BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH: THREATS
WORST BOOK OF THE MONTH: ON THE BRO’D
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BEST COVER OF THE MONTH: BIG RAY
WORST COVER OF THE MONTH: THE GRIMSCRIBE’S PUPPETS
BIG RAY
Michael Kimball
Bloomsbury USA
What Alice in Chains did for “Man in the Box,” Michael Kimball does for “Obese Abusive Dad in the Chair (not pictured on cover).” To those who thought he couldn’t top Us, prepare to be utterly punished by yet another high-octane dose of Kimball’s sensitive, acute prose. Why not call in sick next Tuesday so you can get glued to your sofa with Big Ray and a family-size bag of your favorite corn-based snack product? (See page 60 for our excerpt.)
Amelia Gray
THREATS
FSG
This starts off as a kind of detective story in which an ex-dentist loses his wife in a weird accident and the awesomely named Detective Chico tries to help him find out what happened and without you even noticing effortlessly moves into a terrifying exploration of grief and heartbreak and madness that left me short of breath. It made me cry a bunch. Not that it means anything. I cry all the time.
CRYBABY SMALLS
Karl Taro Greenfeld HarperCollins
These are interlinked stories about five families—fathers, mothers, children, and nannies—and how they’ve become warped and venal and driven mad by the postbohemian bourgeoisie of Tribeca, and how even these members of the 1 percent are now being driven out by members of the .01 percent. There’s some dark truth in these stories of adults struggling with finally growing up, but you know what? Whoever told you that you could be a writer or painter or musician and live like an investment banker? This is also a book about how the creative upper class pass on the same faux-bohemian values to their kids. And then they’ll wonder why their kids move back home and are unemployed for a decade when they’re finished with college.
GIANCARLO DITRAPANO
Irvine Welsh Norton
Oh cool, a Trainspotting prequel. And only a decade shy of the (presumably first) Trainspotting sequel. I guess the only horse Welsh’s kicked lately is the dead one.
KINGDOM COMEJ.G. Ballard Norton
When I was a child I hated Ballard for growing a sense of humor after his 1,000-percent serious 60s stuff. When I grew up, I put away my childish things (beret) and realized that funny-Ballard beats the living shit out of goth-kids-Ballard. And is also a kajillion times scarier. This is the last book he wrote before he died and both his most hilarious and his most terrifying, because it’s about a racist middle-class revolt in the London suburbs that uncannily presages the rise of the real-life English Defence League, and also because the narrator is like an even more psychotic version of Richard Grant’s character in How to Get Ahead in Advertising. RIP, dudre.
KASHER IN THE RYEMoshe Kasher Grand Central Publishing
This is a memoir about a nerve-rattled Jew who got hooked on dope and bounced from one funny farm to the next. Reading this book was like looking out the window, if your window overlooks anywhere in New York, at any time, ever.
ON THE BRO’D: A Parody Of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road
Mike Lacher
Adams Media
You would think there would be tons of anal happening in this reimagining of Kerouac’s most famous book of male friendship, but there isn’t. Still, the whole thing does a fine job of sucking its own cock.
ZONE ONE
Colson Whitehead
Doubleday
A postapocalyptic-zombies-roam-Manhattan book that aims for lyrical and empathic, trying to be a “smart guy’s zombie story.” Unfortunately, it ends up as an “MFA-teacher’s zombie story,” i.e., it will bore your eyeballs off. Reading World War Z very, very slowly in a very, very uncomfortable chair might achieve the same effect.
HHhHLaurent Binet Grasset & Fasquelle
I love it when literature surprises me. Just when I think something is going to be a zany experimental history of Hhgregg, it’s a super-serious Nazi assassination fanfic laced with meta-author commentary.
MEGAN BOYLE
R.A.P. MUSIC
Williams Street
What can suck is admiring a writer and then discovering she’s writing in her second language. When I think how Joseph Conrad wrote in his third language (after Polish, then French), I get a huge case of God, I am uneducated. Chiara’s English is perfect. She does not make mistakes. But since Italians have better taste than Americans, their discriminating word choices can really charge a sentence that would be dead with the most common choice of the American mind. Since we have to give everything a name, as if it were the damn law or something, people will call the contents of Barzini’s collection “flash fiction.” That term has never really jibed with me, but Barzini is writing something, call it whatever. And it hurts you that you’ll never have a sexy Italian accent.
GIANCARLO DITRAPANO
Steve Erickson Europa Editions
This is the guy people have been telling me for years is “Pynchon’s heir”? Really? Maybe I missed the part in Vineland (it was long) where the Left Coast Boomer stereotype waxes guilty about not being accepted by the black kids at college and connects with his adopted Ethiopian daughter through the music of David Bowie’s Greatest Hits, but this shit is beyond square. It’s like if NPR was a book instead of just something I have to turn off every morning when I get to work at the Daily Grind.
THE PATRICK MELROSE NOVELSEdward St. Aubyn Picador
Four novels that are kind of like if Downton Abbey were set now and produced for HBO rather than PBS. In other words, fewer cripples who magically stand up next to fireplaces and more drugs and rape and sex and suicide and sodomy, which is far more representative of the English upper class anyway.
THE LAKEBanana Yoshimoto Melville House
Of the people who will purchase this book, 3 percent will be named Alyce, 10 percent will be purchasing a Frequently Bought Together package containing The Lake and two Haruki Murakami books on Amazon.com, 15 percent will be Banana Yoshimoto fans, 25 percent will have always wanted to read Banana Yoshimoto, and 47 percent will buy it on a mysteriously strong impulse they will later attribute to the words “Banana” and “Yoshimoto” eliciting unconscious memories of banana-flavored Runts candies and Yoshi from Mario.
MEGAN BOYLE
THE GRIMSCRIBE’S PUPPETS
Various writers
Miskatonic River
Uh, tribute albums are kind of fun because bands can cover one band’s songs in their own style, but having different people write their own stories in an established author’s style is called fan fiction, and there’s already a whole, shitty internet full of it. Only way you could do worse is to make the tributee an overrated, sub-Clive Barker horror writer who intentionally keeps his work out of print to preserve his “mystique.”
TASTEFUL NUDES Dave Hill St. Martin’s Tasteful Nudes AGAINST ARCHITECTUREFranco La Cecla PM MAGIC HOURS: Essays on Creators and Creation Tom Bissell
Believer Books/McSweeny’s
Mesmerizing… the bastard stepchild of a three-way between Dwight Macdonald, Gay Talese, and the Paris Review interviews, mixed in a tumbler by a modern-day hipster-bartender version of Greil Marcus.
THEODORE STILLSMELLY
Simon Reynolds Soft Skull
Hey, Britain, quit writing fucking nerdbooks on rock and roll. We want to read about Julian Cope spending two years straight on acid and the KLF firing a machine gun full of blanks into the crowd at the BRIT Awards, not ludicrously overblown track-by-track descriptions of Screamadelica (did you know the Andrew Weatherall remix of “American Spring” “pivoted around an exquisite harpsichord motif like a scattered handful of stardust”?) and block quotes on MDMA from the American Journal of Medicine. Thanks for making rave culture even more boring than it was at the time, which was plenty.
GOD IN PAINSlavoj Zizek Seven Stories BUTTERFLY IN THE TYPEWRITER: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces Cory MacLauchlin Da Capo TREES
Anonymous Smithsonian Nature Guide tons THIS IS HOW
Augusten Burroughs St. Martin’s Press
Theoretically “funny” advice about everything from an extremely preachy man who thinks he’s seen it all. How’s that for a terrible book idea? Terrible is how.
GRANTLAND QUARTERLY ISSUE 2Edited by Bill Simmons McSweeney’s
This evaluation is not based on the contents of this book. Not at all. The contents are the same fantastic pop-culture articles you find on Grantland.com, including a piece about Eddie Murphy that should win some kind of award. Thing is, if I can get the same great content online for free, then you better make sure you then resell that content by wrapping it in a REALLY sweet book, not a half-decent one with very crappy illos inside and a dust jacket that seems to be designed by McSweeney’s shittiest intern. I mean, the first issue was bound in the same material basketballs are made of! BASKETBALLS! COME ON! You can do better, bros.
PULPHEAD: Essays
John Jeremiah Sullivan
FSG
People have been comparing this guy to David Foster Wallace, but that’s a lazy comparison. All that JJS and DFW have in common is that they both write long essays and have those names that are, like, triple names. That’s the problem with blurbs: They’re often full of shit. For example, they might say something like, “Astonishing… the missing link between David Sedaris and David Foster Wallace, with a dash of Flannery O’Connor and a hint of moonshine.”
FARTHER AWAY: EssaysJonathan Franzen FSG
Authoritative and elegant… this is what would happen if you put Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Franzen’s grumpy uncle, and Jonathan Franzen’s sense of self-worth in a kitchen robot, set it on mince, and added a few slices of rare, exotic bird meat.
FEAR OF MUSICJonathan Lethem Continuum/33 1/3
When these little fuckers first came out and were just mini-histories of classic albums written in Asperger’s-esque detail, they were a major guilty pleasure. Then, like some English teacher with a Dead quote above the classroom door, they started letting people write short stories and personal essays “inspired” by the albums, and now look where we are: a 140-page undergrad term paper by Jonathan Lethem on the least interesting record by one of the least interesting bands of all time. What’s next, guys, an improvised Bret Easton Ellis audiotape on Kirsty MacColl’s Electric Landlady? Wait a second, that’s actually a great idea.
ON THE GROUND: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the USEdited by Sean Stewart PM MYTHOLOGIES
Roland Barthes Hill and Wang SUBLIMINAL: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior
Leonard Mlodinow Pantheon Books WRITING IN PICTURES: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless
All of Us, Together Vintage HALLELUJAH, GIANT SPACE WOLF
Daniel Bailey Mammoth Editions Hallelujah, Giant Space Wolf IF I FALTER AT THE GALLOWS
Edward Mullany Publishing Genius
These are good. Plop. There goes another little baby into the drink. Here is the wall to look at. There is the toilet-paper roll. There’s the mirror. Yes, this is the life. Wait, is this the life? Why did you let them finger the cubes in your glass? Are you gay? You are, aren’t you? Whose bathroom is this? How did you get here? Where did you come from? These are little still lifes, Mullany’s poems, these little cubes in my whiskey that I’m drinking sitting on the carpeted bathroom floor wedged between the toilet and the wall. Keep looking around. It’s never going to be the same. Mullany falters at the gallows, because that’s what men do.
GIANCARLO DITRAPANO
THE UNSEEN
Nanni Balestrini
Verso
Peter Sotos and Jamie Gillis Feral House
I sometimes wish Peter would write a book about something that didn’t involve extreme sexual situations/violence/terrible things and turn his hand to something a bit more gentle on the soul. For when he writes good, he’s one of the best out there. Funny, addictive and succinct with incredible powers of observation and perception. I have always suspected there is an amazingly beautiful book about love and life buried deep somewhere within his cuddly/terrifying-bearman heart. This book—about porn legend Jamie Gillis’ “private tapes”—definitely isn’t that one; although it’s one of the most remarkable/eyefucking you are likely to read all year.
RYAN GOSLING
There are like three Melissa Broders: There’s the Melissa Broder in person, who seems very put-together, kind of a deal-maker (I think she’s an agent). Then there is the Melissa Broder of Twitter. There’s no two ways about how she fucking slays it on there. Then there is a third Melissa Broder, who just published Meat Heart, a solid poetry collection I might gloat more over if I weren’t waiting to read Melissa number two in its pages, not this third Melissa I didn’t even know there was. If she ever decides to harness what she does on that stupid fucking website we’re always looking at, some of the most badass poetry ever might occur.
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