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By Eric Markowsky, on May 16th, 2012  Author: Jennifer duBois
2012, The Dial Press
Filed under: Literary, Historical
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that began with a more aptly chosen pair of epigraphs. Lurking in the front pages of Jennifer duBois’s debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, you’ll find these two gems:
All of us are doomed, but some are more doomed than others.
–Vladimir Nabokov, from Ada, or Ardor
And if in this wide world I die, then I’ll die from joy that I’m alive.
–Yevgeni Yevtushenko
The novel’s action takes place at the extremes of optimism and pessimism expressed here. Everyone in this book is doomed (some more so than others), and yet the main characters never give up on trying to make something out of their inevitable descent, looking for answers to long-buried questions, looking to leave a mark, however faint, on history. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 7th, 2012 [This intimate, intricate graphic memoir is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Alison Bechdel
2012, Houghton Mifflin
Filed under: Memoir, Graphic Novel, Literary
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
This impressive graphic memoir is a great book, but not in any way I think I’ve read before. The bulk of the novel consists of Bechdel’s therapy-related endeavors. She remembers episodes from her childhood in terms of various infant-development theories, she recounts her own therapy sessions as an adult, she interprets her dreams, she recounts conversations with her mother, and she quotes frequently from academic papers about psychoanalysis. In fact, the act of creating the book itself might have been therapeutic for Bechdel, because, as she says, “for both my mother and me, it’s by writing… by stepping back a bit from the real thing to look at it, that we are most present.”
Are You My Mother? is not funny, and the events it recounts are never earth-shattering—especially not compared to the central events of her first book, Fun Home, about her father’s closeted bisexuality and his suicide soon after Bechdel herself came out to her parents.
Instead of relying on these more traditional elements of story, Bechdel indulges her considerable talent for eliciting Nabokov-like patterns from the randomness of the world. She weaves a web of interconnected narrative tidbits—plucked from the entirety of her own life, as well as the lives of her parents, the memoirs and novels of Virginia Woolf, the work and life of Donald Winnicott, and many others—that echo and expand the smallest narrative hiccup until it ripples across the entirety of her existence. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on April 27th, 2012  Author: Ron Rash
2012, Ecco
Filed under: Literary, Historical
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
I loved Ron rash’s gritty, atmospheric Depression-era novel, Serena, and I’m looking forward to the movie version, where the badass title character will be played by Jennifer Lawrence—lately Katniss Everdeen in the solid adaptation of The Hunger Games. But Rash’s follow-up to that electrifying novel, a lackluster collection of stories called Burning Bright, left me flat.
This latest offering disappoints in much the same way those stories did: it feels small and too quiet. In fact, The Cove feels like a short story idea stretched past its rightful size. It’s not bad, certainly, but it possesses only tiny patches of the dark tension and classic drama that made Serena so great.
…
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By Mike Beeman, on April 26th, 2012
[This outstanding collections of short-stories is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Eugene Cross
2012, Dzanc Books
Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
If Dzanc books isn’t on your radar as a go-to press for outstanding collections of short stories, it should be. Once a year, for the past three years, a collection by Dzanc has blown me away. Lauran van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us was my gateway drug, and the way she combined the far-fetched and everyday made the collection one of my favorite books I read in 2010. In 2011, I read Knuckleheads, by Jeff Kass, laughing at the sometimes lunkish characters while shaking my head with recognition. So when I picked up Eugene Cross’s collection, Fires of our Choosing, I knew I was in for something good.
Cross’s book does not disappoint. A combination of Phillip Meyer’s American Rust and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son, Fires maps the lives of working-class men and women who often find themselves a dice-throw away from being down-and-out, problems with love, family, and alcohol complicating perpetual crisis of the wallet and the heart. …
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By Sean Clark, on April 20th, 2012 [The insane and hilarious novel is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Mark Leyner
2012, Hachette
Filed Under: Literary, Humor
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
Where to even begin with this book? This novel, if you want to call it that, is brilliant, perplexing, uproarious, and a little bit sad. One thing is certain: this is a superb bit of writing, and example of a writer at the top of his game, whose abilities with the written word put many of his contemporaries to shame. The rest is pretty much up for interpretation. If you want to glean more than just pretty bits of style from this book, come in prepared to to use parts of your brain you probably haven’t exercised in a while.
…
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By Nico Vreeland, on April 20th, 2012  Author: Kevin Barry
2012, Graywolf
Filed under: Literary, Fantasy
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
5 |
| Depth..... |
3 |
Kevin Barry is a wonderful stylist, a rare talent in the prose department. He writes City of Bohane in a gritty patois largely of his own making, halfway between Dashiell Hammett and A Clockwork Orange. Even so, it never gets too precious or contrived, and it never feels like Barry is reaching. That’s a very difficult feat, and the fact that Barry manages it for the entire novel without missing a beat, well, that’s nothing short of remarkable.
It’s a shame, then, that once you delve into the rich prose, there’s nothing inside worth getting to.
…
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By Eric Markowsky, on March 23rd, 2012  Author: Simon Van Booy
Harper Perennial, 2009
Filed under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it on Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Love Begins in Winter appeared on my desk wrapped in silver paper this past Christmas. It wasn’t on my wish list, but I accepted it with all the love that was intended from someone who had a hunch about me and about this book. You might consider my review a belated thank you card for a favorite gift, or else a form of retroactive wishing for what I have already been given.
These are rare and wonderful stories, subtle in tone, ambitious in scope, and Romantic in vision. Each one performs a precise balancing act that spans multiple settings, voices, and perspectives, a feat rendered all the more impressive by a general lack of flash in the writing. Van Booy’s prose is direct and unadorned, as enjoyable to read as it is challenging in its depiction of conflicted emotions.
But perhaps my favorite thing about the writing here is the boldness of it. “Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained,” says Bruno Bonnet, the cellist who narrates the title story. “Music and love are the same.” Van Booy’s characters are prone to lofty speculations like this, and the success of these five stories lies in their ability to support their most challenging observations, persuading readers with precise, evocative detail.
…
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on March 22nd, 2012 Author: Mark Carp
2011, Xlibris
Filed Under: Literary, Short-Run
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
Written in the serviceable prose-style of a newspaper reporter that keeps the reader turning the pages, Mark Carp’s new novella, Cain, Abel and the Family Cohen, tells the story of the rapid rise and breathtakingly precipitous fall of Jonas Cohen, the youngest child of Rabbi Abraham Cohen. Related largely in the first person by Jonas himself (with a couple of minor but confusing switches in point of view in several places), Carp takes us through the beginning of the recent financial crisis when the housing bubble burst, financial institutions tanked and the economy went to hell. Jonas, a recent college graduate and hotshot financial analyst, has just joined the Frick Group, a New York hedge fund where he had interned for several summers.
A precocious investment analyst, Jonas foresees the downturn in the housing market when he arrives in New York to begin his job (his family is from Baltimore where his father leads a congregation) and notices the vastly overpriced properties. He quickly does his research and advises his boss, A.J. Buckner, about the imminent decline in prices and advises him that the Frick Group should begin “shorting housing indexes,” a maneuver to maximize shareholder profits by betting on the decline in housing prices. A real estate broker by day, Carp writes with authority about this in a concise and enlightening manner while furthering his plot.
Jonas’ predictions and advice pan out and he becomes something of a Wall Street celebrity, interviewed on business talkshow programs and consulted for his insights into the economy. A wunderkind, by his own description. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on March 12th, 2012  Author: Gary Shteyngart
2010, Random House
Filed Under: Literary, Humor, Sci-Fi
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
Set in a near future as absurd as it is familiar, Super Sad True Love Story depicts a narcissistic America, drunk on credit, obsessed with youth, and largely ignorant of its relationship with the rest of the world. The government is run by the monolithic Bipartisan party, and no one much cares what the military does in Venezuela so long as the never ending stream of hypnotic information keeps scrolling across their “äppäräti.” It’s funny the way Russian literature, blight, or accidental death can be funny.
I’d call it dystopian literature except that in many ways Shteyngart’s novel doesn’t go far enough in reimagining our world to qualify. “Äppäräti” are juiced up smart phones, new fashions are obscenely revealing, and everyone loves shopping. Dystopian literature shows us our world is stranger than we imagined by drawing out similarities with a world that appears unrecognizable on its surface; Super Sad True Love Story pretty much shows us our world exactly like it is, only worse.
For all the elaborate trappings of its near future setting, Super Sad True Love Story is less affecting as satire than (like the title suggests) as a oddly simple love story. Lenny Abramov, an aging, balding book addict with dreams of immortality falls for Eunice Park, a twenty-something Korean-American beauty and a true product of her times, image obsessed, outwardly confident, inwardly self-loathing. That Shteyngart manages to cut compelling characters from these types is a testament to his talents as a writer; that Lenny and Eunice manage to find consolation in each other is a testament to the strangeness of intimacy. …
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By Roman Gladstone, on March 7th, 2012 Author: Karen Lillis
2012, Spuyten Duyvil Novella Seriess
Filed Under: Literary, Short-Run
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Karen Lillis’ gem of a novella is written in the form of a diary by an unnamed female over the course of three weeks in December, 2003. It is not a diary in the sense of daily entries that recount the events of the day. In fact, we know almost nothing about her activity during this time except that on December 24 the narrator, who lives in New York City (Brooklyn), boards a train for Washington, DC, presumably to spend the holidays with her family, though nothing’s ever mentioned, and on December 30, the final entry, she is about to board the return train.
Watch the Doors as They Close is a soul-searching exploration of an all-consuming love affair that has recently ended. In fact, three days into the journal, December 14, the narrator writes, “Anselm and I broke up a week ago – a week ago today, in fact. On the phone, after he’d already left New York again to return to his mother’s house in Pennsylvania.”
Indeed, the journal begins, “This is the story of Anselm. The story of Anselm as told to me.” It’s this introspective inquiry that makes the choice of the diary form so compelling. A diary is written for oneself, an attempt to make sense of one’s life. To get a bead on her own life, the narrator must come to terms with her lover, the man with whom she shared a room for the past three months in an often tempestuous affair. …
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