BOOK COLLECTOR

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 365 pages, $16 2011 NBCCA Non-fiction finalist After reading Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan’s most recent & superb collection of essays, it’s easy to see why critics lionize him. NPR reviewer, Dan Kois refers to this collection as “among the liveliest magazine features written by anyone in the past 10 years”. So, it should come as no surprise that he garnered  the auspicious guest editor role for The Best American Essays 2014 . In the last decade, Sullivan’s work has frequently appeared in GQ , Harper’s , New York Times Magazine , and Oxford American --to name a few. Most of the fourteen essays in Pulphead have appeared in revised versions elsewhere but having them together in one collection feels like an extra special treat.  Read a couple of Sullivan’s essays and you'll see that he's a writer of tactical reversals & coy suspense, of candid admissions and genial first-person presence, of a...

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline Crown Publishers, 374 pages, $24. 2012 Prometheus Award Nerdgasm: 80s pop-culture, a VR MMORPG Easter Egg, retro-VGs, & one hell of a BIG BOSS!  Ernest Cline’s debut novel, Ready Player One , already has a reputation that precedes itself. Published only three years ago, this genre-expanding dystopian YA adventure-quest bestseller (that’s not a mouthful) has already climbed the cult-status pantheon. Just flip to his dust-jacket bio and you’ll see Cline posing in front of a DeLorean --a vehicle that makes its fair share of appearances in the novel--along with the claim that “his primary occupation [in spite of everything else] has always been geeking out”. If Ready Player One is any gauge for Cline’s ability to “geek out”, then he’s written an exemplary CV.  Jump to a resource depleted America circa 2044, where the Global Energy Crisis has nearly wiped out suburbia. As a result, urban populations have become swollen with th...

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, Riverhead, 417 pages, $27.95 2013 National Book Award Winner The Omen of The Good Lord Bird: American Slavery and the Story of John Brown as Tragicomedy Nearly two decades since the publication of his sensational memoir, The Color of Water, James McBride has spun another fantastic and comedic yarn--this time of John Brown’s rebellion in The Good Lord Bird .  Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, McBride frames his novel as a recovered slave narrative recounted by Henry ‘the Onion’ Shackleford and ghost-written by an “amateur historian” of dubious reputation. This fiction, the prologue informs readers, is the product of an unverified document, written by a person of uncertain character, recounted from the memory of a another man said to be a centenarian that nobody remembers, about an event that lacks historical eyewitness testimony. So, while, incredulous readers won't be fooled by the creative historic framing of this ...

THE GOLDFINCH  By Donna Tartt Little Brown and Co. $30, 771 pages, 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction A terrorist attack at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. One young survivor, Theodore Decker (Theo), disoriented from the blast, wanders among splayed bodies, scorched art, & the architectural detritus of the crumbling Met. Young Theo stumbles upon a dying man named Welty who--in his confusion or clairvoyance--urges Theo to take a painting, a ring, and a message to his business partner, James Hobart (Hobie).  So begins Donna Tartt’s pulitzer-prize winning novel & literary blockbuster,  The Goldfinch --the painting Theo absconds with to his E. 57th St. home where he expects to find his mom waiting for him. Unfortunately, Theo’s mother, Audrey, dies in the blast leaving him a quasi-orphan--alone with his trauma, his memories, his uncertainty toward the future, & his newly acquired, secret masterwork.  This titular painting reminds...

Hunger by Knut Hamson, Translated by Robert Bly Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 (reprint), 243 pages, $16 Hunger 's external plot is inertial--man undergoes bouts of semi-self-inflicted starvation. In another way, the plot is cyclical--man wanders a town called Christiania, man writes or wants to write, man starves, eats, pukes, starves, eats again, (repeat). This by itself, as Hamsun undoubtedly knew, can seem redundant, even boring. That's why the main thrust of this prolonged "parable/allegory" resides in the main character's interiority--the dissonance between the protagonist's framed thoughts & actions and the reader's wider frame of the same circumstances. This is where typical stream-of-consciousness (SoC) shines--in the liminal zones between thought & behavior (think of our narrator's flamboyant bipolarity), between the narratorial unreliability and the authorial hints of "factuality".  Serendipitously, having just read...

The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya, Houghton Mifflin, 278 pages, 2003. Tolstaya's novel,  The Slynx, is a  smorgasbord of dark delights. No matter what angle a reader approaches this story, they'll find something provocative to confront & challenge their thinking about narrative, genre, & storytelling. Tolstaya teases out allusions to the Bolshevik Revolution and other slivers of Russian history, toys with linguistic evolution in a dyspotic future or  the “mutilation of language”; she shifts voices with disorienting effect and unleashes her titular "Slynx" as symbol of Existential Angst--among other things; she  employs  irony & farce with barbed ferocity as it's linked to memory & art. The novel also showcases the macabre “consequences” of  rigid class stratification & retrogressive bureaucracy, recurrent citations of Russian authors, & contemplations of philosophic themes like Censorship, Authority...

For those not yet caught up in this week’s media outrage-pocalypse, let’s brush up on one that’s currently ablaze all over social media and news sites--weighing in among them The New York Times ,  Salon , HuffPo , The Washington Post , CNN, Fox, Slate, The Daily Beast ,  Aljazeera , Washington Times, Politico, Politifact , The New Republic , and many more. Strangely, last Friday’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher spawned a 10 minute-clip of an exasperated Ben Affleck and a staid Sam Harris arguing on misaligned frames of reference about what constitutes fair criticism of islamic dogma and what crosses that line into liberal outcries of “Islamophobia”. The issue, in general that seems to divide people on this topic is a conversational misalignment. Simply put, liberals on both sides aren’t arguing about the same thing and it’s about time we all get on the same page.  Harris puts it succinctly: “The crucial point of confusion is that we have been sold this meme of I...