This month’s book picks have got all your interests covered. Want to learn your history? That’s covered. Itching to read a selection from a classic literary/sci-fi author? Covered. Getting ready for the upcoming tenth anniversary of 9/11? Also covered, not to mention the most essential travel guide you’ll ever need.
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
This follow up to Mann’s bestseller 1491
Ben Loory has written a book of short stories – well, no a book of fables maybe. Succinct, each tiny tale is no more than a few pages. Although fantastical they are rooted in honesty, and Loory has done a good job of capturing the confusion of human emotion when surprises disrupt ones carefully-crafted routine. A woman looses her mind when a book with no words becomes a bestseller. An Octopus living on land hosts his sea-bred nephews as visitors. A man tries his darnedest to trick and kill the grim reaper. A web of disillusion is woven so tightly through Loory’s imaginary world that you might miss it if you don’t read closely.
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Nonfiction had a good showing in the month of June with two anniversary editions of bestsellers: one of which will teach you about America’s past and the other will teach us about its future endeavors. I find that nonfiction books for the general reader, like these, are always a fun way to learn about the complicated things I normally wouldn’t dream of reading about.
The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must by Robert Zubrin
Robert Zubrin is an engineer and creator of Mars Direct, a blueprint for settling the red planet, which has altered completely the way scientists view the potential to do so. This fifteenth anniversary edition of The Case for Mars details how the American Space Program can accomplish such a task. More importantly, Zubrin explains that Mars’ resources make it possible to produce oxygen and fuel. Just the mind-blowing idea of people not only going to, but living on, Mars in our lifetime is enough reason to pick up this book.
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On July 5th, Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant will join the few State cast members who are also published authors (Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter have previously been published). The duo of established screenwriters responsible for the Night At the Museum series and ummm… Balls of Fury, Herbie: Fully Loaded and The Pacifier, will be passing on their knowledge of the craft of screenwriting to let you know how to “turn your words into $tack$ of money”. Based on their resumes, they seem adequately qualified.
UPDATE: Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant have added a NYC appearance at the Paley Center to support the book, more details here.
The book titled, Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too! is available for pre-order.
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Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! published in February by Knopf, has been reviewed by Carl Hiaasen and received quotes from O, The Oprah Magazine; Gary Shteyngart; and (gasp) Stephen King, who called it “Brilliant, funny, original”. Russell previously published a book of short stories St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.
This is the story of thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree, alligator wrestler. Ava grew up on an island off the Florida coast called Swamplandia! (yes, with an exclamation mark). Ava’s mother, Hilola Bigtree, was the star of her family’s alligator wrestling show, performed regularly for tourists from the mainland. When Hilola dies from cancer at the young age of thirty-six, the show is in trouble. Tourists stop coming and money runs out. Both Ava’s father, the Chief, and older brother, Kiwi, leave the island in search of money. Kiwi goes to work for their competitor World of Darkness, but where the Chief goes is a mystery. It’s not unusual for him to disappear for a couple of months, but this time her mother isn’t there. She’s left alone with her sixteen-year-old sister, Ossie, who’s recently become a spiritualist and is cavorting with the dead. Ossie spends her nights visiting her ghost…
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Fans of the printed word rejoice. The books are getting better and better as the year unfolds. New picks from Otto Penzler, Lisa See, and Erik Larsen.
The Big Book of Adventure Stories edited by Otto Penzler
This is a collection of the best adventures stories of all time including “The Cisco Kid”; “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle”; “Bulldog Drummond”; “Tarzan”; “The Scarlet Pimpernel”; “Conan the Barbarian”; “Hopalong Cassidy”; “King Kong”; “Zorro”; and “The Spider”.
This is the posthumous novel by literary giant and author of The Basketball Diaries, Jim Carroll. It is the story of Billy Wolfram, a painter and small-time celebrity of the late-eighties New York City art scene.
Last year the NYC art scene seemed to be a hot topic for novels, including Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall and Steve Martin’s An Object of Beauty. With books like these, which detail the inner worlds of the creative, it’s difficult not to think they are really a mirror for the author’s own feelings about writing. In The Petting Zoo, the word ‘writer’ could easily replace the word ‘painter’, as the word ‘editor’ could replace the words ‘art dealer’, and ‘novel’ could replace ‘painting’. After achieving fame, Wolfram attends a gallery show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the 17th Century Spanish painter Diego Velazquez. He is so struck by the majestic spirituality evident in Velazquez’s work that he doubts his abilities as an artist to produce anything of meaning and to even paint ever again. Much like Carroll, he’s not in it for the money. He wants his art to mean something to people, but he can’t decide whether or not it…
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April’s book picks are here and they are guaranteed to make you a more sympathetic, open-minded, and hilarious literary snob.
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Well I must say, it looks like the short story is making a comeback. With writers like Alice Hoffman and Colm Toibin recently contributing to the genre, along with newbie Tom Rachman, whose novel The Imperfectionists is a collection of thinly disguised linked stories, it appears that the pastime of story writing so popular in the days of Salinger and Vonnegut may be making a reappearance. E.L. Doctorow and Jim Shepard are now joining them, but not to fret if you’re a lover of longer stories because a couple of great novels have also made the list.
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Last year saw the rise of a young literary star who, surprisingly, happens to be an accomplished physicist. Twenty-eight-year-old Paolo Giordano’s The Solitude of Prime Numbers, translated from the Italian, was the winner of Italy’s prestigious Premio Strega award, catching the eye of the international publishing community. This debut novel tells the story of Mattia and Alice, beginning in their awkward childhoods and following them through to their uncomfortable adulthoods. When we first meet them, they are each experiencing a trauma that will forever alter their ability to interact with others. Mattia, a young genius who is embarrassed by his mentally handicapped twin sister, makes a grave miscalculation that leaves him incapable of forgiving himself. Alice, a young girl on her way to becoming a professional skier, has an almost fatal accident that shatters her self-confidence. Once the two outcasts lay eyes on one another in adolescence, it’s uncertainty at first sight. Just as a prime number is indivisible by any other number, they are complete in themselves and so can never connect with anyone else. Mattia is incapable of having a relationship and Alice enters into an empty marriage, which she deals with by starving herself. Neither of the two friends are can connect with another human being, but because of this, they are somehow able to relate to one another
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From the Chunklet staff comes the new book “The Indie Cred Test” which was illustrated by Jesse LeDoux and co-designed by Henry Ownings and Aaron Draplin. The magazine is very funny and presumably the book will be equally or more humorous. Chunklet is also releasing the limited edition Fucked Up 12″ Coke Sucks Drink Pepsi and have been kind enough to offer both the 12″ and “The Indie Cred Test” for a cheaper package deal or separately at the Chunklet site.
More on the Fucked Up record…
A 12″ special live set recorded by these Canadians in Atlanta at the EARL last year. They barrel through a ton of originals and a cover of “Son of Sam” by Chain Gang. Damian espouses his love of Pepsi versus Coke and dedicates way too many songs to record collectors. Running time: 37 min.
Check out the album art for the 12″ below.
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It’s time once again for your Clean-Cut editor to recommend a few books that have surfaced recently. Since we’ll be incorporating a new page into the blog that will list forthcoming books by pub date, the format (and title) of the monthly book post has changed. It will now be a short list of only the most commendable efforts book publishing currently has to show for itself. I sincerely hope this method will be more useful to those of you who like to show off that you’ve read the latest book before your friends have even heard of it.
Enough About Love by Hervé Le Tellier
Jack of all trades, Hervé Le Tellier, is a writer, journalist, mathematician, food critic and teacher. Enough About Love, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter, is his story about two woman, Anna and Louise. They don’t know each other, but their lives begin to mirror one another when both women, happily married, meet and fall in love with other men. With a romantic Parisian backdrop to set the stage, this novel promises to expose the very real and very destructive conflict between desire and responsibility.
Book Review The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman; pub date: 4/6/10; available in paperback as of 1/4/11
First-time novelist Tom Rachman has produced a worthy debut surrounding a moody, but interesting cast of characters. Holed up in the office of an international newspaper in Rome, they see only too much of each other day in and day out. However, as we learn with each narrator, they really know very little about one another. We meet a man whose life is turned upside down by the death of his daughter; a woman who doesn’t think enough of herself to break up with an unappreciative, jobless boyfriend; another woman who is stalking her boss’ ex-boyfriend; and that ex-boyfriend’s mother, who religiously reads the paper cover to cover every day even though she is years behind.
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Book Review
While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction by Kurt Vonnegut; pub date: 1/25/11
This is a great, fun read, although it deals heavily with moral dilemmas and the sad inability of people to really relate to one another. The collection is part of a treasure trove of old stories that fell by the waste side as short story writing went out of vogue and Vonnegut dedicated his time to novel-writing, according to a recent interview on chuckpahniuk.net with Vonnegut’s longtime business partner and friend Donald Faber.
Book review
Journal of a UFO Investigator by David Halperin; pub date: 2/3/11
This debut from a religious studies professor follows the trials of a teenage boy as his fascination with extraterrestrial life expands from a childhood fantasy into an obsession that finds him caught up with a band of serious UFO-hunters. Danny Shapiro is an only child, living a lonely and isolated life with his dysfunctional parents. In order to escape his otherwise humdrum existence, he starts a UFO club with his best friend and his best friend’s girlfriend, who he is in love with. Unfortunately, Danny is the only one who doesn’t lose interest as the three come of age, and he is left on his own when he finally sees a real life UFO land near his house. He then begins receiving anonymous phone calls from what turns out to be the mysterious group of UFO-hunters he is destined to join. The group is led by a strange older boy who often speaks in code and also includes a lovely young woman whom Danny has eyes for, but of course, has a boyfriend. Danny then begins a dangerous sojourn around the country in the name of Roswell.
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