Hasn't anybody

Hasn't anybody noticed Paul Neilan's slacker masterpiece, Apathy and other small victories. It begins with the funniest paragraph I can remember a book beginning with(if you have favorites please submit) and never gets less funny throughout. Neilan has the magical ability to make fun of everything he touches--rather like Julie Hecht, but he is also naughty in a way Hecht has never been. Shane the slacker hero who is just trying to pass his boring life without attracting trouble, spends a few months in a town working temp jobs, getting by. He gets stuck in a town when he is accused of murdering his deaf dental assistant and is bullied by musclebound female aggessor into pretending to love her and into taking the dullest imaginable office job. It's all funny. Every sentence made me giddy. It is a 17.95 hardcover from Von Holtzbrink. Buy it. Have pleasure. If anyone tries to tell you it's in poor taste, push them down and hurt their feelings.

and Lori Lansens has written what may be the best novel so far this year in The Girls, a novel of conjoint twins stressing the medical condition as a gift of intimacy rather than a freakish mistake. The girls are 29, the longest living of any twins joined at the scull. A secret triumph for the girls. One has an aneurism that could bust at any time, so both know their lives are short. Their lives are eventful for rural Canadians. Lansens has managed to make scenes live with a certain brightness about them. Another brilliant book by a Canadian author. They're better than us. They can't help it. I've been talking to the publicity people at Little Brown and they can't get people, who are happy to plunk down their money for a weak Ann Tyler to try a piece of genuine literature. Breaks my fucking heart.

misternouse

end of the world Rasta style

Denis Johnson is a wonderful writer, master of the novel, the short story, and all manner of poetry. Jesus' Son is one of the most perfect books of dark, realistic short stories I've ever read. Infinity Lounge is an original slim tome of poetry now sadly out of print. He's an old hippy who's suffer many of the drug and political agonies of old hippiedom. I remember him in Iowa City as a political anti-war in Viet Nam guy who wrote so well he made everyone jealous. He wrote poetry then. Gorgeous stuff.
Fiskadoro(1985) is my favorite of his fiction. It is an end of the world book that takes place on Key West(called Twicetown). The bombs have fallen only shreds of civilization remain amongst the Rasta talking locals. It has something of the magical feel of Riddly Walker. The sense of a pasttoo far gone to retrieve but of a culture consumed with curiosity for the very different world that went before. Cuba is thought to be the cradle of civilization and people catch wisps of music from Cuban Radio on calm nights. They never see any Cubans though and never think to mount an expedition to Havana. People lost in a dream of a distant civilization. No one seems to read this book any more. It would be wise for college kids to read to help them understand the Viet Nam era as there are many, many Viet Nam references. Fiskadoro is the callow young seeker Mr. Cheung is his mentor. Mr Cheung's mother who escaped Viet Nam in the last, terrible days of America's departure from Saigon does not speak, but Johnson allows us into her memory bank and this provides the novel's ballast. Amazingly enough it is still in print. Give it a try.

Mister Nouse

rasta end of the world

Hiroshima

In the face-off with happiness suffering often wins, he reflected, ont only by being a necessary hardship but by being chosen. Suffering is chosen over happiness by almost everyone. It is designed, coddled, carressed and persuaded; it is worked over by the brain so that it informs the limits of our freedoms and the shape of our fulfillment. It ties us to other people where happiness does not.
Suffering is embraced.
Lydia Millet Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

Mina

Scottish crime novelist, Denise Mina, author of the Creasey Award winning Garnethill Trilogy, has published the first of a new series of novels with Field of Blood, introducing the very young Paddy Meehan(a she) working as a copy girl for the Glasgow newspaper. She is Catholic and working class in a way which offers young women of intelligence and talent little to entice them into a rewarding adulthood. Paddy is very bright but inexperienced in the ways of the world when a child is killed and a relative of her conventional boyfriend shows up in the paper as a suspect. The unpleasant Glaswegian winter sets the tone for this bleak, fascinating, and wry novel of a young woman at the beginning of a career which Mina should be following in her next four novels, set to end in 2008 with Paddy's death. I'll read every one of them. Mina is one of the truly fine writers of crime fiction in the English speaking world. I'm grateful for her.

Mister Nouse

pure radiant

Lydia Millet has got to be one of my favorite American writers. Her new one from Soft Skull is called Oh Pure and Radiant Heart and must rank as her most ambitious novel yet. It's a rich and marvellous meditation on the atomic bomb from Los Alamos to Japan, as an idea and as 20th century mythos. A very nice Librarian in Santa Fe begins to dream. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Enrico Fermi come back to life, reconoiter in New Mexico and become Ann(the Librarian)'s focal point for most of the book. Millet is so smart she can cobble such unlikely material into a complex, hysterical and heartbreaking novel. She is extraordinary with her characters(the three physicists are particularly fetching) and the world she presents as Ann's dreams blend nicely with the scarcely believable real world. I've read all of Millet's books and have yet to be disappointed. She is still young and may write some amazing stuff in the future. Soft Skull has issued this new novel in hardcover, a mistake, I think. People who'll love it won't have $25 of disposable income to spend on something they might not like.

Mister Nouse

Dracula

If you like the myth of the undead and its grizzly trappings you'll love The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. If you never want to read or watch anything ever again that smacks of vampiricism and dracularity, my advice is the same. The Historian follow a bright and sensitive historian(see title) all over Europe researching the myth of Dracula which her father had done before he became a career diplomat. The writing comes alive from the first page. The author is in control for the length of this lengthy novel and even though you have ideas about how things will turn out, she throws enough curve balls the reader's way to keep the reading experience alive and thrilling to the end. I know two people who read it twice in a week. Makes Anne Rice look like a tramp and Bram Stoker a stick in the mud. Read it.

Mister Nouse

paperback

David Bezmozgis's Natasha and Other Stories
Michelle de Kretser The Hamilton Case
Mary Kay Zuravleff The Frequency of Souls(back in print) a great make fun of engineers novel
Carlos Ruiz Zafon The Shadow of the Wind(Barcelona during wartime)

four paperbacks that should change the quality of anyone's Summer

Mister Nouse

Albahari

Serb by way of Calgary, David Albahari's novel Gotz and Meyer(sorry I don't do umlauts) is due in December of '05. Probably the best Holocaust novel since Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, Gotz and Meyer gives you teacher of teenagers in Belgrade trying to explain the Holocaust to his naive bewildered students. Gotz and Meyer are like Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, two nearly identical Nazi functionaries with whom the narrator is in constant contact, as shocked as his students that such boring people could be responsible for killing so many innocents. The narrator of course has lost all but a straggling few members of his family to the war and they are scattered about the globe wanting to do nothing but forget the tragedies of the past. An amazing beautiful novel we should all read.

Mister Nouse

Pelecanos

George Pelecanos has transformed Washington DC with his noirs featuring the many many kinds of people of all races who live good and not so good lives in all four quadrants of the nations capitol. Detective Derek Strange is his most frequent guide through the city buy Drama City, his new stand alone is touching and tough and as always informative. It's the guy out of jail trying to make a go of it against odds(yes an old theme) that is handled with beautiful prose and a poignant sense of character. Even the bad guys get moments to show their humanity.
Mister Nouse

Wilson

Cintra Wilson's hysterical sendup of America's need for celebrity is finally available in paperback and should be read by everyone who's ever wished vengeance on the rich and the beautiful. Laughing all the way.
Mister Nouse

good things