This collection of inventive, hilarious, and weirdly heartbreaking stories is both totally accessible and unlike anything I’ve ever read.
Cash is plugged into our current moment and makes satirical fodder of the means and mores of our high-speed, low attention-span digital world. There isn’t a page here that didn’t make me laugh, but underneath it all I registered the pervasive pain of living in a world that doesn’t make sense, where nothing lasts long enough to truly register.
A brilliant, bellwether book by an author that we’ll be hearing from a lot more in the coming years.
In her electric debut, Madeline Cash synthesizes the godlessness of a digital age into a glimmering, sublime, life-affirming collage of stories.
Earth Angel is a book like no other, the paperback that swallowed the smartphone. An Isis recruit, an adolescent beauty queen, and a childless millennial walk into a bar. A Biblical plague rains down head lice, aerial drone strikes, gender non-conforming frogs. An app throws a slumber party for a friendless office worker. Texans in the winter, the Taliban in Springtime, Teslas with bumper stickers, Frozen 5 in Arabic, architectural consistency laws in Laurel Canyon, the longest recorded nosebleed…
Sam Lipsyte is one of the greatest sentence writers to grace our dying literary republic. I’ve loved all of his books, but this short novel has a moshing, escalating murder-mystery plot (kicked off by the theft of a bass guitar) that is unlike anything else he’s written.
It’s set in the early 90s on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and this urban landscape is so immersive that I felt shocked, after putting the book down, that it was actually 2023 and that I was living in upstate New York.
It’s a page-turner driven by a deeply funny, self-deprecating narrator (Jack Shit) searching futilely for transcendence through subversive (possibly unlistenable) punk rock. And did I mention the murdering?
A darkly comic mystery by the author of Hark and The Ask set in the vibrant music scene of early 1990s New York City.
Manhattan’s East Village, 1993. Dive bars, DIY music venues, shady weirdos, and hard drugs are plentiful. Crime is high but rent is low, luring hopeful, creative kids from sleepy suburbs around the country.
One of these is Jack S., a young New Jersey rock musician. Just a few days before his band’s biggest gig, their lead singer goes missing with Jack’s prized bass, presumably to hock it to feed his junk habit. Jack’s search for his…
American Grunt is for anyone who’s ever worked a shitty manual labor
job for minimum wage (i.e., most of America).
As a kind of literary
outsider, Cramer – who narrates with a forceful, friendly humor, as if
he’s got his arm around the reader’s shoulder – writes compellingly
about his decades on construction sites and in warehouses and behind the
wheels of delivery trucks. Life, that is, as a grunt.
There aren’t many
writers out there who can articulate the absurdity of such a life… a
life at the intersections of poverty, danger, apathy, and frustration.
Cramer’s one of them. I’d read anything this guy wrote. His experience
is a reminder that the primary mode of working life is unhappiness… and
that there’s something so funny about our acceptance of this fact.
Working dead-end blue-collar jobs your whole life can take a dramatic physical and emotional toll-unless you learn to embrace the absurdity.
Kevin Cramer has almost died at work three separate times, surviving each incident only through a minor miracle. It got him asking the question-why? Why do so many of us get up and trudge to a place we dislike every day? American Grunt: Ridiculous Stories of a Life Lived at $8.00 an Hour is Cramer's quest to find meaning in a career spanning nearly a hundred forgettable jobs from paper boy to construction laborer, including all the warehouses, bars,…
A Hungarian fatalist convinced that the human race is a blemish on God's otherwise beautiful universe; a statistician who has determined that we completely exhaust the earth's resources every 30 days; a failing novelist whose nihilistic fiction has doomed her halfhearted quest for tenure; an Ultimate Frisbee-playing man-child who has discovered a fractal pattern contained within all matter; a former philosophy professor with ALS who can make things happen simply by wanting them badly enough; and a trio of vengeful, superintelligent robots secretly imprisoned in an underground hangar in Iksan, South Korea, patiently waiting for some gullible human(s) to release them. This is a partial cast of Anthropica, a novel that puts Laszlow Katasztrófa's inspired vision of a universe without us to the test.
