[bksvol-discuss] Just Added to Fiction Wish List (Book Synopses included)
- From: Ali Al-hajamy <aalhajamy@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2012 19:21:14 -0400
As usual, I am willing to provide any help I can with regard to proofing.
The Royal Family, by William T. Vollmann. Published by penguin Books,
800 pages. ISBN: 978-0141002002
This is the last book of what is known to readers of Vollmann's oeuvre
as his Prostitution Trilogy. However, it is not connected in any way to
the other books and can be read alone. The books in the prostitution
Trilogy simply share certain themes and are set around the same time period.
Since the publication of his first book in 1987, William T. Vollmann has
established himself as one of the most fascinating and unconventional
literary figures on the scene today. Named one of the twenty best
writers under forty by the New Yorker in 1999, Vollmann received the
best reviews of his career for The Royal Family, a searing fictional
trip through a San Francisco underworld populated by prostitutes, drug
addicts, and urban spiritual seekers. Part biblical allegory and part
skewed postmodern crime novel, The Royal Family is a vivid and
unforgettable work of fiction by one of today's most daring writers.
Sixty Stories, by Donald Barthelme. Published by Penguin Classics, 480
pages. ISBN: 978-0142437391
With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme
threw the preoccupation of our time into the literary equivalent of a
Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and
low. Here are urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues
through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic
dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and
angsts. Like all of Donald's work, the sixty stories
collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at
once unsettling and irresistible.
Take Five, by D. Keith Mano. Published by Dalkey Archive Press, 582
pages. ISBN: 978-1564781932
Welcome to the world of Simon Lynxx and to one of the great overlooked
novels of the 1980s. Con-man, filmmaker (currently working on producing
"Jesus 2001", what he calls the religious equivalent of The Godfather,
best known for his movie "The Clap That Took Over the World"),
descendent of a wealthy and prestigious New York family whose wealth and
prestige are on a sharp decline, racist and anti-Semite (though Simon
dislikes all ethnic groups equally), possessor of never-satisfied
appetites (food, women, drink, but most of all, money and more money),
and the fastest talker since Falstaff, Simon is on a quest that
goes backwards.
Through the course of this 600-page novel, Simon loses, one by one, all
of his senses (taste is lost when trying to siphon off gasoline for his
roving, broken-down production van), ending in a state of complete
debilitation in which he is being made ready for eternity and salvation.
As energy packed as a William Gaddis novel and as rich in language as a
Shakespearean play, Take Five is a modern masterpiece that is at once a
celebration of life and a morality play on excess, as though
anticipating the self-indulgent "me generation" of the decade.
Here is a review by a Goodreads friend which contains an article written
by Mano discussing the Oulipo-like constraints under which this novels
prose was composed.
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/274317408
Ali
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