March 2012
21 posts
3 tags
mark leyner, the sugar frosted nutsack
“The Sugar Frosted Nutsack” was never actually ‘written.’ A recursive aggregate of excerpts, interpolations, and commentaries, it’s been ‘produced’ through layering and augmentation, repetition and redundancy. Composition has tended to more closely resemble the loop-based step sequencing we associate with Detroit techno music than with traditional ‘writing.’” Quite honestly, this is a pretty good...
“Even those who consider all this total bullshit have to concede that it’s...”
– Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack | Little, Brown 03.26.12
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heller continued
“I walked into the smoky cardboard box that is Harrah’s and took in the sights: an eighty-year-old man with a USS Yorktown cap in a wheelchair glued to a Buffet Mania slot machine. A zonked-out rhino of a woman with canary-yellow hair smoking two cigarettes at once and playing roulette. Morose, hunched-over players at blackjack tables, getting their cards and grumbling, then losing to the dealer....
5 tags
On the one hand, Marcus’s sentences in The Flame... →
I’m finding that one of the most reliable indications of how much I like a book — how worthwhile I think it ultimately is — comes in how much I’m interested in reading about it. And I’m still willingly reading about The Flame Alphabet, despite it being a thoroughly unlikeable reading experience. I think I slightly less than half-agree with Lee Konstantinou’s...
3 tags
ted heller, pocket kings
“Boca Barbie was a nurse and worked long shifts at a large assisted-’living’ facility in Florida. Old men and women died on her regularly, and new ones would quickly fill their places, only to perish a few weeks or months later. A never-ending supply of the dying. Kiss was married, his oldest son suffered from severe autism, and his wife was on Zoloft; the Zoloft wasn’t working although it didn’t...
4 tags
kunzru continued
“If he was a man of faith, maybe he would have found consolation? Or at least had a plan. A road map; some picture of the future… . He stood there for almost an hour, looking up at the mosaic of lighted windows, thinking about the Walter model and causality and guilt. If the world was made of signs, why couldn’t he read it? All he could say for sure was that everything was...
4 tags
kunzru continued
“It was like no other music in her collection. It started with a quivery electronic drone, the kind of noise made by the equipment you saw on old science-fiction movies, with big metal dials and wavy lines going up and down on little screens… . The effect was scary and boring at the same time, like a crazy person sitting next to you on the bus. The first time she played it she thought...
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hari kunzru, gods without men
“There was a ribbon campaign, briefly. There was a website with a counter and a PayPal button.” From the central moment in the central storyline of this book; maybe the chapter I liked the least, actually, because it seemed much more labored and rote than anything else in the book, a fragmented chapter that mirrored a character coming apart rather than a fragmented narrative because...
5 tags
harkaway continued
“And somehow Mercer is angry, because he nearly shouts. ‘Yes, Joe! It is against the law! It always is! And yet it happens. Or did you think they only did this to taxi drivers from Karachi? They do it when they feel like it, when the situation demands it. And no one cares because it never happens to them!’” Following a rather drawn-out couple chapters of clinical torture, escape, and our hero’s...
4 tags
harkaway continued
“Who makes mechanical bees, for God’s sake? Who creates a superweapon or a superwhatever-it-is and makes it so bloody whimsical?” From Mercer, who is a very specific sort of sidekick — the voice of reason, the character who undercuts the unrealistic world of the book (but by being implicated in it, confirms its reality, flattering the reader while being allied with the author’s need to draw...
5 tags
nick harkaway, angelmaker
“Party has also supplied a tool to go with. I have taken to referring to this object as the whojimmy. It resembles no tool the like of which I have ever seen, and I am to inform you that you are permitted to keep it as a souvenir or part-payment. The whojimmy is apparently necessary to gain access to certain of the moving parts of the doodah. Thus not, in fact, merely a twofer, as our...
3 tags
“In truth, to be in love with anyone is a matter of the naivete common to early...”
– Svetislav Basara, The Cyclist Conspiracy (tr. Randall A Major)| Open Letter 03.20.12
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barry continued
“You could barely walk the wynds for the large and ragged crew that bounced off the tenement walls. There were big lunks of hill-country sluggers, and pipe-mad pikeys on the loose from the rez, and syphilitic freaks with lost-time dreams in their eyes, and washed-up auld hoors, and one-legged trick ponies (the gout often a danger to the lads of that trade), and sand-pikey watches roved the...
4 tags
barry continued
“Dom would be happy to talk about the old Bohane until the clock came down the stairs, and there on the hardback chair he rocked to and fro, rhythmically, as he made notes from the Gant’s powerful recall, and the hunchback Grimes, too, was set adrift on memory bliss — ah youth; he’d been a puckish spirit in his youth, Balt Grimes; the hump hadn’t kept him from his...
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kevin barry, city of bohane
“Oh give us a grim Tuesday of December, with the hardwind taking schleps at our heads, and the rain coming slantways off that hideous fucking ocean, and the grapes nearly frozen off us, and dirty ice caked up top of the puddles, and we are not happy, exactly, but satisfied in our despair.” This is the standard register for City of Bohane — a sort of blarney-drunk mock-heroic...
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lee child, nothing to lose
“Reacher’s mother had said such things gave a room personality. Reacher himself had been unsure how anything except a person could have personality. He had been a painfully literal child.” As much as I like Lee Child, generally as a palate-cleansing sprig of parsley, this is clearly the three-sentence high point of this book. Normally so well-aware of his abilities and limits, this installment is...
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gray continued
“The detective checked his notes. ‘That’s not what this says.’ “David leaned sideways to look at the notebook. On the line where Chico pointed, he read, the toll that took. Then, of course, the institution, after your sister’s untimely passing. The next line read A home for women, followed by That’s not what this says and then If I’ve learned one...
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gray continued
“I WILL CROSS-STITCH AN IMAGE OF YOUR FUTURE HOME BURNING. I WILL HANG THIS IMAGE OVER YOUR BED WHILE YOU SLEEP.” One of the threats, which are perfect surreal snowflakes. But the best part is the response: David has found this, in a tiny coil, taped around the base of his dead wife’s eye cream. He speculates, immediately, about “the possibility that the threat had been included with the product...
7 tags
amelia gray, threats
“The tape on the package was striped with waxed string. David dug his fingernails underneath the perimeter of the tape and clawed at it. He didn’t want to go to the kitchen for a knife, and he spent an extra piece of time examining the entire package to find the loose end that could be pulled up. Inside the package was a Styrofoam carton, sealed with another kind of thick tape. A receipt was...
