Review Books Bookslut
Tags: , ,

Amina Cain, I Go To Some Hollow

These fifteen brief stories press the modern reader to examine both their direct and indirect relationship with the external world, through a number of subtle and at other times provocative devices. Amina Cain writes in “Black Wings,” “It is hot and humid and we are reading Lolita. After we read for a while we take a bike ride, and when we are tired we get off our bikes and sit against a concrete wall.” At first glance, this appears to be an unassuming reference to just another book of the past, yet for those who have read Nabokov, we know its literary weight and are sure to be stirred, if not strangely aroused by this juxtaposition of Lolita to the bicycle—the one tool every blooming adolescent recognizes as synonymous with liberation, movement and exploration. More »

Published on maj 1, 2009.
Book Review Books Bookslut
Tags: , ,

Vanessa Place, La Medusa

La Medusa and the sprawlish, sweltering city of Los Angeles are both shifty terrains for recurring exploration, and the brave minds of both those who inhabit and delve into these parallel universes are not short of a challenge. Much like the mythological horror and fascination of Medusa herself, this novel carries the weight of its fate—to be loved by those who relate to its labyrinthine thread of excess and perhaps despised by those who fail to comprehend and revere the beauty and sheer force of such a charming, deadly siren. The Gorgon Medusa is also commonly associated with female rage and maliciousness, but who is say whether or not Los Angeles possesses the spirit of such a venomous persona, or if this city and its migrant souls are just misunderstood? More »

Published on mars 1, 2009.
Book Review Books Bookslut
Tags: , ,

Maxi Kim, One Break, a Thousand Blows!

One of a series of nine carefully commissioned bodies of work, Stewart Home chose One Break, A Thousand Blows! as part of a historical tribute to a previous tendency to choose more difficult, less obvious texts, highlighting the more non-commercialized, avant garde tendencies of the mid-twentieth century’s Beat Generation or the somewhat tedious constraint-based Oulipian dialectics. This novel—like many bubbling up in this millennium—is tainted in a good way, clouded with previous literary influences, wary of outright acceptance by a quaint populace. One Break can be frustrating, for it could be interpreted that Kim does not care whether or not the reader hears the joke or the punch line. A drum roll doesn’t always lead to humor, and humor is sometimes far from appropriate. More »

Published on januari 1, 2009.
Book Review Books Bookslut
Tags: , , ,

Axel Thormählen, A Happy Man and Other Stories

One of many to-be-desired releases in Les Figues’ TrenchArt: Parapet Series (among others such as I Go to Some Hollow by Amina Cain and God’s Livestock Policy by Stan Apps), this special compilation of nine well-crafted short stories by German author Axel Thormählen exceeds any careful reader’s expectations—they are gems to be marveled. Though these stories are similar in tone and in literary design, the subject matter in which they investigate, explode or agitate is such that any receptive soul must harbor the ability to linger appropriately with each one, and a safe haven is needed for the reader to engage in Thormählen’s highly subjective, poetic fiction. Thormählen does not avoid uncomfortable subjects, and because of this, his fiction is—at times—philosophically cumbersome. His stories do not shy away from our mutually shared experiences, and they display internal worlds of his characters with a selective eye—keen in observation, precise in both their secular and otherworldly guises. More »

Published on november 1, 2008.
Book Review Books Bookslut
Tags: , , ,

Aaron Kunin, The Mandarin

The prospect of writing an innovative novel could be a contemporary poet’s nightmare, for who wants to be confined by mainstream devices of the conventional narrative, and how does a poet turned novelist avoid the blunders of monotony (or as Kunin writes on pg. 28, “a lifetime of needless repetitions”)? At best, how does this novel pursue a previously overlooked approach? Aaron Kunin’s first novel The Mandarin is hardly coy in dissecting the heavy sentiments associated with such a pursuit. The lines between the writer and the novel’s panoply of characters, between the reader and the read and among the novel’s personalities (both human and their inanimate counterparts—e.g. a TV set, toenail clippings, umbrella, telephone, ad nauseam) are brimming with pointed opinions, intellect and desire—they are infinitely built, demolished, rebuilt and tinkered with. The Mandarin requires the strictest attention; its pace is quick, odd and askew but careful not to exhaust. One could almost declare that Kunin’s book, along with being a disappointed jester of our current political and spiritual state, is a questionably harmless enemy of the predictable and linear. More »

Published on augusti 1, 2008.
Book Review Books Bookslut
Tags: , ,