Dennis Haritou: Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Angel’s Game is a city. It is Barcelona in the early 20th century. Broad, sunny boulevards with crowds, outdoor markets and palatial buildings lie jumbled, like tangled electrical wires, with hazy residential avenues, with slums like human sewers and back alleys black with shadows. If you manage to reach the perimeters of this spider-like labyrinth of a polis, you are confronted with either the shore of the Atlantic with its shacks of derelicts and soothsayers or the Pueblo Neuvo cemetery.
Our hero, Martin, learns the writer’s craft by dumping himself on the steps of
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The nice folks at McSweeneys sent us a trailer for this fine new book by Art Spiegelman. Go buy this book…or else. Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EemERwpa9Zg
Jason Chambers: I was a bit surprised when the guys pointed me toward this book as review option, as it initially seemed like something I would not pay much attention to. It looks like just another thriller, and with us having recently reviewed Beat the Reaper, and evokes a lot of the similar motifs from that book. Two meth-head Cape Town gangsters on an unrelated errand break into Jack Burns’ house and end up dead. Of course, he can’t call the cops, since he and his family are on the lam from U.S. authorities. So, he disposes of the bodies, and,
The Raymond Carver short story ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’ starts off the collection of photographs in this incredibly vibrant book, Yard Sale Photographs, by Adam Bartos. This is a magnetizing set of images taken from different yard sales. It seems cosmically perfect that Raymond Carver has a story about a man putting his bedroom set out on his front lawn, not hoping to sell it, but attracting interest just the same, Adam Bartos must like Carver. They say when you’re trying to sell your home you should put a pot of boiling water on the stove, fill it with chopped apples and
The ridiculously talented Chad Kultgen seems to be stuck in a holding pattern. His point of view is going to offend anyone who slows down long enough to take a look. Yes, it’s like a car crash, or the last few minutes of ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’, where Jennifer Jason Leigh…you get the idea. Last summer I picked up the very funny ‘Average American Male’ and wondered why on earth this kind of writing hadn’t seen the light of day before. It’s offensive, full of juicy sex, and misogynistic. The hatred of women leaps of the page like a wet fart.
When I was in college my mom and I took one of our many trips to NYC, where we would have lunch , stop into a few bookstores, and occasionally go to Soho to visit galleries. (Soho you say? What’s that?) On one trip I picked up a paperback copy of Richard Avedon’s incredible book of photographs, ‘In The American West’. I remember looking at the pictures the entire ride home and then using the inspiration I got from it in my
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