Tag: books

hurray for springheel_jack!

I just got in the mail from him two books: Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps and Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato.

The Greene is wonderfully gloomy. Mr. G heads off to Liberia in the late thirties and wallows in the horrors of colonialism. Not only are things completely fucked-up, but reading it now I know how much worse they got. All of the gloom is worth it, though, for his prose.

Going After Cacciato is a wonderful novel that I read when it came out. I haven’t had my own copy (I read my dad’s) and hadn’t re-read it since, although I have recommended it to others. It’s a picaresque journey/magic realist fantasy set during the Vietnam war, but that doesn’t do it justice at all.

Thanks Nat! That was really cool of you!

As promised, Stahl delivers the coup de grace on Frey

FREE JAMES FREY! In defense of the post-truth memoir

Why bother with accuracy when the feelings are real? Was it three hours in an empty office, or three months behind bars? Doesn’t matter! What the writer felt when the stuff that really happened was going on is exactly the same as what his character feels when stuff that didn’t really happen goes on in the book. And that’s what the reader feels. Keep up with me here…

If anyone had listened: the Exile on Frey from last year

The Exile had James Frey pegged on Day One and even more so on Day Two, even before he was unmasked as a proven fake.

just another dry drunk asshole. They’re popular these days. Representative quotes:

Rehab stories provide a way for pampered trust-fund brats like Frey to claim victim status. These swine already have money, security and position and now want to corner the market in suffering and scars, the consolation prizes of the truly lost.

Frey got those anecdotes the no-risk way: he stole them from a real druggie/criminal author. A much better and more honest one, a guy named Eddie Little-specifically, Frey looted Little’s great debut novel, Another Day in Paradise.

The accusation of theft from Eddie Little is interesting; I’ll have to find that book.

Thanks to salome_st_john for pointing this one out.

Slumming for dollars

ENTIRE LITERARY ESTABLISHMENT TAKEN IN BY SOCK PUPPET

I’ve seen people beg for money, lie, and make outrageous claims of things like HIV infection before and get away with it. On internet forums. And not for very long.

Apparently you can take this act big-time if you’re a couple of aging hipsters who want to get into the “music world” and meet famous people.

These people should be given scrofula and then sent to live in Pahrump, NV in a trailer for life.

Unbearable

The always useful and entertaining Maciej Ceglowski explains better than I ever could exactly how hard The Unbearable Lightness of Being sucks. “The Dave Matthews of Slavic Letters” is just about perfect. It’s a dumb, trashy book.

But he fortunately doesn’t stop there. The rest of the article provides a guide to the best in Slavic dating literature! Including one of my personal favorites, The Good Soldier Svejk.

But if you really still just need to get laid, the Kundera is there for you. The cock has its reasons than the mind knows not of.