I read a lot of books, in a lot of genres, and don't feel compelled to read the latest sensation, the hottest, most social-media-hyped author: on the contrary, I approach these works with caution. Hype, boys and girls, is the name of the social media game, not content.
I devoured this book when I was a teenager, and was wowed by the pacing, the characterizations, the characters, finding it dark, brutal, vivid. 50 years later, I devoured this book: And was wowed by the pacing, the characterizations, the characters, its darkness, brutality and vividness.
Popeye, the deformed, twisted anti-hero, is one of the most memorable characters in American fiction: as close to pure evil as you'll ever find. (Where's the brutal, vivid 1970s/80s movie?) Most other characters are drawn well, including minor characters like Reba. The exception would be Horace, the good guy, but in this melee of the damaged, the diseased, the criminal, he just seems weak.
Faulkner himself dismissed this book as trash, written only to make money -- in a reported 3 weeks! Ennobling it is not. Not recommended for kids or anyone with a sensitive literary palate.
A powerful novel examining the nature of evil, informed by the works of T. S. Eliot and Freud, mythology, local lore, and hardboiled detective fiction. Sanctuary is the dark, at times brutal, story of the kidnapping of Mississippi debutante Temple Drake, who introduces her own form of venality into the Memphis underworld where she is being held.
Forget about "Ironweed," this is Kennedy's best book: Nothing short of a literary miracle, a contender for The Great American novel.
All the titular games, including the central kidnapping, drive the narrative, but this book is really about fathers and sons, guilt and expiation: very Irish, very Catholic, very on the hustle, very tough guy. The wordplay is often delicious, as is the laugh out loud humor.
As close to a forgotten masterpiece as you'll ever find.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed explores the seedy underbelly of a Depression-era town in the second novel in the Albany cycle
Billy Phelan, a slightly tarnished poker player, pool hustler, and small-time bookie, moves throuh the lurid nighttime glare of Albany, New York. A resourceful man full of Irish pluck, Billy works the fringes of the city's sporting life with his own particular style and private code of honor, until he finds himself in the dangerous position of potential go-between in the kidnapping of a political boss's son. In relating Billy's fall from underworld grace and his storybook redemption,…
How can a book about a lad who walks out of the Cotswolds to be a grunt worker in London then a tramp-musician in Spain be so dark, so luminous?
It's primarily the language; Lee is really a poet and poets tend to write the most lyrical novels. This memoir/travelogue explores all the filth, brutality and beauty of pre-Civil War Spain. The ugliness can get pretty ugly at times, but is again and again redeemed by the sheer poetry of a sunrise or a walk in the hills. How come I never heard of Lee before? He is truly special. Because he's British? Americans can't write like this.
The author of Cider with Rosie continues his bestselling autobiographical trilogy with “a wondrous adventure” through Spain on the eve of its civil war (Library Journal).
On a bright Sunday morning in June 1934, Laurie Lee left the village home so lovingly portrayed in his bestselling memoir, Cider with Rosie. His plan was to walk the hundred miles from Slad to London, with a detour of an extra hundred miles to see the sea for the first time. He was nineteen years old and brought with him only what he could carry on his back: a tent, a change of…
It's 1974, and an invaluable Moonrock is stolen from the University of Missouri's Museum of Natural History in Smithton, Mo.
Another one missing! More than half of the roughly 270 Moonrocks the Apollo program brought back are AWOL. Estimated value? $8 million plus. For a very, very small rock.
Who took Missouri’s lunar sample? Why has it not surfaced since Blazing Saddles ruled the box office? It’s up to private investigator Peter Pike to follow a half-century-old lead and connect the dots from a wayward wife, to a bold little girl who becomes a drunken heiress, and a sinister lawyer. Will Pike find the rock? Or will the wife, heiress and lawyer make sure Pike falls face first into filthy Jimson Creek and stays there?
