quips and clips

just finished reading DBC Pierre’s romantic farce, LUDMILA’S BROKEN ENGLISH. worthy of DaPonte, a romp swirling together the lives of sundered British Siamese twins and the title-character’s family in a desolate hamlet in the Caucasus in war-torn present-day Russia, via an internet bride service. really funny, and a lot less at stake here than in…

the only pleasure capable of outstripping reading Lucius Shepard is re-reading Lucius Shepard. beyond that, there is only this singular gift of re-reading a masterwork of Lucius’ in a form spectacularly reworked by him. VIATOR, a novel centered on a freighter violently beached on a beach near a destitute port near Nome, AL, and its…

just finished reading Nikolai Grozni’s WUNDERKIND, a novel based on the author’s life experience as a gifted young pianist in a Bulgarian School for the Gifted in Sofia during the last days of the Iron Curtain. it’s a very dark but sometimes darkly comic novel, with, not incidentally, some of the smartest and most beautiful…

just finished reading the devotedly curated collection, EXPELLED FROM EDEN, A WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN READER, edited by Larry McCaffery and Michael Hemmingson. i’ve read all of Vollmann’s work (admittedly, only the 800-page condensed version of the 7-volume ‘life’s work’ of Vollmann (though i do own the complete), his history and calculus of violence, RISING UP…

ugh. finally finished reading Justin Cronin’s THE SUMMER GUEST, a soppily sentimental history of family and guests over the decades at a remote fishing camp in NW Maine. i must be a really bad person. this is just as prettily written as the sensitive crap that gets in the New Yorker, but i have no…

just finished reading more great work from Lucius Shepard, foremost, his near-future novella of the Mexicali border, AZTECHS. one might consider its competing reality views worthy of Philip K. Dick, or its drug-metamorphosed military mutants denizens of a William Burroughs novel, but this is hallowed Lucius ground; part of the fabric he wove in his…

Just finished rereading the ultimate semiotician’s horror novel, the first of Mark Z. Danielewski’s masterpieces, House of Leaves. This book goes into my handful of books (Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and Infinite Jest) which upon finishing, one can ponder seriously whether to read anything else, or to more fruitfully to Beginagain.

just finished reading Michael Lewis’ collection of essays on the Internet, NEXT. brilliant as he is, this one can’t help but be a bit dated (published in 2002) but it’s still a thoughtful and incisive commentary on the online world. pretty sure he was in First Class on a recent trip from Boston for Chicago,…

thanks to From the Top’s producer, Tom Voegli for gifting me the Last Days essays by one of the most gifted and compelling minds of our time, Christopher Hitchens’ MORTALITY. beautiful preface by Graydon Carter, and a magnificent afterward by Hitchens’ wife, Carol Blue, who tells of Hitchens’ volubility and grace even in the last…

even more astonishing than the breadth and scope of Lucius Shepard‘s imagination in the seemingly infinite variety of his plot, trajectories and characterizations is the power inherent in narratives that share a common theme or tone; when novellas with common locales or sensibilities are collected, they are their own mythologies: THE JAGUAR HUNTER, LIFE DURING…