Latest news with #fiction
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘The River Is Waiting' is every parent's nightmare
After the trauma splayed out in 'She's Come Undone,' 'I Know This Much Is True' and 'The Hour I First Believed,' nobody wanders into a Wally Lamb novel for kicks. Still, the opening of his latest book, 'The River Is Waiting,' screams in a pitch that will etch itself into your nightmares.
New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Risky, Reality-Bending Thriller You Need This Summer
THE CATCH, by Yrsa Daley-Ward Here's a dilemma. Despite its mind-bending premise, I don't actually want to talk to you about what happens in 'The Catch,' Yrsa Daley-Ward's first novel after a poetry collection ('Bone') and two nonfiction projects ('The Terrible' and 'The How'). I want to talk about how it happens. 'The Catch' follows semi-estranged twin sisters, Clara and Dempsey. When they were infants, their mother, Serene, vanished, presumed to have drowned in the Thames. As a result, both sisters were adopted, but by different families. Clara was adopted first, by a wealthy family who said that she 'appeared special right from the beginning,' but they left behind Dempsey, who was 'wheezing and small.' Dempsey was adopted a year later by a councilor. Now adults in their 30s, the same age as their mother when she disappeared, the two have a strained relationship. Clara's a spiraling but newly famous author launching a big book; Dempsey does clerical work and data entry. Then Clara glimpses a woman who looks just like Serene. 'She is my mother,' Clara says, believing her to be Serene, come back. 'My very own mother.' Dempsey, however, sees this figure as a con woman out to manipulate her famous but disturbed sister. It gets weirder. This discovered Serene has not aged a day in the years she has been gone. Furthermore, the events that unfold in the sisters' lives after Serene's reappearance are the same events and language found in the writing that Serene left after her death as well as the same language and writing that appears in Clara's blockbuster book, 'Evidence,' large sections of which appear in 'The Catch' itself. That's the what of the novel. The how, though, is where the book reveals itself to be a rich and risky text. Daley-Ward uses a full complement of textures to weave this book. The surreal drips into the moments of assumed sobriety, shifting the world around us as we read. To unfurl the story, she reaches for dark comedy, for drama, for poetry, for the absurd. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Novels Inspired by Opinion Polls? They're Here, and They're Weird
Pick up a novel and suddenly you're at the whim of the author's imagination. Plot, characters, setting — you have no say in these matters. This is part of the appeal of fiction. Now, perhaps for the first time since Choose Your Own Adventure, Tom Comitta tweaks the equation in 'People's Choice Literature,' coming out from Columbia University Press on June 3. The hefty 584-page volume contains two distinct works: 'The Most Wanted Novel' and 'The Most Unwanted Novel,' each incorporating results of an opinion poll on the literary preferences of 1,045 readers from across the United States. Think eggs to order but fiction, served on the same plate as the most unappetizing breakfast imaginable. 'The Most Wanted Novel' is a thriller about a woman fighting a murderous tech leader. 'The Most Unwanted Novel' is an experimental epistolary romance set on Mars. 'The point is to create levity and humor and lightness,' Comitta said. 'The books take literature seriously, but also recognize that all human endeavor is absurd.' Comitta, who uses they/them pronouns, has long explored the boundary between prose and performance art. In graduate school, they published a journal of intentionally terrible writing. (Its title rhymes with 'literature' and the first syllable is an unprintable synonym for excrement.) Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Irish Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Sam Tallent's Running the Light: Tale of a god-gifted comedian masquerading as joker and joke
Running the Light Author : Sam Tallent ISBN-13 : 978-1399632898 Publisher : White Rabbit Guideline Price : £20 Writing tutors call it subcultural insider information. Anthony Bourdain blew the lid off the psychic cesspit of restaurant back rooms with Kitchen Confidential. FX Toole exposed all the dirty tricks employed by fight corner cut-men in his short story collection Rope Burns. Now we have comedian Sam Tallent's fictional tell-all Running the Light. If Bourdain's first readers and champions were fellow line cooks, Tallent's original audience was his peers. Running the Light's original incarnation was as an online venture, self-published in May 2020, as Covid snuffed out the last lights of the live circuit. Five years later, White Rabbit are publishing it in physical form. The lag is fortunate. Half a decade ago, the culture was still too censorious and self-righteous to tolerate such a spiritually rotten protagonist as Billy Ray Schafer. We're not talking Richard Pryor or Bill Hicks here. This is the tale of a god-gifted but ageing, violent, alcoholic, drug-addicted comedian masquerading as joker and joke, running on a misery wheel of airport bars, rental cars and cheap hotel rooms for 200 days of the year, solitary but always in service, numbing the ghosts with coke, smokes and booze. Schafer's existence is a netherworld of strip mall Bud bars, of one-nighters spent acting as dancing monkey for good old boys in the secret sanctums of country club back rooms, slouching onstage after terminal cancer testifiers and geek show hucksters peddling duck shit bingo. READ MORE All this would be pointless degradation without the redemptive factor of the craft. Tallent writes exceptionally well about the grind, yes, but also the reason for the grind, the daylong gravitational pull towards showtime, the controlled ordeal of the gig, the large adrenaline spike followed by hours drinking with anyone who'll stand your company, squalid episodes in public restrooms, the desperate lengths the solitary comedian will go to in order to avoid the hollow comedown of returning to an empty hotel room, snorting alone, drinking alone, afraid to face the phantoms of betrayed ex-wives and the contempt of estranged sons. Tallent writes: 'When he was young he could take off on a premise running only to catch up to his own flight of imagination sixty minutes later, his clothes soaked and the air itself crackling with the urgency of what he'd done. Those days were gone, but even drunk and coked and spun and pilled, he still killed harder than the reductive drivel being peddled in theaters and arenas by the skeletons he envied. Despite his failures with sobriety, monogamy, business and fatherhood, he was still funny, and funny is the hardest thing to be.' But this flimsy bravado is laced with toxic self-disgust. This is not Bukowski-lite. The performer's psyche is conveyed here as a volatile cocktail of ego and fragility, a queasy bipolar roundabout of gut-level sadness balanced by resilience: Schafer's kindred are Bad Blake in Thomas Cobb's Crazy Heart or Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, the modern day equivalents of washed-up pugs looking for one last pay-day, or the old pro too old to rock 'n' roll and too young to die. The only deliverance to be found is in love or family, but it's too late for that. Billy Ray's sins are not too grievous to be forgiven by others, but by himself. As he drives across the southwest over the course of the week that maps this book's plunging narrative arc, he penetrates deeper into America's Heart of Darkness, yes, but also an internal wasteland. He's done hard time for the worst of crimes, but he's too institutionalised to leave the prison of his soul, choking on his own one-liners, the smile becomes a rictus grin. The bottom-out, when it comes, is horrific. Thrown down among the transients, wandering the streets of Denver, he witnesses the entropic pageantry of the 5th Annual Zombie Crawl: 'He had never heard of such a thing but it made sense. As a species, humankind was bored and increasingly bullshit passed for fun. Their mirth disgusted him. Their happiness was ostracizing. Numb to inorganic novelty, he pitied them their false calamity. Their lives – staid, monotonous – were so safe and predictable these people were forced to organise chaos and pretend they were dead. It was disappointing, For a moment he thought he'd made it to Armageddon.' Running the Light is Dante as gag-artist, trapped in a Diabolical Comedy. Or maybe, in the end, a disgraced Odysseus searching for a way back home to contrition and forgiveness. Read it and weep. I did, through my fingers. Peter Murphy is a writer, journalist and spoken word artist. He records and performs under the name Cursed Murphy
Geek Girl Authority
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Girl Authority
Jennifer Oko Archives
Categories Select Category Games GGA Columns Movies Stuff We Like The Daily Bugle TV & Streaming Geek Girl Authority reviews Jennifer Oko's third novel, Just Emilia, a speculative novel about a woman facing her past and future.
