Sifting through the dirt to get to the gold
"By implication we orphans were idiots of connectivity, overly impressed by any trace of the familial in the world. We should doubt ourselves any time we imagined a network in operation. We should leave that stuff to Minna. Just as he knew the identity of our parents but would never reveal it to us, only... Continue Reading →
"A working actress is an anomaly in L.A. Everyone is some kind of model-actress-whatever, but when you drill down, waitress-barista-sex worker tends out to be more accurate." The author gives the reader a first-hand look at the lives of the rich and famous and even those of the downtown laden buskers. What the lead protagonist... Continue Reading →
Charlie Asher owns and operates a second hand thrift shop in San Francisco, a city that possesses the perfect balance of darkness and light, making it one of the easiest places on Earth to get lost. A notion that Charlie has perhaps taken a little too literally throughout the course of his life. Charlie is... Continue Reading →
"It offended his sense of proportion and economy to throw away a ninety-percent serviceable string of lights. It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it... Continue Reading →
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is an appropriate title for this book. This stream of consciousness narrative puts you into the mind of a ten-year old where at one moment you can be interpreting one thing and at a drop of a hat you can become fixated on another. The author channels his inner child,... Continue Reading →
"The rough estimate of these riches was set at fifteen thousand dollars; my take of this more than tripled my savings, and as we left the musty basement, heading up the stairs and into the light, I felt two things at once: a gladness at this turn of fortune, but also an emptiness that I... Continue Reading →
"The great painters and composers didn't simply decide what beauty was. They discovered in their lives and devoted themselves to capturing it." This is a 21st century retelling of a popular 1980's family comedy, but for the sake of subtleties let's call this intergalactic religious odyssey Ransom & Corwin's Excellent Meta-Physical Adventure. Together they travel... Continue Reading →
SUMMARY You think you've got bad dreams? Consider author John F.D. Taff's nightmares. How about the one where a guy resurrects his dead girlfriend with a set of the prop neck bolts used on Boris Karloff in the 1932 classic Frankenstein? Or one where the ghost of the author's dead dog keeps coming back to... Continue Reading →
Summary -The predecessor / doppelgänger / kindred spirit of “Catastrophically Consequential”, “Hideous Exuberance” remains, in this revised edition, a character-driven, highbrow-lowbrow, post-post-modern, comic-fantasy-nightmare dissecting the unbridled egoism, narcissism, and anti-intellectualism of the present day. This work is a flamboyant, surrealistic and experimental study of abusive and self-abusing characters, as well as a trashy, grungy, poetic... Continue Reading →
Most of the people who knew my mother either slept with her or wished they had, including me, my aunt Medina and a man who boarded with us; though he was neither old nor someone’s father, he went by the name of “Pops.” I know that’s ambiguous, but it’s better left ambiguous for now. As... Continue Reading →
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