MJ's bookshelf: all

MJ's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 04 Apr 2025 06:39:31 -0700 60 MJ's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Astragal 21222632 208 Albertine Sarrazin 1846689414 MJ 0 currently-reading 3.50 1965

author: Albertine Sarrazin
name: MJ
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1965
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> End of I. 17086 tense, breakneck reflections on loss in all contexts are imbued with remarkable urgency and warmth.]]> 250 Stephen Dixon 1932416536 MJ 4 merkins, novels 3.73 2006

author: Stephen Dixon
name: MJ
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: merkins, novels
review:
The last outing from Dixon’s alter-ego I. is another novel-in-stories poking into past wounds for wistful and comic effect written in trademark Dixonese. Among the highlights is a modern breakup tale that has the violent desperation and pathos of an angst-ridden Victorian classic and a story exploring the passing of a former friend that captures the shrug of sorrow when a phantom of the past formally ceases to exist.
]]> Hard Times 2859195 Thomas Gradgrind is the guiding luminary of the Coketown school, stern proponent of the Philosophy of Fact, whose ill-conceived idealism blinds him to the essential humanity of those around him, with calamitous results. His daughter Louisa becomes trapped in a loveless marriage and falls prey to an idle seducer, and her brother Tom is ruined thanks to their father's pet theories. Meanwhile Sleary's circus offers a vision of escape and entertainment, a joyful contrast to the dreariness of life in Coketown. The hardship of the workers and the victimization of Stephen Blackpool are set against the exuberance of the circus people in Dickens's much-loved moral tale. Gradgrind is forced to reconsider his cherished system when he realizes that 'Facts alone' are not, after all, enough. (From the back cover)

Hard Times is Dickens's shortest novel, and arguably his greatest triumph. A useful appendix of the author's working notes, together with an enlightening introduction and full explanatory notes, will ensure that this edition becomes the obvious choice for anyone studying the novel. Paul Schlike is Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen.

]]> 299 Charles Dickens 0199536279 MJ 3 Hard Times opens with the usual Dickens comic brio and sabre-toothed satire. Mr Gradgrind’s pursuit of Facts, Facts, Facts deadens his daughter Louisa’s sense of Fancy and humour, until she relents to a marriage to Mr. Bounderby—surely the progenitor of Monty Python sketch. As the novel moves into its second half, the melodramatic and laboured Steven Blackpool narrative distracts from the more poignant story of circus orphan Sissy and the Gradgrinds. Steven’s phonetic Lancastrian dialect is unnecessarily distracting and the social commentary becomes somewhat tedious upon the arrival of the saucy politician. Too much time is devoted to Mrs Sparsit, a bland fallen lady at the mercy of Bounderby, not enough to Sissy. Let’s not forget the phonetically rendered Lisp of Mr. Sleary, or the hysterical (in the wrong way) fate of Stephen. Apart from these complaints Hard Times is fine: the story isn’t dreary, only the individual elements and plotting seemed a little subpar.
]]> 3.30

author: Charles Dickens
name: MJ
average rating: 3.30
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2012/09/03
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: novels, oxford-classics, pre-1900s, sassysassenachs
review:
Hard Times opens with the usual Dickens comic brio and sabre-toothed satire. Mr Gradgrind’s pursuit of Facts, Facts, Facts deadens his daughter Louisa’s sense of Fancy and humour, until she relents to a marriage to Mr. Bounderby—surely the progenitor of Monty Python sketch. As the novel moves into its second half, the melodramatic and laboured Steven Blackpool narrative distracts from the more poignant story of circus orphan Sissy and the Gradgrinds. Steven’s phonetic Lancastrian dialect is unnecessarily distracting and the social commentary becomes somewhat tedious upon the arrival of the saucy politician. Too much time is devoted to Mrs Sparsit, a bland fallen lady at the mercy of Bounderby, not enough to Sissy. Let’s not forget the phonetically rendered Lisp of Mr. Sleary, or the hysterical (in the wrong way) fate of Stephen. Apart from these complaints Hard Times is fine: the story isn’t dreary, only the individual elements and plotting seemed a little subpar.

]]> Later Stories 60805711

Alexander Theroux now comes to us in full flame with Later Stories, a collection of 13 new explosive narratives, only one which has been previously published, the third and last volume of this series, including Early Stories and Fables. His genius for plot, the power of his sparkling invention, the unsparing brilliance of his satire, the unforeseen twists and force of irony he wields, along with the astounding philosophical sense that inform his insights, are truly matchless. No scenario is predictable. Intrigue underpins the tale of an enigmatic Iraqi writer who is sought out with devastating consequences. We encounter an opinionated feminist poet from Maine, merciless in her impatience but eminently quotable. An operatic tenor in Italy faces down a waistline problem. A greedy diamond merchant flees Nazi-occupied France only to meet with grave consequences. Why in one story does a ballerina refuse to appear at curtain calls? What, in another, is the unforeseen and final turn of fate in the life of a young, seemingly unredeemable English thug? How do books and reading effect the life of young Filipina orphan brought to New Hampshire? We are presented a masterful college lecture on a French painter that amounts to a personal confession. We meet a group of seminarians who to pass the time seek a playful diversion. False piety figures in several tales with catastrophic results. And we are treated to a new saga of the Mayflower pilgrims.

With the turn of each page, we find again Theroux's love affair with language, his passion for the perfect phrase, a scholar's pressing need to inform.

As literary critic Larry McCaffery in "A Rose to Look At" in Some Other Frequency writes, "Of contemporary fiction writers, only Alexander Theroux comes close to [poet and novelist Robert] Kelly in terms of being able to articulate his concerns within the full range of words and storytelling skills available to writers."]]> 682 Alexander Theroux 0578381451 MJ 3
Opening story ‘Rolf Vowels�� presents an uproarious caricature of a Cockernee villain—a racist, homophobic thug with an encyclopaedic command of street slang and a voice that is wildly inconsistent—one moment he’s using American terms (“freak crazy��), the next he’s using obscure words for cunnilingus (“gamahuching��), the next he’s coining portmanteau insults (“lunchbuckets��, “fudgemonkey��). In far-right Britain, where racist rhetoric is spewed frequently from politicians�� mouths, the onslaught of hate speech from this little shit sticks awkwardly in one’s craw, likewise the excruciating path to redemption via Jesus that concludes the tale.

‘The Ratmansky Diamonds�� is flat-out antisemitic and at no risk of being misunderstood as satire, un-PC comedy, or anything approximating humorous. The story concerns a wealthy Jewish couple named Ratmansky (rat man—tee-hee!) besotted with precious diamonds, who secrete their spoils on a farm in bottles of garlic paste before fleeing to America at the start of the Second World War. While in America, they become incredibly fat, feeding their rapacious Jewish appetites with tucker and moolah (of course), all the while stressing over the safety of their prized minerals in war-torn France. An acrobatically kind reader of this abomination might argue Theroux is intentionally mining antisemitic stereotypes to create a wildly off-colour lark that wields the most outrageous and offensive tropes for the shock LOLs. Either Theroux is tone-deaf to the cultural sensitivity of a Christian man revelling in antisemitic tropes, or he’s merely interested in tickling his own funny bone—and there’s no denying a wild time was had writing these absurd caricatures and making them the fools of the piece—with no subtlety or knowing winks to hidden intentions behind the story. This is a catastrophically tin-eared misfire that honks of the writer’s weird unchecked bigotry and lack of any editor politely beseeching him to reconsidering letting this carbuncle ever leave the bottom drawer. (Later in the collection, Theroux address and discusses antisemitism, making the purpose behind this oddity more baffling).

Although accusations of misogyny are routinely lobbed at Theroux, the female character skewered in ‘An Interview with the Poet Cora Wheatears�� is a worthy hate-sponge—an arch, absurdly condescending lady poet who patronises and corrects everyone with whom she comes into contact, a vintage Dickensian grotesque who dismisses Marianne Moore as “cuckoo��, Ezra Pound as “twaddle��, and categorises John Ashbery, Stanley Kunitz and Jorie Graham as “comb jellies—lower than ctenophores.�� Successfully managing to plant trivia on poets such as Wallace Stevens into the story in a way that is unbothersome and woven into the comedic tapestry of the tale, this is a classic character portrait-cum-assassination in the manner of ‘A Wordstress in Williamsburg�� from Early Stories, where Theroux perfected this form.

As the collection continues, Theroux struggles to suppress the part of him that is perpetually perched over an encyclopaedia, beaverishly hunting for novel factoids and even more beaverishly eager to share those factoids to anyone who will listen. ‘The Corot Lecture�� is a lecture on French landscape painter Jean-Baptiste-Camile Corot with fictional baubles included where the lecturer admonishes his students and alludes to his divorce—flimsy contrivances to pass this lecture off as a legit story. (The lecture itself is typically erudite and interesting—should have been plopped in a trivia volume, though). Similarly, ‘Revelation Hall�� features a young girl oppressed by her religious tyrant of a father who retreats into a private realm of reading and factoid-hunting, allowing Theroux to blitz the pages with random trivia, slowing down and strangling the momentum of the fairly bleak and unremitting story which comes to an abrupt end when he runs out of ways to crowbar in the nous. As one of the few admirers of his trivia volumes (even superfan Steven Moore who wrote A Fan’s Notes has little patience for those) Einstein’s Beets or The Grammar of Rock et al, keeping the two forms separate would make for a less irritating reading experience, especially when the stories in this monstrous volume average over sixty to seventy pages each.

‘The Brawn of Diggory Priest�� retells the early days of the Mayflower settlers—a more narratively appealing way in which Theroux imparts learning into the fabric of a historical yarn. ‘Envenoming Junior�� is the collection’s stand-alone WTAF moment, an acerbic rant in which thinly veiled versions of his long-loathed brother Paul Theroux and nephew Marcel Theroux are savaged in an epic litany of beef and qualm, an exhausting roster of everything that has upset Theroux about the other Theroux over the years, leaving him the most isolated of the Theroux dynasty. As a sustained piece of fictional familial evisceration, the story is pretty impressive in its unburdening of grievance, and deserves some kudos for the audacity of its assault, but the tone of the tale is much too bitter and arrogant to scale any artistic heights, and represents the worst of this tendency toward unfiltered spleen-venting that is funnier in other works.

Limping onward through the volume, this reader eventually fled in sheer exasperation. ‘Madonna Pica��, a story about teens pranking in a seminary has some of the most subpar prose on a sentence level in the collection, forcing me to bail early and skip ‘The Missing Angel�� and ‘The Nemesis of Jawdat Dub��, stories that at a glance repeat this tired formula of outlining a character solely for the purposes of flaunting erudition. The final two shorter stories ‘Acknowledgments�� and ‘A Note on the Type�� are whimsical canapés more lighter in tone, where Theroux flexes his lexical bicep in brief. While this collection is disappointing and the poorest of the three short fiction reissues from Tough Poets Press, it’s worth reiterating the breadth of Theroux’s knowledge, and the power of his prose style where the possibilities of language are boldly exploited like no other writer out there today. As a prose artist, Theroux crafts stories that are passionately in love with words and their potential to thrill and excite the reader. Alas, his previous peaks of prose mastery mean these lesser forays stick out in a canon of uniformly astonishing work, and so are deserving of the serial whipping that this reviewer has performed—entirely out of love and admiration.

For those eager to explore Theroux’s fictive world beyond the novels, I’d recommend Early Stories as the most essential of his story collections.]]> 3.80 Later Stories

author: Alexander Theroux
name: MJ
average rating: 3.80
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/09
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: new-in-2022, merkins, short-stories, novellas, voluminous
review:
The latest in Tough Poets Press’s heroic unleashing of a lifetime’s worth of unpublished manuscripts finds Cape Cod’s premier sesquipedalian in typically uncompromising form with a new collection that encapsulates the least appealing elements of his maximalist style.

Opening story ‘Rolf Vowels�� presents an uproarious caricature of a Cockernee villain—a racist, homophobic thug with an encyclopaedic command of street slang and a voice that is wildly inconsistent—one moment he’s using American terms (“freak crazy��), the next he’s using obscure words for cunnilingus (“gamahuching��), the next he’s coining portmanteau insults (“lunchbuckets��, “fudgemonkey��). In far-right Britain, where racist rhetoric is spewed frequently from politicians�� mouths, the onslaught of hate speech from this little shit sticks awkwardly in one’s craw, likewise the excruciating path to redemption via Jesus that concludes the tale.

‘The Ratmansky Diamonds�� is flat-out antisemitic and at no risk of being misunderstood as satire, un-PC comedy, or anything approximating humorous. The story concerns a wealthy Jewish couple named Ratmansky (rat man—tee-hee!) besotted with precious diamonds, who secrete their spoils on a farm in bottles of garlic paste before fleeing to America at the start of the Second World War. While in America, they become incredibly fat, feeding their rapacious Jewish appetites with tucker and moolah (of course), all the while stressing over the safety of their prized minerals in war-torn France. An acrobatically kind reader of this abomination might argue Theroux is intentionally mining antisemitic stereotypes to create a wildly off-colour lark that wields the most outrageous and offensive tropes for the shock LOLs. Either Theroux is tone-deaf to the cultural sensitivity of a Christian man revelling in antisemitic tropes, or he’s merely interested in tickling his own funny bone—and there’s no denying a wild time was had writing these absurd caricatures and making them the fools of the piece—with no subtlety or knowing winks to hidden intentions behind the story. This is a catastrophically tin-eared misfire that honks of the writer’s weird unchecked bigotry and lack of any editor politely beseeching him to reconsidering letting this carbuncle ever leave the bottom drawer. (Later in the collection, Theroux address and discusses antisemitism, making the purpose behind this oddity more baffling).

Although accusations of misogyny are routinely lobbed at Theroux, the female character skewered in ‘An Interview with the Poet Cora Wheatears�� is a worthy hate-sponge—an arch, absurdly condescending lady poet who patronises and corrects everyone with whom she comes into contact, a vintage Dickensian grotesque who dismisses Marianne Moore as “cuckoo��, Ezra Pound as “twaddle��, and categorises John Ashbery, Stanley Kunitz and Jorie Graham as “comb jellies—lower than ctenophores.�� Successfully managing to plant trivia on poets such as Wallace Stevens into the story in a way that is unbothersome and woven into the comedic tapestry of the tale, this is a classic character portrait-cum-assassination in the manner of ‘A Wordstress in Williamsburg�� from Early Stories, where Theroux perfected this form.

As the collection continues, Theroux struggles to suppress the part of him that is perpetually perched over an encyclopaedia, beaverishly hunting for novel factoids and even more beaverishly eager to share those factoids to anyone who will listen. ‘The Corot Lecture�� is a lecture on French landscape painter Jean-Baptiste-Camile Corot with fictional baubles included where the lecturer admonishes his students and alludes to his divorce—flimsy contrivances to pass this lecture off as a legit story. (The lecture itself is typically erudite and interesting—should have been plopped in a trivia volume, though). Similarly, ‘Revelation Hall�� features a young girl oppressed by her religious tyrant of a father who retreats into a private realm of reading and factoid-hunting, allowing Theroux to blitz the pages with random trivia, slowing down and strangling the momentum of the fairly bleak and unremitting story which comes to an abrupt end when he runs out of ways to crowbar in the nous. As one of the few admirers of his trivia volumes (even superfan Steven Moore who wrote A Fan’s Notes has little patience for those) Einstein’s Beets or The Grammar of Rock et al, keeping the two forms separate would make for a less irritating reading experience, especially when the stories in this monstrous volume average over sixty to seventy pages each.

‘The Brawn of Diggory Priest�� retells the early days of the Mayflower settlers—a more narratively appealing way in which Theroux imparts learning into the fabric of a historical yarn. ‘Envenoming Junior�� is the collection’s stand-alone WTAF moment, an acerbic rant in which thinly veiled versions of his long-loathed brother Paul Theroux and nephew Marcel Theroux are savaged in an epic litany of beef and qualm, an exhausting roster of everything that has upset Theroux about the other Theroux over the years, leaving him the most isolated of the Theroux dynasty. As a sustained piece of fictional familial evisceration, the story is pretty impressive in its unburdening of grievance, and deserves some kudos for the audacity of its assault, but the tone of the tale is much too bitter and arrogant to scale any artistic heights, and represents the worst of this tendency toward unfiltered spleen-venting that is funnier in other works.

Limping onward through the volume, this reader eventually fled in sheer exasperation. ‘Madonna Pica��, a story about teens pranking in a seminary has some of the most subpar prose on a sentence level in the collection, forcing me to bail early and skip ‘The Missing Angel�� and ‘The Nemesis of Jawdat Dub��, stories that at a glance repeat this tired formula of outlining a character solely for the purposes of flaunting erudition. The final two shorter stories ‘Acknowledgments�� and ‘A Note on the Type�� are whimsical canapés more lighter in tone, where Theroux flexes his lexical bicep in brief. While this collection is disappointing and the poorest of the three short fiction reissues from Tough Poets Press, it’s worth reiterating the breadth of Theroux’s knowledge, and the power of his prose style where the possibilities of language are boldly exploited like no other writer out there today. As a prose artist, Theroux crafts stories that are passionately in love with words and their potential to thrill and excite the reader. Alas, his previous peaks of prose mastery mean these lesser forays stick out in a canon of uniformly astonishing work, and so are deserving of the serial whipping that this reviewer has performed—entirely out of love and admiration.

For those eager to explore Theroux’s fictive world beyond the novels, I’d recommend Early Stories as the most essential of his story collections.
]]> <![CDATA[Roadside Picnic (S.F. Masterworks)]]> 198220961
First published in 1972, Roadside Picnic is still widely regarded as one of the greatest science fiction novels, despite the fact that it has been out of print in the United States for almost thirty years.]]> 209 Arkady Strugatsky 1399617206 MJ 3 3.99 1972 Roadside Picnic (S.F. Masterworks)

author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: MJ
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1972
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: borscht-and-kvass, novels, science-fiction
review:
Comparing this incessantly to the Tarkovsky adaptation in my head while reading created a strange readerly dissonance, where I struggled to accept the blackly comic tone and punchiness of the characters as my mind wandered into the mercurial majesty of the cinematic Zone. Textbook reader error.
]]> <![CDATA[The Fall and Fall of Derek Haffman]]> 209605886
A pleasantly unpleasant tale told in four blissfully interminable chapters by the Milky Way’s leading virtuoso of the vowels and consonants, The Fall and Fall of Derek Haffman is the perfect read for anyone open to consider that unspecified solutions to unidentified political problems may not yield juicily delectable results.]]> 332 M.J. Nicholls 1952386748 MJ 0 my-writing 5.00 The Fall and Fall of Derek Haffman

author: M.J. Nicholls
name: MJ
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: my-writing
review:
Ever wondered if one frustrated politician could bring about a non-specific form of political revolution by pickpocketing the parliamentarians in the parliamentary lobby, then using those funds to kick-start some form of unspecified, opaque, and incomprehensible change in the governance of a nation? If so, the new novel from me is the new novel for you.
]]> The Ayatollah and I 128779997
This is the only book where English-language readers can enjoy the wit that Iranian readers have appreciated for years. This collection of Khorsandi's writing highlights a genial and inventive spirit that will be instantly attractive to readers everywhere.

Happily, his children carry on the family tradition in his son in journalism and his daughter as a top-ranking comedienne on TV, radio and in standup, mixing irreverent laughter with a sharp political edge.��]]> 160 Hadi Khorsandi MJ 3 Asghar Agha (published in London after Hezbollah called for his execution in Iran) was published in 1987, and suffers from two issues: the humour is too subtle for readers not versed in the writings of the mullahs being parodied (or the translation of the humour isn’t successful), and the pieces are reacting to events specific to the 1970/80s, so the chuckles-through-recognition have long expired. The stronger moments here are sharp, cutting broadsides thrown at authoritarian violence, and have much in common with the Soviet satire of Zinoviev or Voinovich. (P.S. British readers will be familiar with the author’s daughter, the stand-up comedian Shaparak Khorsandi).]]> 3.00 1987 The Ayatollah and I

author: Hadi Khorsandi
name: MJ
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1987
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: buried-books, middle-east, short-stories
review:
Iranian satire is not something one chances upon often in English translation, so pardon the impulse purchase. This collection of translated pieces from Khorsandi’s satirical journal Asghar Agha (published in London after Hezbollah called for his execution in Iran) was published in 1987, and suffers from two issues: the humour is too subtle for readers not versed in the writings of the mullahs being parodied (or the translation of the humour isn’t successful), and the pieces are reacting to events specific to the 1970/80s, so the chuckles-through-recognition have long expired. The stronger moments here are sharp, cutting broadsides thrown at authoritarian violence, and have much in common with the Soviet satire of Zinoviev or Voinovich. (P.S. British readers will be familiar with the author’s daughter, the stand-up comedian Shaparak Khorsandi).
]]> <![CDATA[The Universe and Other Fictions]]> 7707580 Book by West, Paul 224 Paul West 0879513160 MJ 0 half-read 2.50 1988

author: Paul West
name: MJ
average rating: 2.50
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: half-read
review:
The one collection of short fiction from exuberant novelist Paul West contains a sequence of unapologetically recondite exercises in style, each outbidding the other for weirdness or erudite blather. Other than West showcasing his wizardry with language, the stories in here are for the most part tiresome experiments.
]]> Ring for Jeeves (Jeeves, #10) 18029 240 P.G. Wodehouse 1585675245 MJ 3 novels, sassysassenachs 4.01 1953

author: P.G. Wodehouse
name: MJ
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1953
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: novels, sassysassenachs
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Serendipitous Error and An Evil Malady]]> 127282608
A Serendipitous Error, an early novella of 1839, written when Goncharov was still in his twenties, is accompanied here by An Evil Malady. Taken together, these two stories �� translated for the first time into English by Stephen Pearl �� are further proof of the eclectic narrative skills of the celebrated author of Oblomov.]]> 128 Ivan Goncharov 1847499112 MJ 3 3.70 A Serendipitous Error and An Evil Malady

A Serendipitous Error and An Evil Malady

author: Ivan Goncharov
name: MJ
average rating: 3.70
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: borscht-and-kvass, pre-1900s, short-stories
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley]]> 12455877 404 Robert Sheckley 1590174941 MJ 5 4.21 2009

Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

author: Robert Sheckley
name: MJ
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: merkins, nyrb, science-fiction, short-stories
review:

]]> Funny Dirty Little War 433730 170 Osvaldo Soriano 0930523180 MJ 0 to-read 3.79 1974

author: Osvaldo Soriano
name: MJ
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Invention of Curried Sausage]]> 281285 The Invention of Curried Sausage is an ingenious, revealing, and delightful novel about the invention of a popular German sidewalk food. Uwe Timm has heard claims that currywurst first appeared in Berlin in the 1950s, but he seems to recall having eaten it much earlier, as a boy in his native Hamburg, at a stand owned and operated by Lena Brücker. He decides to check it out. Although the discovery of curried sausage is eventually explained, it is its prehistory - about how Lena Brücker met, seduced and held captive a German deserter in Hamburg, in April, 1945, just before the war's end - that is the tastiest part. Timm draws gorgeous details from Lena's fine-grained recollections, and the pleasure these provide her and the reader supply the tale's real charm.]]> 218 Uwe Timm 0811213684 MJ 0 to-read 3.72 1993 The Invention of Curried Sausage

author: Uwe Timm
name: MJ
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Neon Bible 54123 The Neon Bible tells the story of David, a young boy growing up in a small Southern town in the 1940s. David's voice is perfectly calibrated, disarmingly funny, sad, shrewd, gathering force from page to page with an emotional directness that never lapses into sentimentality. Through it we share his awkward, painful, universally recognizable encounter with first love, we participate in boy evangelist Bobbie Lee Taylor's revival, we meet the pious, bigoted townspeople. From the opening lines of The Neon Bible, David is fully alive, naive yet sharply observant, drawing us into his world through the sure artistry of John Kennedy Toole.

John Kennedy Toole, who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole's heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole's suicide at thirty-one, that this amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication.]]> 162 John Kennedy Toole 0802132073 MJ 3 merkins, novels 3.74 1989 The Neon Bible

author: John Kennedy Toole
name: MJ
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1989
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: merkins, novels
review:
At the age of sixteen I was ensconced in my box room writing a surreal comic novella called Shirts Dancing with Nelson Mandela, a farce with talking appliances and a notable lack of dancing shirts. I was imitating my betters at the very beginning of an arduous slog to write what we might call a “passable�� literary sentence. Toole was already tooled up and ready to masterpiece, penning a sentimental work of small-town miserabilism that McSweeney’s would have hailed Debut of the Year, had Mr. Eggers been around to bestow that accolade. Observant, melancholy postcards from a very young man, Toole’s talents were better suited to the riotous comedy of his famous one, making this posthumous cash-grab eminently skippable. (And having one of the most hideous book covers ever designed also doesn’t help).
]]> Gould: A Novel in Two Novels 274525 320 Stephen Dixon 080505605X MJ 4 buried-books, merkins, novels Gould punches up there with Roth’s My Life as a Man for its exhausting candour.]]> 3.91 1997 Gould: A Novel in Two Novels

author: Stephen Dixon
name: MJ
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: buried-books, merkins, novels
review:
Dixon explores the erotic lives of awful people in this squeamish comic novel-in-two-novels. His trademark neurotic tickertape runs at full steam across both novels, the opening ‘Abortions�� cataloguing the lovers Gould Bookbinder(!) has impregnated and the subsequent known and unknown terminations, while ‘Evangeline�� focuses on one recurring lover and her stream of phony and sincere endearments and rejections. As a comic novel exploring the cruelty, futility, and selfishness of modern relationships, where no one will commit until all specific character traits of the potential partner are met to exacting standards, Gould punches up there with Roth’s My Life as a Man for its exhausting candour.
]]> Swastika Night 28812216 1984, Swastika Night projects a totally male-controlled fascist world that has eliminated women as we know them. Women are breeders, kept as cattle, while men in this post-Hitlerian world are embittered automatons, fearful of all feelings, having abolished all history, education, creativity, books, and art. The plot centers on a “misfit�� who asks, “How could this have happened?”]]> 196 Murray Constantine 1473214661 MJ 4 Man in the High Castle, before WWII had even begun, feminist author Katharine Burdekin (who published her SF under a male pseudonym) wrote this horrifying dystopian vision set 700 years into a Nazi-ruled Europe, which captures the medieval sadism of Hitler’s “vision�� with an unflinching eye. The novel has much in common with H.G. Wells’s discursive fiction of the period, i.e. light in plot and heavy on characters discoursing, and Burdekin’s world is one of knights and serfs, where history has long been erased, and the discovery of an old picture of the fat, frothing form of Hitler threatens to destroy the myth of his perfect Ayranness. Burdekin’s vision on the treatment of women is revelatory—women are kept shaven-headed and illiterate in cages for forced breeding purposes, male children are removed from their keep—showing how the subjugation of women is always top on the agenda of fascists and tyrants, something we are predictably seeing play out again in the “free�� world at the moment. ]]> 3.45 1937 Swastika Night

author: Murray Constantine
name: MJ
average rating: 3.45
book published: 1937
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: distaff, novels, sassysassenachs, science-fiction
review:
Before Philip K. Dick wrote the overrated Man in the High Castle, before WWII had even begun, feminist author Katharine Burdekin (who published her SF under a male pseudonym) wrote this horrifying dystopian vision set 700 years into a Nazi-ruled Europe, which captures the medieval sadism of Hitler’s “vision�� with an unflinching eye. The novel has much in common with H.G. Wells’s discursive fiction of the period, i.e. light in plot and heavy on characters discoursing, and Burdekin’s world is one of knights and serfs, where history has long been erased, and the discovery of an old picture of the fat, frothing form of Hitler threatens to destroy the myth of his perfect Ayranness. Burdekin’s vision on the treatment of women is revelatory—women are kept shaven-headed and illiterate in cages for forced breeding purposes, male children are removed from their keep—showing how the subjugation of women is always top on the agenda of fascists and tyrants, something we are predictably seeing play out again in the “free�� world at the moment.
]]> The Old Men at The Zoo 21041334 352 Angus Wilson 0140020799 MJ 4 novels, sassysassenachs 3.86 1961

author: Angus Wilson
name: MJ
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: novels, sassysassenachs
review:

]]> War 214575262 First Ever English Translation of an unpublished work by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the author of Journey to the End of the Night.

A major rediscovery of a manuscript, considered lost after being looted during the liberation of Paris, re-emerged in France in 2020, sparking a frenzy of interest. An essential missing link in Céline’s oeuvre.

The scene opens in a smouldering orchard in Flanders, where the French soldier Ferdinand, shell-shocked, badly wounded and surrounded on all sides by mud, corpses and destruction, tries to find his way to safety and make sense of what has happened to him since he lost consciousness. His hallucinatory wanderings eventually take him to the military hospital of Peurdu-sur-la-Lys. There, after narrowly cheating death, he strikes up a friendship with a Parisian pimp and continues to be confronted with the moral chaos and side effects of war in all their vicious and repulsive senselessness and brutality.

Written around 1934, only a couple of years after Journey to the End of the Night, War shares its protagonist, its setting and many of its themes with Céline’s most celebrated novel. Its manuscript, considered lost after being looted during the Liberation of Paris, re-emerged in France in 2020, sparking a frenzy of interest and being hailed as a major rediscovery. Translated now for the first time into English, War is a powerfully vivid, unflinching, darkly comical exploration of the physical and mental trauma of the Western Front, which provides a fascinating missing link in the writing career of one of the greatest �� and most controversial �� authors of the twentieth century.]]> 132 Louis-Ferdinand Céline 1847499163 MJ 3 War is a vintage burp of Louis-F, replete with the usual viciousness, vulgarity, and brutality of a world in schism, with a curious focus on the masturbatory habits of the war wounded. Taken from uncluttered drafts, the text has broken sentences and muddled character names, lending an extra dimension to the improvisatory chaos of a novel on the improvisatory chaos of war. The UK translator’s introduction explains his use of Cockney dialect where the French dialect was untranslatable, but this ultimately reads strangely in a novel that is as brutely Gallic as snail en croute with champignon champagne. Towards the end we are treated to a ginger Scotsman mounting a French cocotte (twice) with a vigour and stamina that made me proud to be a horny-handed son of Saltire.]]> 3.64 2022 War

author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline
name: MJ
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: new-in-2024, novels, pernod-and-gauloises
review:
An unearthed fragment of a lost novel, War is a vintage burp of Louis-F, replete with the usual viciousness, vulgarity, and brutality of a world in schism, with a curious focus on the masturbatory habits of the war wounded. Taken from uncluttered drafts, the text has broken sentences and muddled character names, lending an extra dimension to the improvisatory chaos of a novel on the improvisatory chaos of war. The UK translator’s introduction explains his use of Cockney dialect where the French dialect was untranslatable, but this ultimately reads strangely in a novel that is as brutely Gallic as snail en croute with champignon champagne. Towards the end we are treated to a ginger Scotsman mounting a French cocotte (twice) with a vigour and stamina that made me proud to be a horny-handed son of Saltire.
]]> Abba Abba 230130 128 Anthony Burgess 0749390387 MJ 3 3.45 1977

author: Anthony Burgess
name: MJ
average rating: 3.45
book published: 1977
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/02
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: novels, poems, sassysassenachs
review:
Another exuberant folly from Burgess, part rambling reimagining of the end of Keats, part showcase for tedious comic verse. Romping historical fiction with a literary swagger was the domain of Robert Nye in the 1970s, Burgess’s effort is a cut-and-shut job concealed as an experiment.
]]> Notes of a Native Son 35997466 'The story of the negro in America is the story of America ... it is not a very pretty story'

James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him the voice of his generation. Ranging over Harlem in the 1940s, movies, novels, his preacher father and his experiences of Paris, they capture the complexity of black life at the dawn of the civil rights movement with effervescent wit and prophetic wisdom.

'A classic ... In a divided America, James Baldwin's fiery critiques reverberate anew' Washington Post

'Edgy and provocative, entertainingly satirical' Robert McCrum, Guardian

'Cemented his reputation as a cultural seer ... Notes of a Native Son endures as his defining work, and his greatest' Time]]> 179 James Baldwin 0241334004 MJ 4 4.28 1955

author: James Baldwin
name: MJ
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1955
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: african-american, merkins, non-fiction, penguin-classics
review:

]]> Femmes Fatales 28152188 228 Claude Mauriac 0714502316 MJ 0 half-read 3.50 1957

author: Claude Mauriac
name: MJ
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1957
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: half-read
review:
Read 100pp. The son of Francois Mauriac was a minor nouveau roman novelist whose translated works have never been reissued. This novel features a pompous aesthete frolicking his way through a series of sexy beauts and philosophising on his sadness at having this succession of sexy romps without real love landing in his randy lap. The results are as unappetising as that sounds.
]]> Slump 15789858 96 Will Self 0863691080 MJ 3 The Quantity Theory of Insanity in 1991. ]]> 4.00 1985 Slump

author: Will Self
name: MJ
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1985
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: art-or-illustrated, buried-books, sassysassenachs
review:
For those curious as to how celebrated British novelist and thinker William Woodard Self spent his twenties, regard this first publication, a collection of comic strips featuring the titular bed-prone new wave Oblomov, a recumbent wastrel unfond of taxing things in life like sitting up. As a doodler, Self is an amateur, and across each four-panel format rarely manages to raise anything other a mild smirk. This was the eighties, remember, when bright young Oxford graduates were handed things like comic strips or columns in national broadsheets to help them in their slow weaning off the parental fiscal teat, and Self’s misstep in this medium was a necessary bump in the road to literary magnificence that followed with the publication of The Quantity Theory of Insanity in 1991.
]]> The Flagellants 413161 214 Carlene Hatcher Polite 0374526567 MJ 4 The Flagellants is a curious treat, available as a POD book from the original publisher. ]]> 4.38 1966

author: Carlene Hatcher Polite
name: MJ
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: african-american, distaff, buried-books, merkins, novels
review:
An original novel that as the blurb states explores the “bitter antagonism between black men and women�� (the titular flagellation), in an unabashedly intellectual style, weaving bold and complex imagery around stylised dialogues between the two antagonists. Surreal, inscrutable at points, with a mesmerising rhythm to the prose, The Flagellants is a curious treat, available as a POD book from the original publisher.
]]> If We Must Die 131519857 137 Junius Edwards MJ 5 5.00 1963

author: Junius Edwards
name: MJ
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: african-american, buried-books, merkins, novellas
review:
The lone novel from Junius Edwards, who went on to found an advertising agency and quit fiction writing, is a brief shocker of white supremacist violence in the Dark South (where else?), where a young black man attempts to register to vote, and is met with AmeriKKKa’s finest rootin-tootin�� pond scum, who escalate the matter to a predictable pitch of barbarism. The flat, matter-of-fact prose works well for the suckerpunch the novel delivers, and the last third of the novel foreshadows the black humour of Percival Everett at his angriest and sharpest heights.
]]> Jonah's Gourd Vine 28673843 Jonah's Gourd Vine, Zora Neale Hurston's first novel, originally published in 1934, tells the story of John Buddy Pearson, "a living exultation" of a young man who loves too many women for his own good.
Lucy, his long-suffering wife, is his true love, but there's also Mehaley and Big 'Oman, as well as the scheming Hattie, who conjures hoodoo spells to ensure his attentions. Even after becoming the popular pastor of Zion Hope, where his sermons and prayers for cleansing rouse the congregation's fervor, John has to confess that though he is a preacher on Sundays, he is a "natchel man" the rest of the week.
And so in this sympathetic portrait of a man and his community, Zora Neale Hurston shows that faith, tolerance, and good intentions cannot resolve the tension between the spiritual and the physical. That she makes this age-old dilemma come so alive is a tribute to her understanding of the vagaries of human nature.]]> 324 Zora Neale Hurston MJ 4 3.67 1934 Jonah's Gourd Vine

author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: MJ
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1934
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: african-american, distaff, merkins, novels
review:
Hurston’s premiere is a riveting portrait of a “yaller�� black man (born to a white father), cast out by his stepfather to a new life across the creek, from years of poverty and wifely strife to legendary status as a preacher. A sharp, unjudging portrait, John Pearson’s character is one of self-indulgence, philandering, and family neglect, elevated by Hurston’s perfect dialogue that captures the patois, the slang, the timbre of her characters with precision and panache. Uneven in plotting—the novel accelerates from lengthy portions of John’s childhood into his ascension to preaching royalty with casual leaps of chronology, skittering over formative moments towards the tragedies and tumults.
]]> <![CDATA[Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass]]> 6526854 "I was born in Tuckahoe. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant."

So begins the now-classic personal account of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), who was born into slavery in Maryland and after his escape to Massachusetts in 1838 became an ardent abolitionist and campaigner for women's rights. His Narrative, which was an instant bestseller upon publication in 1845, relates his experience as a slave, the cruelty he suffered at the hands of his masters, his struggle to educate himself, and his fight for freedom.

Written with much passion, and with no small degree of striking biblical imagery, the Narrative came to assume epic proportions as a fundamental anti-slavery text, an accessible record in which the author had carefully crafted both his life story and his persona. The introduction and notes for this new edition fully examine Douglass--the man and the myth--while also considering both his complex relationship with women and the enduring power of his autobiography. Other highlights include extracts from Douglass's primary sources and examples of his writing on women's rights.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
]]> 176 Frederick Douglass 0199539073 MJ 5 4.17 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

author: Frederick Douglass
name: MJ
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1845
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: african-american, bifographies, merkins, non-fiction, oxford-classics, pre-1900s
review:

]]> Dirty Bird Blues 58536102
The PRH Audio book of Dirty Bird Blues by Clarence Major won a 2022 EARPHONE AWARD. Narrated by Dion Graham.

A Penguin Classic

Set in post-World War II Chicago and Omaha, the novel features Manfred Banks, a young, harmonica-blowing blues singer who is always writing music in his head. Torn between his friendships with fellow musicians and nightclub life and his responsibilities to his wife and child, along with the pressures of dealing with a racist America that assaults him at every turn, Manfred seeks easy answers in "Dirty Bird" (Old Crow whiskey) and in moving on. He moves to Omaha with hopes of better opportunities as a blue-collar worker, but the blues in his soul and the dreams in his mind keep bringing him back to face himself. After a nightmarish descent into his own depths, Manfred emerges with fresh awareness and possibility. Through Manfred, we witness and experience the process by which modern American English has been vitalized and strengthened by the poetry and the poignancy of the African-American experience. As Manfred struggles with the oppressive constraints of society and his private turmoil, his rich inner voice resonates with the blues.]]> 384 Clarence Major 0143136593 MJ 5 3.72 1996 Dirty Bird Blues

author: Clarence Major
name: MJ
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: african-american, novels, merkins, penguin-classics
review:
A prolific artist, poet, and novelist, Clarence Major published a slate of avant-garde novels in the 70s and 80s, some with Fiction Collective, before turning to more conventional realism in the 1990s and beyond. The rhythms of the early blues pioneers powers this delightful novel set in the 50s, following frustrated bluesman Manfred across his work, relationship, and musical misadventures as he forges a new life in Omaha with his woman while wrestling the dirty bird (the bottle, the booze, the liquid crack). A triumph of smooth, melodious prose, with pitch-perfect dialect of the period, Major’s most famous novel is a captivating frolic peppered with blues lyrics that bring to mind the early days of Muddy, Hooker, and the Wolf.
]]> Queer 10287367 150 William S. Burroughs MJ 4 Gravity’s Rainbow for the first and last time. Queer fits the bill except, by today’s standards, the book is a little prude in tight Speedos with its danglies between its thighs asking us to love it if we’d only give it a chance. Will Lee is a homosexual-in-training in pursuit of reluctant, disobliging ass that often makes him cry, so unsure is he of his own sexuality. This is a weird piece of tortuousness. But an interesting one.]]> 3.38 1985 Queer

author: William S. Burroughs
name: MJ
average rating: 3.38
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2012/09/06
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: novellas, tortured-artists, merkins, penguin-classics
review:
Certain “cult�� writing earns this status because the prose is so transparent and simple it instantly appeals to teenage males done with Easton Ellis and Kerouac who want to up their shock quotient before attempting to read Gravity’s Rainbow for the first and last time. Queer fits the bill except, by today’s standards, the book is a little prude in tight Speedos with its danglies between its thighs asking us to love it if we’d only give it a chance. Will Lee is a homosexual-in-training in pursuit of reluctant, disobliging ass that often makes him cry, so unsure is he of his own sexuality. This is a weird piece of tortuousness. But an interesting one.
]]> Cane 765172 Cane is a powerful work of innovative fiction evoking black life in the South. The sketches, poems, and stories of black rural and urban life that make up Cane are rich in imagery. Visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and flame permeate the Southern landscape: the Northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. Impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic, the pieces are redolent of nature and Africa, with sensuous appeals to eye and ear.
]]> 116 Jean Toomer 0871401517 MJ 4 3.86 1923 Cane

author: Jean Toomer
name: MJ
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1923
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/14
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: african-american, merkins, poems, short-stories
review:

]]> The Heat's On 55877598
Detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones have lost two criminals. Pinky ran off - but it shouldn't be hard to track down a giant albino in Harlem. Jake the drug dealer, though, isn't coming back - he died after Grave Digger punched him in the stomach. And his death might cost them both their badges. Unless they can track down the cause of all this mayhem - like the African with his throat slit and the dog the size of a lion with an open head wound.

Chester Himes's hardboiled tales of Harlem have a barely contained chaos and a visceral, macabre edge all their own.]]> 224 Chester Himes 0241521106 MJ 4 3.80 1961 The Heat's On

author: Chester Himes
name: MJ
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: african-american, merkins, novels
review:
Another lowdown and sweat-drenched tale of depravity from the master of unhinged, convoluted, and supercool noir.
]]> Dangerlok 25325382 - Back cover]]> 125 Eunice de Souza 0143065076 MJ 0 to-read 3.62 2003

author: Eunice de Souza
name: MJ
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Outsider 54898511
Cross Damon is disenchanted. At odds with society, and with himself, his idealism and sense of alienation have driven him to drink and incessant reflection. But when Cross is mistakenly reported to have died, he is suddenly free to put his ideals to the test - and a reign of terror and destruction ensues.

A counterpart to Wright's 1940 novel, Native Son , The Outsider is Wright's existential masterpiece. An epic exploration of criminality and oppression its publication established Wright as America's most daring, and damning writers.]]> 512 Richard Wright 1784876976 MJ 4 The Outsider is a riveting potboiler exploring a man beyond morality, a man unsqueezable into his class, his skin colour, his environment, and the hypocritical laws of his country. A searing tale of violence and psychological terror, with a sturdy slapdown of the Fascist and Communist movements of the 1950s, Wright’s second opus serves up another explosion of insight from one of the most vital American novelists, portraying a world as claustrophobic as that described in the breathless story/novel The Man Who Lived Underground.]]> 4.29 1953 The Outsider

author: Richard Wright
name: MJ
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1953
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: african-american, novels, merkins
review:
Wright’s second behemoth suffers from an abundance of Dostoevskian noodling and a fondness for tubthumping in the manner of late H.G. Wells. This takes the form of antihero Damon Cross launching into frenzies of eloquent discourse when being interrogated by twitchy Commies and humpbacked DAs in a manner that stretches credulity to snapping point. This quirk aside, The Outsider is a riveting potboiler exploring a man beyond morality, a man unsqueezable into his class, his skin colour, his environment, and the hypocritical laws of his country. A searing tale of violence and psychological terror, with a sturdy slapdown of the Fascist and Communist movements of the 1950s, Wright’s second opus serves up another explosion of insight from one of the most vital American novelists, portraying a world as claustrophobic as that described in the breathless story/novel The Man Who Lived Underground.
]]> <![CDATA[The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Other Writings]]> 1035817 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Other Writings, by James Weldon Johnson, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics��series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

��
In his long career James Weldon Johnson established himself as a poet, composer, lawyer, diplomat, educator, and journalist. Yet he wrote only one novel: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Published anonymously in 1912, it received scant notice until its reissue in 1927 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. A landmark in African-American writing, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was the first black novel written in the first person, and a trailblazer for writers exploring racial ambiguity. It served as an eloquent model for later writers ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.

A coming-of-age story about a man whose light skin enables him to “pass�� for white, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man describes a remarkable journey through the strata of black and white society at the turn of the twentieth century. From a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club in New York, from hobnobbing with European aristocrats to jamming with ragtime musicians, the unnamed narrator struggles to forge an identity in a culture that recognizes nothing but color. At the end, he discovers that the decision to pass brings its practitioners little more than a ruinous self-denial.
��
This edition also includes a selection of Johnson’s poetry and newspaper writings.
��

Noelle Morrissette is Lecturer of African-American Studies and English Literature at Yale University, where she received her Ph.D. in 2002.]]> 208 James Weldon Johnson 1593082894 MJ 3 3.64 1912 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Other Writings

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Other Writings

author: James Weldon Johnson
name: MJ
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1912
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/06
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: african-american, merkins, novels, poems
review:
Influential and path-breaking African-American novel from 1912 that lingers a little on the protagonist’s childhood, slouching into a semi-picturesque semi-social tale in the second half—unexciting prose enhanced by timeless racial commentary.
]]> Home to Harlem 999816 340 Claude McKay 1555530249 MJ 4 3.64 1928

author: Claude McKay
name: MJ
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1928
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/02
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: african-american, merkins, novels
review:
1920s Harlem comes alive, with a soupcon of the sentimental, in this classic of the Renaissance—a throbbing, sweating, pulsating account of life before the Great Crash.
]]> Wounded 1401180 207 Percival Everett 0571232442 MJ 4 3.89 2005 Wounded

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2010/10/29
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: novels, merkins, african-american
review:
A warm but gritty book about a reluctant horse trainer saving lives and kicking ass.
]]> Reckless Eyeballing 855411 148 Ishmael Reed 1564782379 MJ 5
In this book, the characters wear their sexist and racist prejudices on their sleeves. Imagine a world where everyone spoke their minds and everything was determined by class, race and gender. Oh no, hang on . . . we're in that world. Oops.]]> 3.59 1986 Reckless Eyeballing

author: Ishmael Reed
name: MJ
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1986
rating: 5
read at: 2010/11/12
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: novels, dalkey-archive, merkins, african-american
review:
Another gloriously talented writer hanging with the cool Dalkey kids. This is a scathing satire on race, couched in a scathing satire on the NY theatre scene. Ian is a Creole playwright who finds his success by toning down his misogynist content to please the feminist crowd.

In this book, the characters wear their sexist and racist prejudices on their sleeves. Imagine a world where everyone spoke their minds and everything was determined by class, race and gender. Oh no, hang on . . . we're in that world. Oops.
]]> The Terrible Threes 1403481 192 Ishmael Reed 1564782247 MJ 2 Reckless Eyeballing but this novel is a mess. There are a dozen or so plots at large in this 180-page novel, most of which revolve around something that happened in a previous Reed book. Most of the characters speak in the same voice and the range of personnel involved makes it impossible to tell them apart, to pick up a narrative thread, to clear the fug—something.

All that remains is Reed’s ironical prose, which is entertaining in spots. In Reckless Eyeballing there was a greater purpose, a more disciplined spume of bile, but here Reed seems to be chatting to himself. The satire has little purpose in this book, and despite a few hints at genius, I ended up flitting from page to page looking for engaging mini-stories.

I will read more from Reed, though. I do like his style.
]]> 3.62 1989 The Terrible Threes

author: Ishmael Reed
name: MJ
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1989
rating: 2
read at: 2010/12/12
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: novels, dalkey-archive, merkins, african-american
review:
I loved Reckless Eyeballing but this novel is a mess. There are a dozen or so plots at large in this 180-page novel, most of which revolve around something that happened in a previous Reed book. Most of the characters speak in the same voice and the range of personnel involved makes it impossible to tell them apart, to pick up a narrative thread, to clear the fug—something.

All that remains is Reed’s ironical prose, which is entertaining in spots. In Reckless Eyeballing there was a greater purpose, a more disciplined spume of bile, but here Reed seems to be chatting to himself. The satire has little purpose in this book, and despite a few hints at genius, I ended up flitting from page to page looking for engaging mini-stories.

I will read more from Reed, though. I do like his style.

]]> Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down 43017 Mumbo Jumbo and one of America's most innovative and celebrated writers. Reed demolishes white American history and folklore as well as Christian myth in this masterful satire of contemporary American life. In addition to the black, satanic Loop Garoo Kid, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down features Drag Gibson (a rich, slovenly cattleman), Mustache Sal (his nymphomaniac mail-order bride), Thomas Jefferson and many others in a hilarious parody of the old Western.]]> 177 Ishmael Reed 1564782387 MJ 4 Blazing Saddles—almost as funny, twice as anarchic. Written in a series of stand-alone paragraph fragments, Reed sends up the genre’s clichés, taking a broader pop at American politics and race relations circa 1968. The proceedings are surreal and outré: from scandalous subversions of Western myths and characters to sudden appearances of presidents and popes. (And questionable sexual politics). I’m sure I missed most of the novel’s references and subtleties, but I had a rootin�� tootin�� darn good two hours all the same. Along similar lines, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Gold Fools.]]> 3.80 1969 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

author: Ishmael Reed
name: MJ
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2011/11/27
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: dalkey-archive, merkins, novels, african-american
review:
A Wild West satire predating Blazing Saddles—almost as funny, twice as anarchic. Written in a series of stand-alone paragraph fragments, Reed sends up the genre’s clichés, taking a broader pop at American politics and race relations circa 1968. The proceedings are surreal and outré: from scandalous subversions of Western myths and characters to sudden appearances of presidents and popes. (And questionable sexual politics). I’m sure I missed most of the novel’s references and subtleties, but I had a rootin�� tootin�� darn good two hours all the same. Along similar lines, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Gold Fools.
]]> Giovanni’s Room 38462 here.

Baldwin's haunting and controversial second novel is his most sustained treatment of sexuality, and a classic of gay literature. In a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous liaisons and hidden violence, an American finds himself unable to repress his impulses, despite his determination to live the conventional life he envisions for himself. After meeting and proposing to a young woman, he falls into a lengthy affair with an Italian bartender and is confounded and tortured by his sexual identity as he oscillates between the two.

Examining the mystery of love and passion in an intensely imagined narrative, Baldwin creates a moving and complex story of death and desire that is revelatory in its insight.]]> 159 James Baldwin MJ 5 The City & the Pillar. This novel renders Vidal’s effort a tame, breezy vacation at the hotel de homo, sizzling as it does with dirty-realist conflict, torturous identity politics, and one of the whiniest lovers since Courtney Love hooked up with the entire population of Iran. One frustrating conflict—Baldwin wanted to escape the “Negro writer�� ghetto, so made his characters (it would seem) white in this novel. Imagine the stink if he’d written about a black man-on-man romantic affair. In escaping his cage he might have bypassed the opportunity of the century. Still, Giovanni’s Room is an audacious, spectacular example of the power of literature to free the repressed, comfort the lost, and nudge the helpless toward some sort of assistance. Love this man.]]> 4.31 1956

author: James Baldwin
name: MJ
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1956
rating: 5
read at: 2012/09/07
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: novels, merkins, penguin-classics, african-american
review:
Baldwin picked up where Gore Vidal left off in The City & the Pillar. This novel renders Vidal’s effort a tame, breezy vacation at the hotel de homo, sizzling as it does with dirty-realist conflict, torturous identity politics, and one of the whiniest lovers since Courtney Love hooked up with the entire population of Iran. One frustrating conflict—Baldwin wanted to escape the “Negro writer�� ghetto, so made his characters (it would seem) white in this novel. Imagine the stink if he’d written about a black man-on-man romantic affair. In escaping his cage he might have bypassed the opportunity of the century. Still, Giovanni’s Room is an audacious, spectacular example of the power of literature to free the repressed, comfort the lost, and nudge the helpless toward some sort of assistance. Love this man.
]]> Glyph 355818 Praise for Glyph: Carol Muske-Dukes" Glyph is an answer-- and an antidote-- to not only what ails the Academy, but what ails a society without the self-knowledge to satirize itself. Percival Everett's infant genius protagonist vaults out of the playpen like Voltaire in flaming diapers-- to dispatch Theory's charlatans, kidnappers and con men in this brilliantly, wildly parodic romp. Deconstruct THIS!!!"Terry McMillan" I think Percival Everett is a genius. I've been a fan since his first novel. He continues to amaze me with each novel-- as if he likes making 90 degree turns to see what's around the corner, and then over the edge. I think he has a following, but not large enough. He's a brilliant writer and so damn smart I envy him."

]]> 208 Percival Everett 0571221122 MJ 4 Glyph features the nine-month-old mute intellectual Ralph, whose ability to write lucid, illuminating responses to his parents�� requests sends a local doctor spinning with career resentment and rouses the sinister forces of the American government, eager to use the silent poop machine as a robotic appendage of espionage. Told in short, punchy chapters with headings cribbed from Derrida and Barthes (who appears as a character), and full of dazzlingly inventive high-theory spoofery (or homage?), the novel is a wonderfully comic exploration of the world within the word and how literary theory both replenishes and dismantles the possibilities of literature. ]]> 3.77 1999 Glyph

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2012/09/27
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: novels, merkins, african-american
review:
A sublime satirical romp, as if Ishmael Reed had been reincarnated as an angry young grammatologist. Glyph features the nine-month-old mute intellectual Ralph, whose ability to write lucid, illuminating responses to his parents�� requests sends a local doctor spinning with career resentment and rouses the sinister forces of the American government, eager to use the silent poop machine as a robotic appendage of espionage. Told in short, punchy chapters with headings cribbed from Derrida and Barthes (who appears as a character), and full of dazzlingly inventive high-theory spoofery (or homage?), the novel is a wonderfully comic exploration of the world within the word and how literary theory both replenishes and dismantles the possibilities of literature.
]]> Invisible Man 176958 'One of the most important American novels of the twentieth century' The Times

'It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves'

Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible 'simply because people refuse to see me'. Published in 1952 when American society was in the cusp of immense change, the powerfully depicted adventures of Ellison's invisible man - from his expulsion from a Southern college to a terrifying Harlem race riot - go far beyond the story of one individual to give voice to the experience of an entire generation of black Americans.

This edition includes Ralph Ellison's introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man, a fascinating account of the novel's seven-year gestation.

With an Introduction by John F. Callahan

'Brilliant' Saul Bellow]]> 581 Ralph Ellison MJ 5 tour de force: timeless, breathtaking, politically ablaze, tremendously comic. I only have one more thing to say:

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[spoilers removed]]]> 3.94 1952 Invisible Man

author: Ralph Ellison
name: MJ
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1952
rating: 5
read at: 2012/10/21
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: novels, merkins, penguin-classics, worshipped, picaresque, second-read, african-american
review:
A powerful, energetic tour de force: timeless, breathtaking, politically ablaze, tremendously comic. I only have one more thing to say:

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[spoilers removed]
]]> Juneteenth, Engl. ed. 10152796 400 0141183039 MJ 4 Dead Souls II serving as the ur-example of what happens when an author fails to follow up a masterpiece and loses his sanity and reputation in the process. Whether Ellison lost his sanity trying to complete his Untitled Second Novel is unclear—forty years trying to follow up one of the Great American Novels Invisible Man suggests a lack of coherence and confidence in his vision—but the posthumous papers on his desk attest to a Gogolian faff-up of towering proportions. The exception to my rule is when brave, passionate editors can cut-and-paste satisfying works from the mess—Michael Pietsch’s heroic work on DFW’s The Pale King being the obvious example—and John F. Callahan has whittled down the 2000+ pages into a slim and satisfying whole from various pre-published fragments and a longer excerpt to make Juneteenth. As a novel, the work is at its most powerful during Reverend Hickman’s oratorical rampages, and the POV makes use of radical shifts, from straight third-person to first-person merging with internal monologue, and the unusual dropping of speech marks during conversations to create a distance between the white senator Sunraider (raised by Hickman) and the Rev. The central storyline is the upbringing of Sunraider and his parentage, interspersed with all manner of fascinating episodes intended to form part of a MUCH larger saga on Black America in the early 20thC. The Modern Library released a longer attempt to sculpt the intended masterpiece in 2010 as Three Days Before the Shooting . . .]]> 3.40 1999 Juneteenth, Engl. ed.

author: Ralph Ellison Edited by John F. Callahan
name: MJ
average rating: 3.40
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2013/06/30
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, penguin-classics, african-american
review:
My rule with unfinished or abandoned novels is to leave them festering lonesome on shelves as embarrassing reminders of a writer’s all-too-human faffiness—Gogol’s Dead Souls II serving as the ur-example of what happens when an author fails to follow up a masterpiece and loses his sanity and reputation in the process. Whether Ellison lost his sanity trying to complete his Untitled Second Novel is unclear—forty years trying to follow up one of the Great American Novels Invisible Man suggests a lack of coherence and confidence in his vision—but the posthumous papers on his desk attest to a Gogolian faff-up of towering proportions. The exception to my rule is when brave, passionate editors can cut-and-paste satisfying works from the mess—Michael Pietsch’s heroic work on DFW’s The Pale King being the obvious example—and John F. Callahan has whittled down the 2000+ pages into a slim and satisfying whole from various pre-published fragments and a longer excerpt to make Juneteenth. As a novel, the work is at its most powerful during Reverend Hickman’s oratorical rampages, and the POV makes use of radical shifts, from straight third-person to first-person merging with internal monologue, and the unusual dropping of speech marks during conversations to create a distance between the white senator Sunraider (raised by Hickman) and the Rev. The central storyline is the upbringing of Sunraider and his parentage, interspersed with all manner of fascinating episodes intended to form part of a MUCH larger saga on Black America in the early 20thC. The Modern Library released a longer attempt to sculpt the intended masterpiece in 2010 as Three Days Before the Shooting . . .
]]> The Terrible Twos 17024 192 Ishmael Reed 1564782263 MJ 2 Mumbo Jumbo, The Freelance Pallbearers, Reckless Eyeballing and Yellow Radio Back Broke-Down all demonstrate this innovator’s outlandish skill at bending the language to service his devilishly satirical agendas. Alongside its sequel, The Terrible Threes, this novel is written in a matter-of-fact style, in simple unexciting sentences, stuffed with increasingly dull surrealism and rambling and often unfunnily callous satire. Comedic novels need to be anchored in some sort of believable reality before they go nuts, and Reed stretches his comedy far past the point this reader was particularly interested in anything on the page, apart from the amusing dialogue and diverting shenanigans. Get thee to more Reed, people!—but not this one.]]> 3.63 1988 The Terrible Twos

author: Ishmael Reed
name: MJ
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1988
rating: 2
read at: 2013/07/08
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: dalkey-archive, novels, merkins, african-american
review:
Ishmael is well-served in print—all poems and plays and essays and novels widely available—but his readership is hardly vast. Even among my GR brethren, hardy wielders of the spade, intrepid adventurers in the unseen original, Reed rarely pops up with a tickled five-star write-up. Hardly a potent point to make, says you, in this two-star review, but be ye not flippant, because works like Mumbo Jumbo, The Freelance Pallbearers, Reckless Eyeballing and Yellow Radio Back Broke-Down all demonstrate this innovator’s outlandish skill at bending the language to service his devilishly satirical agendas. Alongside its sequel, The Terrible Threes, this novel is written in a matter-of-fact style, in simple unexciting sentences, stuffed with increasingly dull surrealism and rambling and often unfunnily callous satire. Comedic novels need to be anchored in some sort of believable reality before they go nuts, and Reed stretches his comedy far past the point this reader was particularly interested in anything on the page, apart from the amusing dialogue and diverting shenanigans. Get thee to more Reed, people!—but not this one.
]]> Mumbo Jumbo 985324 The Classic Freewheeling Look at Race Relations Through the Ages Mumbo Jumbo is Ishmael Reed's brilliantly satiric deconstruction of Western civilization, a racy and uproarious commentary on our society. In it, Reed, one of our preeminent African-American authors, mixes portraits of historical figures and fictional characters with sound bites on subjects ranging from ragtime to Greek philosophy. Cited by literary critic Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred most significant books in the Western canon, Mumbo Jumbo is a trenchant and often biting look at black-white relations throughout history, from a keen observer of our culture.]]> 224 Ishmael Reed 0689707304 MJ 3 Yellow Radio and Freelance Pallbearers, which is a shame, because his skill in that regard is nonpareil. ]]> 3.72 1972 Mumbo Jumbo

author: Ishmael Reed
name: MJ
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1972
rating: 3
read at: 2013/07/13
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, african-american
review:
Reed is the sort of impish satirical crank whose Promethean intellect and restlessly zesty creativity tingles my funnybones, but whose books always leave me yearning for more logic, understanding and clarity. No exception here. This one is your all-out postmodern “metatext,�� splicing citations and references and photos from other texts into the body of the main text—a satire about a dancing pandemic called Jes Grew—and despite the presentational panache of the novel, nestling beneath is really another relentless absurdist farce, albeit one written by a dazzling hyperbrain. More to the point: the references of whatever African-African late 60s cultural moment under analysis are entirely lost on a 26-year-old whitey from Backwoods, Scotchland, so the book deserves a more clued-in reader. In terms of the language, Reed has dropped the wizardry from his first two books Yellow Radio and Freelance Pallbearers, which is a shame, because his skill in that regard is nonpareil.
]]> Japanese by Spring 448390
"One of the funniest satires of university politics I've ever read. Ishmael Reed is funnier than Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal." —Leslie Marmon Silko

"Reed is, as always, an American original; a wiseguy whose wisdom is the real thing," ��The Boston Sunday Globe]]> 240 Ishmael Reed 0140255850 MJ 4 Lucky Jim, suddenly it was OK to admit you worked at a university, and that teaching Advanced Polynesian Judo Rubric to squat milquetoasts from Ploverstown was in fact the apex of hip. Soon a slew of campus coms from prime inkers like Randall Jarrell and Vladimir Nabokov emerged, ending in meltdown when John Barth published the frankly silly Giles Goat-Boy—one of his valiant attempts to explode the very movement he’d created, like a smirking nihilist inventor. In the 70s and 80s, the campus novel vanished into a cloud of heretonormative properness—this, after all, was the providence of Randy Male Authors, and nothing was funny in the Reagan-Thatcher 80s. In 1993, Ishmael Reed (who appears as a character), never one to worry about trends or offence, wrote this prickly campus book, wonderfully fresh since the first to satirise campus politics from an ethnic as well as gender and generational viewpoint, full of outstanding political riffs and rants and lunacy. As to its PCitude? Forget. Good satire means never having to say you’re sorry.]]> 3.40 1993 Japanese by Spring

author: Ishmael Reed
name: MJ
average rating: 3.40
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2013/07/17
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, african-american
review:
Reed wrote a campus satire. Whatever happened to the campus satire, you ask? When Kingsley Amis published Lucky Jim, suddenly it was OK to admit you worked at a university, and that teaching Advanced Polynesian Judo Rubric to squat milquetoasts from Ploverstown was in fact the apex of hip. Soon a slew of campus coms from prime inkers like Randall Jarrell and Vladimir Nabokov emerged, ending in meltdown when John Barth published the frankly silly Giles Goat-Boy—one of his valiant attempts to explode the very movement he’d created, like a smirking nihilist inventor. In the 70s and 80s, the campus novel vanished into a cloud of heretonormative properness—this, after all, was the providence of Randy Male Authors, and nothing was funny in the Reagan-Thatcher 80s. In 1993, Ishmael Reed (who appears as a character), never one to worry about trends or offence, wrote this prickly campus book, wonderfully fresh since the first to satirise campus politics from an ethnic as well as gender and generational viewpoint, full of outstanding political riffs and rants and lunacy. As to its PCitude? Forget. Good satire means never having to say you’re sorry.
]]> Flight to Canada 1535948 192 Ishmael Reed 0689707339 MJ 5 Flight to Canada is probably Reed’s most coherently satisfying novel, despite reining in his comic exuberance, and imposing a linearity-of-sorts to the affair, only retaining a smidge of structural lunacy and unchained antics. A slave narrative set in the time of the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln’s assassination, the main storylines follow rich aesthete Arthur Swille and poet-slave Raven Quickskill, trying to flee to Canada. Swille is proslavery and even dresses his white servant as a negro slave and makes him talk the talk, and talks down to Lincoln who has come to his mansion to ask for money. Quickskill has become known through his poem ‘Flight to Canada,�� and has to keep himself moving. This summary barely tickles the surface, as the novel plays with history like playdough and moulds it into a brief and continuously stinging satire on the period, on the narratives of Beecher Stowe, Lincoln’s ropey myth, and all kinds of lousy bestiality in general. Top bookage. ]]> 3.83 1976 Flight to Canada

author: Ishmael Reed
name: MJ
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1976
rating: 5
read at: 2013/08/11
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, african-american
review:
Flight to Canada is probably Reed’s most coherently satisfying novel, despite reining in his comic exuberance, and imposing a linearity-of-sorts to the affair, only retaining a smidge of structural lunacy and unchained antics. A slave narrative set in the time of the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln’s assassination, the main storylines follow rich aesthete Arthur Swille and poet-slave Raven Quickskill, trying to flee to Canada. Swille is proslavery and even dresses his white servant as a negro slave and makes him talk the talk, and talks down to Lincoln who has come to his mansion to ask for money. Quickskill has become known through his poem ‘Flight to Canada,�� and has to keep himself moving. This summary barely tickles the surface, as the novel plays with history like playdough and moulds it into a brief and continuously stinging satire on the period, on the narratives of Beecher Stowe, Lincoln’s ropey myth, and all kinds of lousy bestiality in general. Top bookage.
]]> Juice! 9887820 344 Ishmael Reed 1564786374 MJ 4 3.59 2011 Juice!

author: Ishmael Reed
name: MJ
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2013/08/14
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: dalkey-archive, merkins, novels, art-or-illustrated, african-american
review:
The most recent novel by Reed is an excellent composite of standard-issue zany antics, canny armchair reportage, ropey cartoon work, and furious editorialising. The O.J. Simpson trial and its aftermath(s) is the ostensible “subject�� of the novel, alongside the career trials of the implausibly successful cartoonist Paul Blessings, whose narration we are tempted to take as Reed’s, but refuse to for we are enlightened. In a series of short chapters and diary-entries-as-chapters, Reed riffs on the O.J. case, leaning on the opinion that his trial dredged up a virulent strain of racism among a certain band of American whites, as though in the flick of a switch they could revert to their black-hating attitudes, and that the media response to his case opened up a sewer of bigotry and celebrity pant-sniffing that will come to define the first decade of this century. The hybrid Reed has created here is excellent: the unconventional structure and approach fits the mania of the subject matter perfectly. Reed’s relentlessness as a satirist is on show here, never lapsing into overly kooky absurdism or a wealth of trivial trivia.
]]> <![CDATA[The Last Days of Louisiana Red]]> 264071 180 Ishmael Reed 1564782360 MJ 4 3.67 1974

author: Ishmael Reed
name: MJ
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1974
rating: 4
read at: 2013/12/02
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: dalkey-archive, merkins, novels, african-american
review:

]]> American Desert 1401181 Book by Everett, Percival 304 Percival Everett 0571226620 MJ 3 Glyph, an infant prodigy fluent in Derridean theory is abducted by desperate scientists in what becomes an hilarious spoof of high-end lit-speak and an unsubtle poke at Evil Science People. The satire here is also of the Subtle-as-a-Boulder variety, taking on religious lunatics and immoral governments across a novel that lapses into ridiculous emotional manipulation and seems to mix its ruthless satire with melodramatic content in a way that collapses thudlike. The reincarnated protagonist is a failed suicide and father who learns to become A Better Person—too late. The religious lunatic is a cartoon tyrant who alongside beating his wife and kids has also abducted 27 kids (as if he wasn’t nefarious enough) and this children-in-peril plot is a heinous and obvious tugging on the reader’s anger—compounded by the insertion of the protagonist’s kid also in danger towards in end in a random and bizarre piece of cheap filler. These things aside, the novel was amusing in a none-too-cerebral way, but fails as satire for being too misanthropic and deploying well-written and observant family scenes in a way that couldn’t have been falser if they were wearing a sign that read This Novel Has a Heart—See!!! Three stars because I was entertained.]]> 3.68 2004 American Desert

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2013/12/17
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, african-american
review:
More people should be reading Everett for his humanity, wordplay, and anarchic comedy—if not this title in particular. In his novel Glyph, an infant prodigy fluent in Derridean theory is abducted by desperate scientists in what becomes an hilarious spoof of high-end lit-speak and an unsubtle poke at Evil Science People. The satire here is also of the Subtle-as-a-Boulder variety, taking on religious lunatics and immoral governments across a novel that lapses into ridiculous emotional manipulation and seems to mix its ruthless satire with melodramatic content in a way that collapses thudlike. The reincarnated protagonist is a failed suicide and father who learns to become A Better Person—too late. The religious lunatic is a cartoon tyrant who alongside beating his wife and kids has also abducted 27 kids (as if he wasn’t nefarious enough) and this children-in-peril plot is a heinous and obvious tugging on the reader’s anger—compounded by the insertion of the protagonist’s kid also in danger towards in end in a random and bizarre piece of cheap filler. These things aside, the novel was amusing in a none-too-cerebral way, but fails as satire for being too misanthropic and deploying well-written and observant family scenes in a way that couldn’t have been falser if they were wearing a sign that read This Novel Has a Heart—See!!! Three stars because I was entertained.
]]> <![CDATA[A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid]]> 355819
“If Percival Everett isn’t already a household name, it’s because people are more interested in politics than truth.”—Madison Smartt Bell, author of The Washington Square Ensemble

“Everett’s talent is multifaceted, sparked by a satiric brilliance that could place him alongside Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison . . .”�� Publishers Weekly

“I think Percival Everett is a genius. I’ve been a fan since his first novel. He continues to amaze me with each novel—as if he likes making 90-degree turns to see what’s around the corner, and then over the edge . . . He’s a brilliant writer and so damn smart I envy him.”—Terry McMillan, author of Mama

A fictitious and satirical chronicle of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond’s desire to pen a history of African-Americans—his and his aides�� belief being that he has done as much, or more, than any American to shape that history. An epistolary novel, The History follows the letters of loose cannon Congressional office workers, insane interns at a large New York publishing house and disturbed publishing executives, along with homicidal rival editors, kindly family friends, and an aspiring author named Septic. Strom Thurmond appears charming and open, mad and sure of his place in American history.

Percival Everett is the author of 15 works of fiction, among them Glyph , Watershed and Frenzy . His most recent novel, Erasure , won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and did little to earn him friends.

James Kincaid is an English professor at the University of Southern California and has written seven books in literary theory and cultural studies. These books and Kincaid himself have gradually lost their moorings in the academic world, so there was nothing left for him to do but to adopt the guise of fiction writer. Writing about madness comes easy to him.]]> 300 Percival Everett 1888451572 MJ 4 American Desert or Glyph. A fun-filled curio all the same and twice as energetic as most collaborative side-projects. ]]> 3.80 2004 A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid

A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2014/05/08
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: novels, merkins, african-american
review:
A working knowledge of the life of ex-senator Strom Thurmond (1902-2003) is not required to revel in this epistolary comedy. Thurmond was a racist and bigoted senator who in a century of existence perpetrated more than the average level of hypocritical capriciousness on the African-American people. This collaborative novel (Everett’s fingerprints more prominent) takes the satirical conceit of a notorious racist writing a racist history, and works a series of madcap correspondences around the proposition. Spoofs and lampoons of publishing interns and editors and the bizarre and disturbing relationships they inhabit create the humour in this rambunctious novel. An excellent concept with devastating satirical intentions descends into silliness quite quickly, as with other Everett novels, i.e. American Desert or Glyph. A fun-filled curio all the same and twice as energetic as most collaborative side-projects.
]]> <![CDATA[Percival Everett by Virgil Russell]]> 15792900 “Anything we take for granted, Mr. Everett means to show us, may turn out to be a lie.�� Wall Street Journal

A story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his aging father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write?

Let’s simplify: a woman seeks an apprenticeship with a painter, claiming to be his long-lost daughter. A contractor-for-hire named Murphy can’t distinguish between the two brothers who employ him. And in Murphy’s troubled dreams, Nat Turner imagines the life of William Styron. These narratives twist together with anecdotes from the nursing home, each building on the other until they crest in a wild, outlandish excursion of the inmates led by the father. Anchoring these shifting plotlines is a running commentary between father and son that sheds doubt on the truthfulness of each story. Because, after all, what narrator can we ever trust?

Not only is Percival Everett by Virgil Russell a powerful, compassionate meditation on old age and its humiliations, it is an ingenious culmination of Everett’s recurring preoccupations. All of his prior work, his metaphysical and philosophical inquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this masterful book. Percival Everett has never been more cunning, more brilliant and subversive, than he is in this, his most important and elusive novel to date.]]> 227 Percival Everett 1555976344 MJ 5 How the World Has Wronged Me and the Various Petty Revenges I Will Get on All You Selfish Bastards), plus a vexing social life to crush into submission, I have little time for meviews these daze. So—this is the best Percival Everett so far—a mind-boggling mix of unreliable and confused narrators exploring a father and son at the time of the father’s death—both personae writers whose stories and inventions mingle with cunning digressions and forkings tipping the fedora to Barthes and Derrida as in Everett’s other postmodern (and you are, Percy) romp, Glyph. This is a more mature and touching and exciting novel than his others—those that lapse into a silliness that undercuts the emotional intention. Stunning.]]> 3.71 2013 Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2014/06/14
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, african-american
review:
Due to an increased workload and slavish devotion to my ongoing novel (provisional title: How the World Has Wronged Me and the Various Petty Revenges I Will Get on All You Selfish Bastards), plus a vexing social life to crush into submission, I have little time for meviews these daze. So—this is the best Percival Everett so far—a mind-boggling mix of unreliable and confused narrators exploring a father and son at the time of the father’s death—both personae writers whose stories and inventions mingle with cunning digressions and forkings tipping the fedora to Barthes and Derrida as in Everett’s other postmodern (and you are, Percy) romp, Glyph. This is a more mature and touching and exciting novel than his others—those that lapse into a silliness that undercuts the emotional intention. Stunning.
]]> Oreo 23365264 230 Fran Ross 0811223221 MJ 4 Oreo is the only novel from a fearless humorist on a par with Ishmael Reed or Mel Brooks. Discover Fran this Friday.]]> 3.79 1974 Oreo

author: Fran Ross
name: MJ
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1974
rating: 4
read at: 2015/09/11
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: distaff, new-in-2015, novels, merkins, picaresque, african-american
review:
Reissued in 2015 from New Directions, this early-seventies punnilinguistic mistresspiece deserves a broader readership. An anarchic comedic romp, abounding in ambidextrous wordplay, mixing black and Jewish slang with technical and mathematical language, this novel is a brassy performance, sadomasochistically whip-smart, ferociously intelligent, and unafraid to wipe the smug complicity off your face with a crude or revolting image. Epic in scope (structured around the odyssey of Theseus), Oreo is the only novel from a fearless humorist on a par with Ishmael Reed or Mel Brooks. Discover Fran this Friday.
]]> Flying Home and Other Stories 25242113 The best of Ralph Ellison's short fiction.
�� Written between 1937 and 1954, these fourteen stories are a potent distillation of the genius of Ralph Ellison. Seven of them remained unpublished during Ellison's lifetime and one, 'A Storm of Blizzard Proportions' is now included in Flying Home for the first time. But they all bear the hallmarks that Ellison would bring to his classic Invisible Man: the thematic reach, musically layered voices, and sheer ebullience.
�� The tales in Flying Home range in setting from the Jim Crow South to a Harlem bingo parlor, from the hobo jungles of the Great Depression to Wales during the Second World War. By turns lyrical, scathing, touching, and transcendently wise, Flying Home and Other Stories is a historic volume, an extravagant last bequest from a giant of our literature.]]> 176 Ralph Ellison 0241215056 MJ 4 Invisible Man, might lead the reader to never approach that staggering leap forward in artistry—however, for those interested in the apprentice phase of Ellison’s career, when he wrote powerful social-realist and fanciful observational material, this selection is smashing enough. ]]> 3.83 1996 Flying Home and Other Stories

author: Ralph Ellison
name: MJ
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 2016/11/15
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, penguin-classics, short-stories, african-american
review:
Stories exhumed by executors for posthumous collections can impact on an author’s legacy. These stories, if read before the masterpiece Invisible Man, might lead the reader to never approach that staggering leap forward in artistry—however, for those interested in the apprentice phase of Ellison’s career, when he wrote powerful social-realist and fanciful observational material, this selection is smashing enough.
]]> Year of the Rat 30838403 2017 American Book Award Winner

2015 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize Winner

Marc Anthony Richardson's��Year of the Rat is a poignant and riveting literary debut narrated in an unabashedly exuberant voice.

In��Year of the Rat, an artist returns to the dystopian city of his birth to tend to his invalid mother only to find himself torn apart by memories and longings. Narrated by this nameless figure whose rants, reveries, and Rabelaisian escapades take him on a Dantesque descent into himself, the story follows him and his mother as they share a one-bedroom apartment over the course of a year.

Despite his mother’s precarious health, the lingering memories of a lost love, an incarcerated sibling, a repressed sexuality, and an anarchic inability to support himself, he pursues his dream of becoming an avant-garde artist. His prospects grow dim until a devastating death provides a painful and unforeseeable opportunity. With a voice that is poetic and profane, ethereal and irreverent, cyclical and succinct, he roams from vignette to vignette, creating a polyphonic patchwork quilt of a family portrait.]]> 236 Marc Anthony Richardson 1573660574 MJ 4 4.15 2016 Year of the Rat

author: Marc Anthony Richardson
name: MJ
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2017/07/20
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: fc2, merkins, new-in-2016, novels, african-american
review:
An ambitious and bold first novel and winner of the 2016 Ronald Sukenick Prize for innovative fiction. The blurb says “an artist returns to the dystopian city to tend to his invalid mother, only to find himself torn apart by memories and longings��, which sums up the “plot�� in a novel whose commanding feature is an acrobatic, logorrhoeic, linguistically playful and poetic, occassionally symbolic, style that runs on and on across a sequence of chapters titled after the Latin names for features of Earth’s Moon. And if that wasn’t ambitious enough, the novel also incorporates 38 attributed quotations from sources as diverse as the Book of Luke, Jean Cocteau, and the Black Panthers, in addition to abstract watercolour paintings from artist Hollis Heichemer. The music and bounce of Richardson’s prose is wonderful, and takes the reader into a range of brooding and biblical scenarios, most of them too enswathed in the densely wrought language to really present a clear picture of characters or events, instead thriving on the emotions wrenched up from the poetic heft of his images and descriptions. This stylistic assault and wanton opacity leaves the reader at times yearning for something a little more concrete, although humour and slang and wordplay make welcome appearances to add levity to the proceedings, in a novel that successfully showcases the author’s gutsy talent.
]]> Negrophobia: An Urban Parable 40537237 Negrophobia collides head on with the hydra-headed phenomenon of American racism. A screenplay for the mind, a performance on the page, a work of poetry, a mad mix of genres and styles, a novel in the tradition of William S. Burroughs and Ishmael Reed that is like no other novel, Negrophobia begins with the blonde bombshell Bubbles Brazil succumbing to a voodoo spell and entering the inner darkness of her own shiny being. Here crackheads parade in the guise of Muppets, Muslims beat conga drums, Negroes have numbers for names, and H Rap Remus demands the total and instantaneous extermination of the white race through spontaneous combustion. By the end of it all, after going on a weird trip for the ages, Bubbles herself is strangely transformed.]]> 208 Darius James 1681373297 MJ 4 3.70 1992 Negrophobia: An Urban Parable

author: Darius James
name: MJ
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2020/06/16
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, new-in-2019, novels, nyrb, african-american
review:
A scabrous and surreal novel written in script form, the bastard lovechild of Larry Cohen and Dušan Makavejev, inverting racist tropes in cartoonish scenes of righteous and hilarious incoherence to perform a brutal comic KO.
]]> Dark Days 36436060 'So the club rose, the blood came down, and his bitterness and his anguish and his guilt were compounded'

Drawing on Baldwin's own experiences of prejudice in an America violently divided by race, these searing essays blend the intensely personal with the political to envisage a better world.

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.]]> 50 James Baldwin 0241337542 MJ 5 fifty pages of the Master?!?! Absolutely shocking. ]]> 4.40 2018 Dark Days

author: James Baldwin
name: MJ
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2020/12/21
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, non-fiction, penguin-classics, african-american
review:
Only fifty pages of the Master?!?! Absolutely shocking.
]]> The Sellout 25667451
Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens―on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles―the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.

Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident―the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins―he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.]]> 289 Paul Beatty 1250083257 MJ 3 Reckless Eyeballing is namechecked) is the closest colleague in terms of the riotous flippancy and verbal froth on the history of blackness in America, and in the careening satirical lunacy present. Beatty states that the novel took five years to write, which may explain the piecemeal nature of the story, and the lack of willingness to tether the rollicking streams of frequently hilarious prose to any plot. The novel unfortunately won the Man Booker Prize in 2016, prompting this ludicrous reasoning from historian and chair of the judges Amanda Foreman:

��The Sellout is one of those very rare books that is able to take satire, which is in itself a very difficult subject and not always done well�� [Satire is a genre of literature, not a ‘subject��, who knows what she is blathering about]

“with absolutely savage wit, of the kind I haven't seen since Swift or Twain�� [implying that she was around in the age of Swift or Twain . . . also showing an stultifying ignorance of the fecund history of comic writing since those two authors ... authors critics like to cite when trying to lend credence to their opinion]

“manages to eviscerate every social taboo and politically correct, nuanced, every sacred cow�� [the novel doesn’t eviscerate many social taboos or sacred cows at all, in fact the satire is riotous but fairly tame]

“it is really a novel of our times�� [novels published in ‘our�� times are all of our times �� a nitpick, but this sort of moronic, lazy drivel proves that people like this shouldn’t be allowed to preside over dishing out literary awards].]]> 3.85 2015 The Sellout

author: Paul Beatty
name: MJ
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2021/03/28
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, new-in-2016, novels, african-american
review:
I put myself in the underwhelmed category with this novel, a rambling and unhinged ranty riff somewhat about the son of a crank academic trying to resurrect segregation in an extinct Californian town. African-American satirist Ishmael Reed (whose Reckless Eyeballing is namechecked) is the closest colleague in terms of the riotous flippancy and verbal froth on the history of blackness in America, and in the careening satirical lunacy present. Beatty states that the novel took five years to write, which may explain the piecemeal nature of the story, and the lack of willingness to tether the rollicking streams of frequently hilarious prose to any plot. The novel unfortunately won the Man Booker Prize in 2016, prompting this ludicrous reasoning from historian and chair of the judges Amanda Foreman:

��The Sellout is one of those very rare books that is able to take satire, which is in itself a very difficult subject and not always done well�� [Satire is a genre of literature, not a ‘subject��, who knows what she is blathering about]

“with absolutely savage wit, of the kind I haven't seen since Swift or Twain�� [implying that she was around in the age of Swift or Twain . . . also showing an stultifying ignorance of the fecund history of comic writing since those two authors ... authors critics like to cite when trying to lend credence to their opinion]

“manages to eviscerate every social taboo and politically correct, nuanced, every sacred cow�� [the novel doesn’t eviscerate many social taboos or sacred cows at all, in fact the satire is riotous but fairly tame]

“it is really a novel of our times�� [novels published in ‘our�� times are all of our times �� a nitpick, but this sort of moronic, lazy drivel proves that people like this shouldn’t be allowed to preside over dishing out literary awards].
]]> Their Eyes Were Watching God 730364 272 Zora Neale Hurston MJ 5 4.01 1937

author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: MJ
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1937
rating: 5
read at: 2021/10/15
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: distaff, merkins, novels, african-american
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Conjugating Hindi (American Literature)]]> 35642704 197 Ishmael Reed 1628972548 MJ 4 3.83 2018

author: Ishmael Reed
name: MJ
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2021/10/19
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: dalkey-archive, new-in-2018, merkins, art-or-illustrated, african-american
review:
Another scabrously droll satire from one of America’s funniest novelists, this one cocks a snook at the rise of far-right fascism from the perspective of a celebrity Indian academic whose seminars on ‘Was Slavery All That Bad?�� are taking conservative audiences by storm. Locking antlers with this mayhem is Peter Bowman, an increasingly insolvent academic wheeled out to counter the popularity of not apologising for slavery. As with Reed’s other comic rambles, this novel veers off happily into other tangents, including a strange story of the well-endowed Bowman pleasuring as succession of wang-keen sirens intent on sapping his strength, with frequent forays into the Hindi language and how the horrory legacy of the British occupation of India remains a lesson unlearned among comfy 2010s fascists. Reed also writes a withering portrait of his doddery self whenever he appears in the novel’s pages. Riotous.
]]> So Much Blue 31450930
Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won’t allow anyone to not his children; not his best friend, Richard; not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet (and three inches) that is covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn’t know or, more accurately, doesn’t care.

What Kevin does care about are the events of the past. Ten years ago he had an affair with a young watercolorist in Paris. Kevin relates this event with a dispassionate air, even a bit of puzzlement. It’s not clear to him why he had the affair, but he can’t let it go. In the more distant past of the late seventies, Kevin and Richard traveled to El Salvador on the verge of war to retrieve Richard’s drug-dealing brother, who had gone missing without explanation. As the events of the past intersect with the present, Kevin struggles to justify the sacrifices he’s made for his art and the secrets he’s kept from his wife.

So Much Blue features Percival Everett at his best, and his deadpan humor and insightful commentary about the artistic life culminate in a brilliantly readable new novel.]]> 236 Percival Everett 1555977820 MJ 4 3.99 2017

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/08
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, new-in-2017, novels, african-american
review:

]]> The Trees 56269278 309 Percival Everett 164445064X MJ 4 A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond for another marvellous example).

Poking into the open wound of white supremacy in the rural south in the pre-Biden era, Everett wields his kiln-fresh poker, creating hilariously racist caricatures that capture the blatant racism unleashed with the election of Trumplethinskin. He takes to the thriller with vim, maintaining a brisk pace in short chapters, balancing mordant humour with a venomous critique on America’s unsolvable race riddle, a problem sitting dormant since the end of segregation in the south—illustrated in a powerful sequence of the names of the KKK lynching victims. A master of sharp dialogue, punchy and unflinching satire, Everett once more serves up an irresistible novel that performs another necessary scissor-kick to the gut of modern America.]]> 4.06 2021 The Trees

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/31
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: new-in-2021, novels, merkins, african-american
review:
When a series of Trumpian hillbillies are murdered in the very racist town of Money, Mississippi—each victim twinned with a mutilated black corpse clutching their severed testicles, a corpse that disappears from the morgue soon after—two beleaguered black detectives are sent to investigate. Through a wise-cracking local waitress, they meet a 106-year-old root doctor who has documented every victim of lynching in the country, stretching back to the 1910s. The victims seem to have one thing in common—a connection to KKK murders of the past. As in several of Everett’s works, the plot is incidental to the blistering satire and snark-tastic political comment (consider the lesser-known epistolary smackdown A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond for another marvellous example).

Poking into the open wound of white supremacy in the rural south in the pre-Biden era, Everett wields his kiln-fresh poker, creating hilariously racist caricatures that capture the blatant racism unleashed with the election of Trumplethinskin. He takes to the thriller with vim, maintaining a brisk pace in short chapters, balancing mordant humour with a venomous critique on America’s unsolvable race riddle, a problem sitting dormant since the end of segregation in the south—illustrated in a powerful sequence of the names of the KKK lynching victims. A master of sharp dialogue, punchy and unflinching satire, Everett once more serves up an irresistible novel that performs another necessary scissor-kick to the gut of modern America.
]]> I Am Not Sidney Poitier 6080748

An irresistible comic novel from the master storyteller Percival Everett, and an irreverent take on race, class, and identity in America

I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.

Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation.

Percival Everett’s hilarious new novel follows Not Sidney’s tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not gets arrested in rural Georgia for driving while black, sparks a dinnertable explosion at the home of his manipulative girlfriend, and sleuths a murder case in Smut Eye, Alabama, all while navigating the recurrent communication problem: “What’s your name?�� a kid would ask. “Not Sidney,�� I would say. “Okay, then what is it?��

]]> 234 Percival Everett 1555975275 MJ 4 3.97 2009 I Am Not Sidney Poitier

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/11
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, african-american
review:

]]> Straight Outta Compton 781522
Straight Outta Compton is about living large, living in the fast lane. It raps to its readers about being black, being born and raised in the L.A. ghetto, being so-called "Niggaz 4-Life," being sweet on black life (for those in it, the beat goes on). It focuses on the lives of two black men, Rooster and Clive-nem, who grow up together in Compton. He and Rooster split up, fall into rival gangs-the Bloods and the Crips-and being to hate each other. Clive has other problems besides Rooster-namely, Compton. He thinks that he's made a girl pregnant. He's involved with gangs.

Straight Outta Compton samples from all aspects of black life in its search to have its characters find what rapper Heavy D. would call a, "Peaceful Journey." It wasn't just written; it was mixed by a DJ, and the result is hyped!]]> 121 Ricardo Cortez Cruz 0932511619 MJ 3 Senryu Review:

Tip-top hip-hop jive
samplin�� riffin�� & playin��
wit�� avant-pop cool]]> 3.89 1992 Straight Outta Compton

author: Ricardo Cortez Cruz
name: MJ
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1992
rating: 3
read at: 2022/05/16
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: fc2, merkins, novels, senryu-reviews, african-american
review:
Senryu Review:

Tip-top hip-hop jive
samplin�� riffin�� & playin��
wit�� avant-pop cool
]]> A Different Drummer 41725318
The reaction to this mass exodus comes from the white townsfolk who remain. Every one of whom - whether male or female, young or old, conservative, bigoted or sympathetic �� is grappling with and attempting to explain, this spontaneous rejection of subordination.

As powerful today as it was upon its first publication in 1962, William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer is a provocative and prescient triumph of satire and spirit.]]> 302 William Melvin Kelley 1787478033 MJ 5 4.25 1964

author: William Melvin Kelley
name: MJ
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1964
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/18
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, african-american
review:

]]> Dr. No 59808430 Alternative cover edition of ISBN 9781644452080

A sly, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising

The protagonist of Percival Everett’s puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means “nothing�� in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for “nothing.��) He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal, well, not gold bars but a shoebox containing nothing. Once he controls nothing he’ll proceed with a dastardly plan to turn a Massachusetts town into nothing. Or so he thinks.

With the help of the brainy and brainwashed astrophysicist-turned-henchwoman Eigen Vector, our professor tries to foil the villain while remaining in his employ. In the process, Wala Kitu learns that Sill’s desire to become a literal Bond villain originated in some real all-American villainy related to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As Sill says, “Professor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it’s time we gave nothing back.��

Dr. No is a caper with teeth, a wildly mischievous novel from one of our most inventive, provocative, and productive writers. That it is about nothing isn’t to say that it’s not about anything. In fact, it’s about villains. Bond villains. And that’s not nothing.]]> 262 Percival Everett MJ 4 Telephone and the brutal satire of The Trees, America’s most prolific and multifaceted novelist serves up a tremendous riff on the realm of Fleming. Wala Kitu (Tagalog words for nothing) is a lecturer on nothing—a svengali of nihil who stimulates his students with wild musings on zip, nada, and zilch—whose non-expertise is purchased by self-styled supervillain John Sill who intends to have his revenge on the America that took him less than seriously. His sidekick is Eigen Vector, a mathematician caught in the spell of Sill whose flip evilness provides the strongest and most violent laughs.

Everett’s commitment to sending up the tropes of Bond extends far beyond trapdoors to shark-infested pools (although there is one here), but into a far wittier realm of wordplays about nothing its (non)-self and the mathematical and philosophical contexts of nix, nil, and nowt in relation to our own lives of no significance. Kitu is an inverted Bond—an asexual academic on the autism spectrum with who has never driven a car or kissed a woman and has a close relationship with his canine Trigo—and is a far more charming presence than the superannuated cliché of vintage Bond movies this novel sends up in its unique, original way. Everett is a master of the comedic novel that actually elicits a riptide of LOLs in the reader, making Dr. No an excellent primer for the curious or those seeking the much-needed salve of hilarity in these terminally unfunny times.]]> 3.67 2022 Dr. No

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/10
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: new-in-2022, novels, merkins, african-american
review:
In Everett’s riotous return to comedy following the harrowing heights of Telephone and the brutal satire of The Trees, America’s most prolific and multifaceted novelist serves up a tremendous riff on the realm of Fleming. Wala Kitu (Tagalog words for nothing) is a lecturer on nothing—a svengali of nihil who stimulates his students with wild musings on zip, nada, and zilch—whose non-expertise is purchased by self-styled supervillain John Sill who intends to have his revenge on the America that took him less than seriously. His sidekick is Eigen Vector, a mathematician caught in the spell of Sill whose flip evilness provides the strongest and most violent laughs.

Everett’s commitment to sending up the tropes of Bond extends far beyond trapdoors to shark-infested pools (although there is one here), but into a far wittier realm of wordplays about nothing its (non)-self and the mathematical and philosophical contexts of nix, nil, and nowt in relation to our own lives of no significance. Kitu is an inverted Bond—an asexual academic on the autism spectrum with who has never driven a car or kissed a woman and has a close relationship with his canine Trigo—and is a far more charming presence than the superannuated cliché of vintage Bond movies this novel sends up in its unique, original way. Everett is a master of the comedic novel that actually elicits a riptide of LOLs in the reader, making Dr. No an excellent primer for the curious or those seeking the much-needed salve of hilarity in these terminally unfunny times.
]]> Telephone 51541232
After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, she has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughter’s slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket he’s ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission.

A deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us, Telephone is a Percival Everett novel we should have seen coming all along, one that will shake you to the core as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save.]]> 216 Percival Everett 1644450224 MJ 4 3.97 2020

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/18
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, new-in-2019, novels, african-american
review:

]]> The Body of Martin Aguilera 57482638 163 Percival Everett MJ 4 4.00 1997

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/23
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: buried-books, merkins, novels, african-american
review:

]]> Cutting Lisa 932876 147 Percival Everett 0899194125 MJ 3 Cutting Lisa (his third novel) and The Body of Martin Aguilera (his eighth) are similarly-vibed rural mysteries featuring an elderly protagonist with close a bond to a cute granddaughter becoming embroiled in fishy business in the locale. In the latter, the curious case of a vanishing corpse, in the former, the unhappy pregnancy of his daughter-in-law. Cutting Lisa (the strange title refers to an implied ending foreshadowed in the beginning) is a chatty one that unhurriedly explores the dynamic between a bunch of folks in outback Oregon, breezing along on Everett’s ear for pithy, realistic dialogue and strong knack for pacing. Half of Everett’s novels are laconic pastoral tales with a sardonic, professional tone, miles removed from the unhinged comedy of his more successful (and way more exciting) novels. Many of Everett’s works are out of print, these two among them. Ebooks available of both from Dzanc.]]> 3.88 1986 Cutting Lisa

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1986
rating: 3
read at: 2022/11/25
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: buried-books, merkins, novels, african-american
review:
Cutting Lisa (his third novel) and The Body of Martin Aguilera (his eighth) are similarly-vibed rural mysteries featuring an elderly protagonist with close a bond to a cute granddaughter becoming embroiled in fishy business in the locale. In the latter, the curious case of a vanishing corpse, in the former, the unhappy pregnancy of his daughter-in-law. Cutting Lisa (the strange title refers to an implied ending foreshadowed in the beginning) is a chatty one that unhurriedly explores the dynamic between a bunch of folks in outback Oregon, breezing along on Everett’s ear for pithy, realistic dialogue and strong knack for pacing. Half of Everett’s novels are laconic pastoral tales with a sardonic, professional tone, miles removed from the unhinged comedy of his more successful (and way more exciting) novels. Many of Everett’s works are out of print, these two among them. Ebooks available of both from Dzanc.
]]> Assumption 11019107 A baffling triptych of murder mysteries by the author of I Am Not Sidney Poitier

Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff of a small New Mexico town, is on the trail of an old woman's murderer. But at the crime scene, his are the only footprints leading up to and away from her door. Something is amiss, and even his mother knows it. As other cases pile up, Ogden gives chase, pursuing flimsy leads for even flimsier reasons. His hunt leads him from the seamier side of Denver to a hippie commune as he seeks the puzzling solution.

In Assumption, his follow-up to the wickedly funny I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett is in top form as he once again upends our expectations about characters, plot, race, and meaning. A wild ride to the heart of a baffling mystery, Assumption is a literary thriller like no other.]]> 225 Percival Everett 1555975984 MJ 4 3.64 2011

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/29
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, african-american
review:

]]> The Messenger 971772 217 Charles Stevenson Wright MJ 5 3.99 1963

author: Charles Stevenson Wright
name: MJ
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/28
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, tortured-artists, african-american
review:

]]> The Wig 54104973 179 Charles Wright MJ 5 4.00 1966 The Wig

author: Charles Wright
name: MJ
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1966
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/30
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: novels, merkins, tortured-artists, african-american
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About]]> 551776 215 Charles Stevenson Wright 0374114080 MJ 4 3.90

author: Charles Stevenson Wright
name: MJ
average rating: 3.90
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/31
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, tortured-artists, african-american
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Collected Novels of Charles Wright: The Messenger, The Wig, and Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About]]> 36590427 New York Times hailed as “malevolent, bitter, glittering”—by Charles Wright, whom Ishmael Reed hailed as “Richard Pryor on paper,�� a young, black intellectual from the South struggles to make it in New York City—with a foreword by Mat Johnson.

As fresh and poignant as when originally published in 1963 to 1973, The Messenger, The Wig, and Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About form Charles Wright’s remarkable New York City trilogy.

By turns brutally funny and starkly real, these three classic American novels create a memorable portrait of a young, working-class, black intellectual—a man caught between the bohemian elite of Greenwich Village and the dregs of male prostitution and drug abuse. Wright’s fiction is searingly original in bringing to life a special time, a special place, and the remarkable story of a man living in two worlds.

With a foreword by acclaimed novelist Mat Johnson, this updated edition not only reintroduces Wright’s fans to his darkly humorous, satirical, and eloquent prose, but also brings his unique literary talent to a host of new readers, as it shines a spotlight once again on this important writer—a writer whose work is so crucial to our times.

“Reading Wright is a steep, stinging pleasure.”—Dwight Garner]]> 416 Charles Stevenson Wright 0062839608 MJ 5 The Messenger is an ultra-hip 1960s counterculture classic, with swinging bebop autofictional prose on a par with Ralph Ellison. The Wig is a riotous romp that serves as a blueprint for the entire canon of Ishmael Reed. Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About is Wright’s swansong—the weakest of the three—rambling sketches of NYC street life taken from the author’s sordid experiences that lacks a coherent throughput. A tremendous prose artist who makes the people and the streets sing from the page in an effortless way, Wright’s three prose works are begging to be reread and rediscovered.]]> 4.50 1973 The Collected Novels of Charles Wright: The Messenger, The Wig, and Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About

The Collected Novels of Charles Wright: The Messenger, The Wig, and Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About

author: Charles Stevenson Wright
name: MJ
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/31
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, tortured-artists, african-american
review:
The Messenger is an ultra-hip 1960s counterculture classic, with swinging bebop autofictional prose on a par with Ralph Ellison. The Wig is a riotous romp that serves as a blueprint for the entire canon of Ishmael Reed. Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About is Wright’s swansong—the weakest of the three—rambling sketches of NYC street life taken from the author’s sordid experiences that lacks a coherent throughput. A tremendous prose artist who makes the people and the streets sing from the page in an effortless way, Wright’s three prose works are begging to be reread and rediscovered.
]]> Black No More 55600880 A biting 1931 science fiction satire of American racism, and one of the first works of Afrofuturism.

It's New Years Day in 1933 in New York City and Max Disher, a young black man, has just heard the a mysterious doctor has discovered a strange process that can turn black skin white—a new way to "solve the American race problem." Max, who is tired of being rejected and abused because of his dark skin, leaps at the opportunity. After receiving the "Black-No-More" procedure, he becomes Matthew Fisher, a white man who is able to attain everything he has ever money, power, and a beautiful wife. But it soon becomes apparent that America, whiter than ever, is becoming more and more dangerous . . .

An extraordinary, cutting satire, Black No More is an utterly unique work of science fiction, and one of the first works of Black speculative fiction.]]> 210 George S. Schuyler 0241505720 MJ 4 4.17 1931

author: George S. Schuyler
name: MJ
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1931
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/09
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, penguin-classics, african-american
review:

]]> The Water Cure 355820 I am guilty not because of my actions, to which I freely admit, but for my accession, admission, confession that I
executed these actions with not only deliberation and
premeditation but with zeal and paroxysm and purpose . . . The true answer to your question is shorter than the lie.
Did you? I did.��This is a confession of a victim turned villain. When Ishmael Kidder's eleven-year-old daughter is brutally murdered, it stands to reason that he must take revenge by any means necessary. The punishment is carried out without guilt, and with the usual equipment--duct tape, rope, and superglue. But the tools of psychological torture prove to be the most devastating of all.
Percival Everett's most lacerating indictment to date, The Water Cure follows the gruesome reasoning and execution of revenge in a society that has lost a common moral ground, where rules are meaningless. A master storyteller, Everett draws upon disparate elements of Western philosophy, language theory, and military intelligence reports to create a terrifying story of loss, anger, and helplessness in our modern world. This is a timely and important novel that confronts the dark legacy of the Bush years and the state of America today.]]> 216 Percival Everett 1555974767 MJ 4 The Water Cure is an terrific of example of Everett’s fearlessness and superhuman skill. ]]> 3.45 2007

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/20
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: novels, merkins, tortured-artists, african-american
review:
Sporting a cover that resembles a thriller by a retired headmaster self-published on Lulu, Everett’s sixteenth novel is one his most experimental, a story of brutal revenge narrated in fragments by an unlikely romance novelist with a penchant for Heraclitus. An angry improvisatory novel peppered with caustic commentary on George W. Bush and the whole waterboarding crew of yore, the novel weaves together the incoherent rage and grief of the narrator with a broader assault on then-America, rich in digressive fragments, hilarious tangents, curious wordplays and doggerel, the cumulative effect making the torment at the core of the story the more powerful. The Water Cure is an terrific of example of Everett’s fearlessness and superhuman skill.
]]> Dancers on the Shore 55102424
Originally published in 1964, this collection of sixteen stories includes two linked sets of stories about the Bedlow and Dunford families. They represent the earliest work of William Melvin Kelley and provided a rich source of stories and characters who were to fill out his later novels. Spanning generations from the Deep South during Reconstruction to New York City in the 1960s, these insightful stories depict African American families--their struggles, their heartbreak, and their love.]]> 288 William Melvin Kelley 178747805X MJ 4 4.52 1964 Dancers on the Shore

author: William Melvin Kelley
name: MJ
average rating: 4.52
book published: 1964
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/25
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, short-stories, african-american
review:

]]> Walk Me to the Distance 26805890 196 Percival Everett 1941088988 MJ 4 4.35 1985

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/27
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: buried-books, merkins, novels, african-american
review:

]]> Suder 36427721 Suder, Percival Everett's acclaimed first novel, follows the exploits and ordeals of Craig Suder, a struggling black third baseman for the Seattle Mariners. In the midst of a humiliating career slump and difficulties with his demanding wife and troubled son, Suder packs up his saxophone, phonograph, and Charlie Parker's Ornithology and begins a personal crusade for independence, freedom, and contentment. This ambitious quest takes Suder on a series of madcap adventures involving cocaine smugglers, an elephant named Renoir, and a young runaway, but the journey also forces him to reflect on bygone times. Deftly alternating between the past and the present, Everett tenderly reveals the rural South of Suder's childhood -- the withdrawn father; the unhinged, protective mother; the detached, lustful brother; and the jazz pianist who teaches Suder to take chances. And risk it all he finally does: Suder's travels culminate in the fulfillment of his most fanciful childhood dream.]]> 184 Percival Everett 1941088961 MJ 4 Suder finds Everett harnessing the playful originality that became his trademark from book to book, especially in the 2000s onward. The depiction of the titular protagonist’s “mad�� mother is played partly for uneasy laughs, much in the manner the “retarded�� child in Walk Me to the Distance is also used for un-PC black humour purposes, making this novel ostensibly a comedy, albeit one with bleak undertones. As Suder’s strange behaviour escalates this tension between uneasy chuckles and bemused horror defines the tone, one that Everett manages to straddle well without lurching into the overly silly, as in some of his later work. Suder is out of print and only available as ebook from Dzanc.]]> 4.00 1983 Suder

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/28
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, african-american
review:
This audacious first novel shows Everett’s bizarre sense of humour was clear and present from the beginning. Chronicling a baseball player’s descent into madness—switching between a childhood narrative and a macabre present one��Suder finds Everett harnessing the playful originality that became his trademark from book to book, especially in the 2000s onward. The depiction of the titular protagonist’s “mad�� mother is played partly for uneasy laughs, much in the manner the “retarded�� child in Walk Me to the Distance is also used for un-PC black humour purposes, making this novel ostensibly a comedy, albeit one with bleak undertones. As Suder’s strange behaviour escalates this tension between uneasy chuckles and bemused horror defines the tone, one that Everett manages to straddle well without lurching into the overly silly, as in some of his later work. Suder is out of print and only available as ebook from Dzanc.
]]> For Her Dark Skin 25532461 For Her Dark Skin is a tightly crafted exploration of the story of Jason and Medea weaving both traditional and contemporary fictional and thematic elements into a sharply ironic tale of revenge, ambition, passion and pride. Desires and consequences lead the all-too-human characters through a piercing new interpretation of classic themes.]]> 121 Percival Everett 1941088953 MJ 3 4.08 1990 For Her Dark Skin

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1990
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/29
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: novels, merkins, african-american
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico]]> 42481108 272 Ishmael Reed 1771861851 MJ 4 Hamilton for its depiction of Alexander Hamilton as an abolitionist, when history suggests Hamilton was much more cosy with slaving than the musical explains. Reed also wrote a play called The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, where the airbrushed victims of history come to visit the composer one evening to correct the record. Although score-settling and personal beefs form the kernel of many of these pieces, the arguments and rants are always erudite and sharp, and offer an eye-opening view of how African-American culture and history is continually distorted through a (consciously or otherwise) racist prism.]]> 3.44 Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico

author: Ishmael Reed
name: MJ
average rating: 3.44
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/20
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: non-fiction, merkins, zeitgeist, new-in-2019, african-american
review:
At 85, Reed is still serving up raucous satire and flame-hot polemics. This volume from 2019 collects work from the terrible tens, focusing largely on various bugbears such as the shabby treatment of black males from “corporate feminists��, the ways in which black history and modern life is wrongly perceived by Jewish writers and directors such as David Simon and Steven Spielberg, and how supposedly liberal media outlets like MSNBC fall into racist tropes on issues such as drug abuse, i.e. using images of young black males in their reports. Reed also savages the smash-hit Hamilton for its depiction of Alexander Hamilton as an abolitionist, when history suggests Hamilton was much more cosy with slaving than the musical explains. Reed also wrote a play called The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, where the airbrushed victims of history come to visit the composer one evening to correct the record. Although score-settling and personal beefs form the kernel of many of these pieces, the arguments and rants are always erudite and sharp, and offer an eye-opening view of how African-American culture and history is continually distorted through a (consciously or otherwise) racist prism.
]]> Slumberland 2116687
Hailed by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best writers of his generation, Paul Beatty turns his incisive eye to man’s search for meaning and identity in an increasingly chaotic world. After creating the perfect beat, DJ Darky goes in search of Charles Stone, a little-known avant-garde jazzman, to play over his sonic masterpiece. His quest brings him to a recently unified Berlin, where he stumbles through the city’s dreamy streets ruminating about race, sex, love, Teutonic gods, the prevent defense, and Wynton Marsalis in search of his artistic—and spiritual—other. Ferocious, bombastic, and laugh-out-loud funny, Slumberland is vintage Paul Beatty and belongs on the shelf next to Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, and Junot Diaz.]]> 243 Paul Beatty 1596912405 MJ 4 3.84 2008

author: Paul Beatty
name: MJ
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/06
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, tortured-artists, african-american
review:

]]> Native Son 919347 Librarian note: An alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here.

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic.

Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.]]> 454 Richard Wright 0099282933 MJ 5 4.03 1940 Native Son

author: Richard Wright
name: MJ
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1940
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/24
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, african-american
review:

]]> Black Boy 24302397
Black Boy is Richard Wright's powerful account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. It is at once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment—a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering.]]> 272 Richard Wright MJ 5 4.18 1945 Black Boy

author: Richard Wright
name: MJ
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1945
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/06
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, non-fiction, african-american
review:

]]> A Rage in Harlem 55877596
Jackson's woman has found him a foolproof way to make money - a technique for turning ten dollar bills into hundreds. But when the scheme somehow fails, Jackson is left broke, wanted by the police and desperately racing to get back both his money and his loving Imabelle.

The first of Chester Himes's novels featuring the hardboiled Harlem detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, A Rage in Harlem has swagger, brutal humour, lurid violence, a hearse loaded with gold and a conman dressed as a Sister of Mercy.

With an Introduction by Luc Sante]]> 224 Chester Himes 0241521084 MJ 5 3.93 1957

author: Chester Himes
name: MJ
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1957
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/03
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, penguin-classics, african-american
review:

]]> Uncle Tom's Children 54898512 256 Richard Wright 1784876984 MJ 5 Native Son and Black Boy with nary a plop of digital ink plopped. Onto my third Wright, the same applies—I leave the books feeling stunned, in a state of stammering incomprehension, my skin burning with anger and sorrow at the suffering depicted in these books, the utterly inhumane viciousness, violence, and evil perpetrated towards a people freed as slaves and treated as less than slaves in their supposed freedom by their abductors for generations. It’s not something I was surprised or naïve about, but the stories in this collection are brutal depictions of the ease with which an entire family can be destroyed by merely passing into the orbit of a hostile white man—how the murder of a black man is essentially not considered a crime, the black still a slave in the eyes of the white. Wright’s work should feature prominently on every American school syllabus if it isn’t already (I suspect not, hence MAGA).]]> 4.00 1938 Uncle Tom's Children

author: Richard Wright
name: MJ
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1938
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/30
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, short-stories, african-american
review:
Reviewing a work by Richard Wright has proven beyond my abilities so far, having read the masterpieces Native Son and Black Boy with nary a plop of digital ink plopped. Onto my third Wright, the same applies—I leave the books feeling stunned, in a state of stammering incomprehension, my skin burning with anger and sorrow at the suffering depicted in these books, the utterly inhumane viciousness, violence, and evil perpetrated towards a people freed as slaves and treated as less than slaves in their supposed freedom by their abductors for generations. It’s not something I was surprised or naïve about, but the stories in this collection are brutal depictions of the ease with which an entire family can be destroyed by merely passing into the orbit of a hostile white man—how the murder of a black man is essentially not considered a crime, the black still a slave in the eyes of the white. Wright’s work should feature prominently on every American school syllabus if it isn’t already (I suspect not, hence MAGA).
]]> The Man Who Lived Underground 57968995 256 Richard Wright 1784877697 MJ 4 Senryu Review:

Framed man sinks to cess
sifts the sludge of sick nation
in surreal jazz-prose]]> 3.54 2021

author: Richard Wright
name: MJ
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/04
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, new-in-2021, novels, senryu-reviews, african-american
review:
Senryu Review:

Framed man sinks to cess
sifts the sludge of sick nation
in surreal jazz-prose
]]> Maud Martha 59727174 The stunning only novel by the celebrated poet and first Black author to win a Pulitzer Prize, introduced by Margo Jefferson.

'Such a wonderful book. Utterly unique, exquisitely crafted and quietly powerful. I loved it and want everyone to read this lost literary treasure.' Bernardine Evaristo
'The quotidian rises to an exquisite portraiture of black womanhood in the hands of one of America's most foundational writers.' Claudia Rankine
'Maud Martha reveals the poetry, power and splendor of an ordinary life.' Tayari Jones

What, what, am I to do with all of this life?

Maud Martha Brown is a little girl growing up on the South Side of 1940s Chicago. Amidst the crumbling taverns and overgrown yards, she dreams: of New York, romance, her future. She admires dandelions, learns to drink coffee, falls in love, decorates her kitchenette, visits the Jungly Hovel, guts a chicken, buys hats, gives birth. But her lighter-skinned husband has dreams too: of the Foxy Cats Club, other women, war. And the 'scraps of baffled hate' - a certain word from a saleswoman; that visit to the cinema; the cruelty of a department store Santa Claus- are always there .

Written in 1953 but never published in Britain, Maud Martha is a poetic collage of happenings that forms an extraordinary portrait of an ordinary life: one lived with wisdom, humour, protest, rage, dignity, and joy.]]> 114 Gwendolyn Brooks 0571373259 MJ 4 4.06 1953

author: Gwendolyn Brooks
name: MJ
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1953
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/20
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: distaff, new-in-2022, novels, merkins, faberfaber, african-american
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Cotton Comes to Harlem (Harlem Cycle, #7)]]> 11397178 180 Chester Himes 0141196459 MJ 4 3.73 1964

Cotton Comes to Harlem (Harlem Cycle, #7)

author: Chester Himes
name: MJ
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1964
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/26
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, penguin-classics, african-american
review:

]]> The White Boy Shuffle 34728114
A bombastic coming-of-age novel that has the uncanny ability to make readers want to laugh and cry at the same time,Beatty mingles horrific reality with wild fancy in this outlandish, laugh-out-loud funny and poignant vision of contemporary America.]]> 267 Paul Beatty 1786072254 MJ 3 zaniness.]]> 3.98 1996 The White Boy Shuffle

author: Paul Beatty
name: MJ
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/12
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: novels, merkins, african-american
review:
Beatty is a master of sustained, rollicking zaniness and is incapable of turning out a bland sentence. The only issue is that the novel is simply that—sustained, rollicking zaniness.
]]> Lord of Dark Places 76571 285 Hal Bennett 1885983123 MJ 4 Lord of Dark Places revels in its Dantean horseplay, treating child sexual abuse, incest, and child murder with the same levity as the barrage of pornographic romps taking place from page to page, all the while maintaining a creepy undertone of messianic paranoia and revulsion at the ordeal of life as a black man in 1960s America. Uncompromising, wilfully offensive to everyone everywhere, Bennett’s novel is an exhausting but essential serving of seriously hilarious horror and has the ability to still shock and stun well into this cynical century.]]> 4.45 1970 Lord of Dark Places

author: Hal Bennett
name: MJ
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/13
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: novels, merkins, utter-filth, african-american
review:
A provocative, poisonously satirical novel following the unravelling of Joe Market, a teenager exploited by his father for his remarkable physique and overly broad membrum virile. First paraded before onlookers as a new black messiah, Market then flees into an underworld of gay prostitution where he meets his regular dope supplier and a cop who encourages his education. A demented picaresque, a howling dispatch from the abyss, Lord of Dark Places revels in its Dantean horseplay, treating child sexual abuse, incest, and child murder with the same levity as the barrage of pornographic romps taking place from page to page, all the while maintaining a creepy undertone of messianic paranoia and revulsion at the ordeal of life as a black man in 1960s America. Uncompromising, wilfully offensive to everyone everywhere, Bennett’s novel is an exhausting but essential serving of seriously hilarious horror and has the ability to still shock and stun well into this cynical century.
]]> God's Country 173476035 This ‘comic and fierce�� novel spoofs the classic Western format with the dark, incisive humor we’ve come to expect from its acclaimed author.

One of the earliest works anchoring Percival Everett’s illustrious career, God’s Country is by turns funny, shocking, and devastating. The unlikely narrator through this tale of misadventures is one Curt Marder: gambler, drinker, cheat, and would-be womanizer. Unfortunately, he’s a coward. When he sees a band of “Injun impersonators�� pillaging his home, he has “half a mind to ride down that hill and say somethin��, but it was just half a mind after all.�� It’s 1871, and he’s lost his farm, his wife, and his dog to a band of marauding hooligans. With nothing to live on but a desire to recover what is rightfully his, Marder enlists the help of the best tracker in the West: a Black man named Bubba.

With an introduction from renowned novelist Madison Smartt Bell, this is the perfect edition to add to your growing Percival Everett collection. As NPR’s Michael Schaub noted, “It’s impossible to predict what the next Everett book will bring, but it's always a safe bet that it's going to be great.”]]> 219 Percival Everett 0807016292 MJ 4 4.23 1994 God's Country

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, african-american
review:
Bitter, unflinching, razor-sharp, frequently silly and deadly serious all at the same time. It’s a mystery how Everett does that.
]]> James 211137748 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781035031238.

The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he flees to nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town.

So begins a dangerous and transcendent journey along the Mississippi River, towards the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise. And together, the unlikely pair embark on the most life-changing odyssey of them all . . .]]> 320 Percival Everett MJ 5 The Trees, this is a real celestial point of brilliance for one of America’s best living writers. Everett has always separated his straight-faced work from his satirical, but in James, the satire is more Twainesque and subtle (having his characters masking their intellectual abilities and their pristine English to use slave-speak around the crackers) and entwines perfectly with the thrilling and horrific reworking of the Huck and Jim relationship across a narrative that is exquisitely paced and marvellously engaging. This novel will instantly make Everett your new favourite writer, and there is a seriously breathtaking bibliography of high-calibre work waiting to be discovered. I envy the newbies. ]]> 4.42 2024 James

author: Percival Everett
name: MJ
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/20
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: new-in-2024, novels, worshipped, merkins, african-american
review:
A culmination of Everett’s long back catalogue of straight-faced adventure novels and the savage satire of novels like The Trees, this is a real celestial point of brilliance for one of America’s best living writers. Everett has always separated his straight-faced work from his satirical, but in James, the satire is more Twainesque and subtle (having his characters masking their intellectual abilities and their pristine English to use slave-speak around the crackers) and entwines perfectly with the thrilling and horrific reworking of the Huck and Jim relationship across a narrative that is exquisitely paced and marvellously engaging. This novel will instantly make Everett your new favourite writer, and there is a seriously breathtaking bibliography of high-calibre work waiting to be discovered. I envy the newbies.
]]> The Walls of Jericho 55506335 The first novel by one of the legends of the Harlem Renaissance, a classic in the annals of Black fiction.

When Black lawyer Fred Merrit purchases a house in the most exclusive white neighbourhood bordering Harlem, he has to hire the toughest removal firm in the area to help him get his belongings past the hostile neighbours. The removal men are Jinx Jenkins and Bubber Brown, who make the move anything but straightforward.

This hilarious satire of jazz-age Harlem derides the walls people build around themselves—colour and class being chief among them. In their reactions to Merrit and to one another, the characters provide an invaluable view of the social and philosophical scene of the times.

First published in 1928, The Walls of Jericho is the first novel by Rudolph Fisher, author of The Conjure-Man Dies, whom Langston Hughes called ‘the wittiest of the Harlem Renaissance writers, whose tongue was flavoured with the sharpest and saltiest humour��.

This new edition includes Fisher’s short story ‘One Month’s Wages��, which revisits Jinx and Bubber during the Depression when, down on their luck, one seeks to win money by gambling, the other by taking a job in a mortuary.]]> 224 Rudolph Fisher 0008444358 MJ 3 The Walls of Jericho is a stylish novel flitting between tales of feuding friends, rival lovers, and the folly of a black man buying a house in a white neighbourhood in 1920s New York. Fisher’s portrait of a “compassionate�� spinster whose interest in civil rights stops short at having to interact with black people excepting her attractive domestic help is one of the funniest storylines in a novel that is prone to moments of distracting prolixity. ]]> 4.12 1928 The Walls of Jericho

author: Rudolph Fisher
name: MJ
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1928
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/18
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, novels, african-american
review:
A satirical slice-of-strife from the Harlem Renaissance, The Walls of Jericho is a stylish novel flitting between tales of feuding friends, rival lovers, and the folly of a black man buying a house in a white neighbourhood in 1920s New York. Fisher’s portrait of a “compassionate�� spinster whose interest in civil rights stops short at having to interact with black people excepting her attractive domestic help is one of the funniest storylines in a novel that is prone to moments of distracting prolixity.
]]> Eight Men 54898513 'All eight men and all eight stories stand as beautifully, pitifully, terribly true... This is fine, sound, good, honorable writing rich with insight and understanding, even when occasionally twisted by sorrow' New York Times

Hunted by the police for a crime he didn't commit, a man turns to the sewers and a life underground. Struggling to get work, another turns to wearing his wife's clothes in a desperate last attempt. Finding himself the object of derision, yet another man buys a gun only to discover its true power.

Here are Richard Wright's stories of eight men - black men, living at violent odds with the white world around them. As suspenseful as they are excoriating, they stand alongside Wright's novels as some of the most powerful depictions of black America in the twentieth century.]]> 256 Richard Wright 1784876992 MJ 5 4.50 1961 Eight Men

author: Richard Wright
name: MJ
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1961
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/02
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: merkins, short-stories, african-american
review:
More explosive tales exposing the moral rot of segregated America pre-1960s. Contains the first version of ‘The Man Who Lived Underground��, later unearthed and published in its triumphant original novel form. The (somewhat) lighter side of Wright is here too with the all-dialogue tale of a man who cross-dresses as his wife to work as a domestic in a white household. Essential dispatches from a shamefaced nation.
]]> <![CDATA[Now Beacon, Now Sea: A Son's Memoir]]> 56993992 A wrenching debut memoir of familial grief by a National Book Award finalist--and a defining account of what it means to love and lose a difficult parent.

When Christopher Sorrentino's mother died in 2017, it marked the end of a journey that had begun eighty years earlier in the South Bronx. Victoria's life took her to the heart of New York's vibrant mid-century downtown artistic scene, to the sedate campus of Stanford, and finally back to Brooklyn--a journey witnessed by a son who watched, helpless, as she grew more and more isolated, distancing herself from everyone and everything she'd ever loved.

In examining the mystery of his mother's life, from her dysfunctional marriage to his heedless father, the writer Gilbert Sorrentino, to her ultimate withdrawal from the world, Christopher excavates his own memories and family folklore in an effort to discover her dreams, understand her disappointments, and peel back the ways in which she seemed forever trapped between two identities: the Puerto Rican girl identified on her birth certificate as Black, and the white woman she had seemingly decided to become. Meanwhile Christopher experiences his own transformation, emerging from under his father's shadow and his mother's thumb to establish his identity as a writer and individual--one who would soon make his own missteps and mistakes.

Unfolding against the captivating backdrop of a vanished New York, a city of cheap bohemian enclaves and a thriving avant-garde--a dangerous, decaying, but liberated and potentially liberating place--Now Beacon, Now Sea is a matchless portrait of the beautiful, painful messiness of life, and the transformative power of even conflicted grief.]]> 304 Christopher Sorrentino 1646220420 MJ 5 3.70 2021 Now Beacon, Now Sea: A Son's Memoir

author: Christopher Sorrentino
name: MJ
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: merkins, new-in-2021, non-fiction, bifographies
review:

]]> Naked Lunch 24832260 Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, a book that redefined literature. A startling tale of a narcotics addict unmoored in New York, Tangier, and ultimately a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone, its formal innovation, taboo subject matter, and virtuoso style have exerted a significant influence on authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Will Self, as well as on music, film, and the media generally. This restored edition incorporates Burroughs’s notes on the text, several essays he wrote about the book, and an appendix of new material and alternate drafts from the original manuscript. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume is a definitive and fresh experience of this classic of our culture.]]> 289 William S. Burroughs MJ 3 et al are path-breaking howls from the nascent drugged-up counterculture, visionary textual explorations from ravaged junk-sick minds that exploded on the scene with an astonishing menace and originality. Today, Naked Lunch is more interesting for its impact on the American avant-garde, the prose itself a frequent schlepp of nonsensical be-bop that rambles on with the tedium of a party bore explaining in excruciating detail that totally trippy dream they had while on acid.]]> 3.29 1959

author: William S. Burroughs
name: MJ
average rating: 3.29
book published: 1959
rating: 3
read at: 2022/07/05
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: merkins, novels, penguin-classics, tortured-artists
review:
As with other Beat classics, the novels of Kerouac, Burroughs et al are path-breaking howls from the nascent drugged-up counterculture, visionary textual explorations from ravaged junk-sick minds that exploded on the scene with an astonishing menace and originality. Today, Naked Lunch is more interesting for its impact on the American avant-garde, the prose itself a frequent schlepp of nonsensical be-bop that rambles on with the tedium of a party bore explaining in excruciating detail that totally trippy dream they had while on acid.
]]> In the Land of Pain 110988
In quick, sharp, unflinching strokes of his pen, Daudet wrote about his symptoms (“This is the one-man-band of pain��) and his treatments (“Mor-phine nights . . . thick black waves, sleepless on the surface of life, the void beneath��); about his fears and reflections (“Pain, you must be everything for me. Let me find in you all those foreign lands you will not let me visit. Be my philosophy, be my science��); his impressions of the patients, himself included, and their strange life at curative baths and spas (“Russians, both men and women, go into the baths naked . . . Alarm among the Southerners��); and about the “clever way in which death cuts us down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out.��

Given Barnes’s crystalline translation, these notes comprise a record—at once shattering and lighthearted, haunting and beguiling—of both the banal and the transformative experience of physical suffering, and a testament to the complex resiliency of the human spirit.]]> 112 Alphonse Daudet 0375414851 MJ 4 In the Land of Pain is a terrifying and strangely life-affirming peep into the corporeal abyss. ]]> 3.86 1929

author: Alphonse Daudet
name: MJ
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1929
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: non-fiction, pernod-and-gauloises, pre-1900s, tortured-artists
review:
The pain journal of a syphilitic Victorian novelist serves up fragments of lucid insight into the horror of living with an incurable illness. It is unthinkable the scale of pain people had to suffer before the advances in medicine, and astonishing to see the stoicism Daudet shows while enduring the onslaught on his nervous system (although copious buckets of morphine were a regular palliative). A passion project for Julian Barnes, who stylishly translated, annotated, and introduced the volume, In the Land of Pain is a terrifying and strangely life-affirming peep into the corporeal abyss.
]]> Lonely Boy Blues 44139626
Legendary editor Maxwell Perkins, best known for his work on the first novels of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, wrote that Kapelner had "a most unusual talent in narrative, in dialogue, and in perception," and agreed to take on the editing of Lonely Boy Blues . It would be one of his last projects before his death in 1947.]]> 150 Alan Kapelner 0578467860 MJ 3 new-in-2019, novels, merkins Ulysses namedropped in the first chapter, a polyphonic spree of staccato dialogue and anarchic mosaics of postwar realism / playful surrealism. Published before the Beats, the novel has a little taste of everything to come, from the be-bop insufferableness of Kerouac, the exuberant punch of Sorrentino’s Brooklyn, to the radical stylistic bravura of Ralph Ellison. The novel fails to maintain the swagger and fire from the first chapter, a breathless whoosh of energy and inventiveness that is lost in the muddled mélange. P.S. The blurb has the author born in 1933, which would make him eleven at the time of publication—the actual date is 1913. ]]> 3.40 1944 Lonely Boy Blues

author: Alan Kapelner
name: MJ
average rating: 3.40
book published: 1944
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: new-in-2019, novels, merkins
review:
A singularly bizarre novel to emerge from 1940s America—a confused mélange of styles with Ulysses namedropped in the first chapter, a polyphonic spree of staccato dialogue and anarchic mosaics of postwar realism / playful surrealism. Published before the Beats, the novel has a little taste of everything to come, from the be-bop insufferableness of Kerouac, the exuberant punch of Sorrentino’s Brooklyn, to the radical stylistic bravura of Ralph Ellison. The novel fails to maintain the swagger and fire from the first chapter, a breathless whoosh of energy and inventiveness that is lost in the muddled mélange. P.S. The blurb has the author born in 1933, which would make him eleven at the time of publication—the actual date is 1913.
]]> Memoirs of a Hunter 65215604
Originally published individually in the St Petersburg journal Sovremennik before appearing as a single volume in 1852, and presented here in a masterful new translation by Michael Pursglove, this landmark collection established the literary reputation of the author, who considered it his most significant contribution to Russian literature, and is universally regarded as a milestone in the Russian realist tradition.]]> 432 Ivan Turgenev 184749904X MJ 0 sampled 4.00 1852 Memoirs of a Hunter

author: Ivan Turgenev
name: MJ
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1852
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: sampled
review:
A landowner (named Turgenev) paints dewy-eyed portraits of muzhiks. 80 pages was enough.
]]> Sleep Has His House 204148 A classic later novel by Anna Kavan.

A largely autobiographical account of an unhappy childhood, this daring synthesis of memoir and surrealist experimentation chronicles the subject's gradual withdrawal from the daylight world of received reality. Brief flashes of daily experience from childhood, adolescence, and youth are described in what��is��defined as��"nighttime language"—a heightened, decorative prose that frees these events from their gloomy associations.

The novel suggests we have all spoken this dialect in childhood and in our dreams, but these thoughts can only be sharpened or decoded by contemplation in the dark. Revealing that side of life which is never seen by the waking eye but which dreams and drugs can suddenly emphasize,��this startling discovery��illustrates��how these nighttime illuminations reveal��the narrator's joy for the living world.]]> 200 Anna Kavan 0720611296 MJ 2 3.93 1973 Sleep Has His House

author: Anna Kavan
name: MJ
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1973
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: distaff, novels, sassysassenachs, the-art-of-loathing
review:
Surrealist experimentation often means “elegant nonsense��, and this novel slips with ease into that category. Descriptions of dreams or attempts to recreate the unknowable darkness of Morpheus’s matter can never (for me) make for a captivating novel form and the screeds of well-written nonsensical prose in Kavan’s 1947 work pirouetted across my weary vision busting impressive shapes and sounds �� having as little impact on my intolerant and flippant psyche as the bore at work who has the most amazing dreams EVER, and over the course of eight horror-packed hours will let you know about them at length. If you believe automatic writing has the power to unlock some of the mysteries of the subconscious (it doesn’t), then you might find this self-important gibberish mesmerising. Otherwise, step away from your desk, leave your colleague to prattle to himself, and never look back.
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