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.

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