Tag Archives: TFL

TFL #62

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The Floating Library is becalmed on a sea of whiskey. Doesn’t sound too bad, eh? Read on, matey, read on…

Everyone hits bottom, but everyone’s bottom is different—therein lies the suspense. At what point will the protagonist recognize he or she is trapped in a zero sum game? Will it happen before she loses everything, assuring herself of a chance at recovering that which has been lost? Or will she burn everything to the ground, reaching the point where she physically can’t go any further and anyone who has ever loved or respected her will never do so again?

Read the rest of the review. 

TFL #61

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This installment of The Floating Library is part book review essay about an illustrated children’s book called What Is Punk? by Eric Morse and Anny Yi and part personal essay about my daughter’s indifference to the music I love. An excerpt:

…Do I really want my daughter to love punk rock? After all, punk rock and substance abuse go hand-in-hand. You could say that about any kind of music scene but I don’t think my friends who listen to country (oh wait I don’t have any friends who listen to country) or other genres have been to as many funerals as I have. I really don’t want my daughter dropping f-bombs and calling me a fascist when I tell her to make her bed.

Read the rest oft he excerpt here. 

TFL #60

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The Floating Library sets sail on the Sea of Short Stories with Amelia Gray, Rivka Galchen and Rebecca Makkai.  An excerpt:

While Gray’s stories are often distinguished by their darkness, they are buoyed by a sharp sense of humor. In “Go for It and Raise Hell” a Camaro driving New Mexican terrorizes his patch of desert with his pitiless worldview:

“Carl is coated in the filth of the world. Carl does not believe that the meek shall inherit. He knows that you never know what is enough until you find out what is more than enough.”

When he isn’t “flipping endless J-turns” or hitting on waitresses, Carl imagines the movie of his life that he calls, GO FOR IT AND RAISE HELL, and when is that ever not excellent advice?

Read the rest of the review.

TFL #59

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This was a book I could have gone on and on about. I didn’t talk about it in my review, but it’s really interesting how the book’s themes dovetail with Karolina’s previous novel, How to Get into the Twin Palms. And the ending really put me in mind of David Goodis’s pulp masterpiece The Burglar. An excerpt:

The Invaders is a masterful work of literary fiction with the pulse of a thriller and an ending that’s right out of a pulp novel: lyrical yet unstintingly unsentimental and as pitiless as a sunburn on a cloudy day.  

Read the rest of the review.

TFL #58

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The Floating Library takes a look at a pair of novels with similar subjects and identical titles: Junkie Love (a memoir) by Joe Clifford and Junkie Love (a novel) by Phil Shoenfelt. An excerpt:

I’ve heard stories of writers coming up with the “perfect” title for his or her book, only to discover that it had already been taken; but I’d never met two authors who had books with the same title until this year.

Read the rest of the review. 

TFL #57

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The Floating Library tunes into Daniel Manoney’s Sunblind Almost Motorcrash by Spork Preess: 

If you love music, but the prospect of reading a collection of record reviews strikes you as a less-than-thrilling use of your time, Daniel Mahoney just might make you reconsider.

His new book Sunblind Almost Motorcrash, published by Spork Press, collects a series of imaginary record reviews by bands that don’t exist. (If this review was in an audio format, you’d hear the sound of a needle scratching a record here.) That’s right: the songs, records, bands—even the record labels—are all products of Mahoney’s prodigious imagination.

Read the rest of the review.

TFL# 56

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The Floating Library stays close to home port for a look at a trio of exceptional debut novels by Andy Roe, Celeste Ng and Shanna Mahin, who was reviewed in the New York Times last week. An excerpt:

Oh! You Pretty Things is also about class, but you’d be hard pressed to find a class struggle this entertaining. When the story prepares you for a Hollywood ending, the long-suffering, acid-tongued narrator (“If I were a cutter, I’d have crop circles on my thighs”) brings the funny.

Read the rest of the review. 

TFL #53

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The Floating Library checks in with Edward Gorey, author/illustrator of The Unstrung Harp, the book that gave us the phrase “the unspeakable horror of the literary life.” 

The Unstrung Harp has the subtitle “or, Mr Earbrass writes a novel” and begins with “Mr C(lavius) F(rederick) Earbrass” contemplating his next book. “On November 18th of alternate years” he selects a “title at random from a list of them he keeps in a little green note-book.” Over the course of the next several pages, we get glimpses of the plot-heavy story he’s constructing, and while his novels have pseudo-serious-sounding titles like “More Chains than Clank” and “The Meaning of the House,” the clues suggest that he’s at work on a highbrow, yet slightly off-center, mystery.

The he rest of the review. 

TFL #52

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The Floating Library is besieged by sirens with reviews of Dorothy Iannone’s You Who Read Me with Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends and Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star. 

Iannone’s work combines text and image in arresting fashion. While her figures are typically clothed, or at least ornamented, their genitalia are almost always on display. While the text describes erotic scenes, it’s seldom vulgar—more Marguerite Duras than Anaïs Nin—and more often then not, the words are used to convey stories, recipes, anecdotes and aphorisms of a nonsexual nature. The result is something that appears at first blush to be as shocking as Raymond Pettibon, only more poetic and much more polite.

Read the rest of the review here.

Books

Two new debuts, two very different views of procreation: The Shimmering Go-Between by Lee Klein and Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend by Erika T. Wurth. 

The Shimmering Go-Between, the debut novel by Lee Klein, published by Atticus Books, takes its title from a quote by Vladimir Nabokov: “Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall tale, there is a shimmering go-between…” That’s a telling quote, for it alerts the reader to the possibility that we are on the threshold of something fantastic.

Read the rest of the review in the forty-fourth installment of The Floating Library.