Gary Shteyngart – Absurdistan

This edition starts with three pages of appraisals. Additionally, both the front and the back covers are filled with similar quotes from Time, New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, you name it. I hope everybody can do like me and cunningly skip all these and dive into the book itself.

The synopsis is surely intriguing and whoever gets a glimpse of it would like to know more, ending up by picking the book off the shelf and throwing it in the basket case.

It’s all about the humor and, whether it is terribly dark, burlesque, satiric or ironic, Gary succeeds in putting together a storytelling that will keep your fingers turning the pages until you realize you reached the end. Obviously this won’t actually happen, but you get the idea. It’s catchy, funny, witty, and while I personally think it has its flaws, it all glues together quite nicely. The kind of a best selling book that is pretty good, despite its commercial success. Sometimes there are too many divagations, too many metaphors, too many descriptive scenes. The momentum is somehow pushed and pulled sideways, cause there’s drama and subtle existentialist issues inside as well, which are not always welcome. But if your critic eye is not in a bad mood that day, you’ll just enjoy the reading and fall in love – or at least sympathize, c’mon – with the central character. And that will do.

Red Love, by Alexandra Kollontai

VULPES LIBRIS: There are so many myths and half-truths surrounding the name of Alexandra Kollontai that, rather than write a plain old biographical sketch, I’m going to give you a quiz instead.

Suicide Foiled by Nuclear War

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Have you been missing the end-of-the-world posts? Well, here's one for you. It's a rather good book by an author I can't find out anything much more about. The book itself is Few Were Left, a cheery story about a homeless depressive who is about to commit suicide by throwing himself under a New York subway train when total nuclear war erupts.

Tomer Hanuka and the Classics

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Tomer Hanuka is an Israeli-born, London-based illustrator and comics artist whose work has started turning up on the covers of some classic books. Most recently, he did the covers for Vintage's two John O'Hara reprints...

Jim Boyd on When the Press Fails

THE CHICAGO BLOG: Jim Boyd, the former deputy editorial page editor at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis has written an interesting piece on W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston's When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina for the Spring 2008 issue of the Nieman Report.

The other N word

A DIFFERENT STRIPE: Lawrence Hill writes in today's Guardian book blog about why the title of his Commonwealth Prize–winning historical novel, The Book of Negroes , was changed by its American publisher to Someone Knows My Name.

All the happy families – Carlos Fuentes

Master of Spanish literature who will celebrate this year 80^th birthday, finally decided to do this, what every decent writer thinks of – pertain to the first sentence from Lew Tolstoy`s “Anna Karenina” and develop it on his own way. Tolstoy starts with the statement that: “All the happy families are similar, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This sentence opens for the writer many new doors and gives plenty of possibilities.

Fuentes did realize it very well, that`s why he wrote sixteen different stories of different families and divided them with choirs which sound and look like poems written by American representatives of Big-Beat generation.

After lecture, putting all the plots and pieces together – it requires from the reader plenty of attention and it`s not so easy – we are given a picture of Mexican society torn apart. A society convincingly different from the one we already know from other charming novel “Summer with Laura Diaz”.

“Violence, violence” are last words of the book, dangerously coexisting with Tolstoy`s sentence. When family falls apart, everything falls apart.

 Summarized by Fusinha

Press Release: Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz, The Flash Press

THE CHICAGO BLOG: If you think you've had your fill of malicious gossip, sex as a route to celebrity, and relentless sports and entertainment news, you might just be reading all about it two centuries too late.

Frey Lives On

THE MILLIONS: At first I couldn't tell if Janet Maslin's review of James Frey's novel Bright and Shiny Morning was a joke or not. I guess she liked the book, but her homage to Frey's style is so terrible, the start-stop prose so laughably bad, that I assumed she was making fun of the poor guy:

The Millions breaks it down

THE MILLIONS: Max’s recent post cataloging 13 years of Anglo-American “Prizewinners” got me wondering… what were the most decorated books in foreign-language fiction during the same period?

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