No book review from me this time. Judging by my recent history, it’d be a wise guess to say I do little more than read and review books. But such a guess would also be wrong. I also lounge in hotel chairs and talk about the problem of not writing as I—get this—don’t write.
Are you a writer who sometimes has trouble…performing? Then this pill…uh, video… is for you. Don’t kick yourself for letting your partner down. Lack of writing happens to everyone. Really. It does. Even me.
At times William Gay, at times Carlton Mellick III, but always, I’d say, he dodges what would traditionally be called Bizarro fiction by way of empathy for his characters. He’s Bizarro with heart…so, magical realist, I suppose. He’d fit in more with Amy Bender and Gabriel Garcia Marquez than with Carlton Mellick III or even Bradley Sands, but is strong enough in the world of any to be welcomed by them.
Wallwork isn’t afraid to take a strange, even repulsive concept, and build a touching story around it. A story of a man shitting out his own nerves? Sounds ridiculous, but Wallwork makes it work. A sexual sideshow couple famous for inserting increasingly large objects into the woman’s vagina? Yep, but it gets even weirder, yet Wallwork knows how approach these images with honesty and heart.
Chuck Palahniuk is an important writer. Love him or hate him, he’s done more to bring reading to uninterested demographics than almost any other author. But how do his books rank?
I decided to take some time to (as) objectively (as possible) rank all of Chuck Palahniuk’s novels from Most Important to Least Important as a way to help hew readers find the right Palahniuk book.
What makes for an important book? It’s not necessarily a good story or well-written prose. I believe it’s a mixture of both, along with contextual relevancy, or “impact. For purposes of this list, I will be weighing the social impact of the book above any other metric.
Here’s the list
Socially relevant
Fight Club (machismo and consumerism)
Survivor (cult of celebrity)
Invisible Monsters (cultural importance of and priority placed on beauty)
Maybe socially relevant
Haunted (the reality TV obsession and “Truman Show Syndrome”)
Pygmy (Xenophobia, terriorism)
Not socially relevant
Rant
Choke
Lullaby
Diary
Snuff
Tell-All
Damned
The video is long, averaging about 1 minute per book (totaling about 12 minutes), but it’s a good enough primer, I think.
In addition to this one 12 minute video, I recorded a series of mini-reviews of each book. Check out any of the videos in the playlist below. At the end of each video, you’ll see a series of links that you can click to continue watching other Palahniuk book reviews.
Click the image above to watch the story of getting Denis Johnson to sign my copy of Jesus’ Son.
A few years ago I attended a writing conference in Portland, Oregon called the Tin House Writer’s Workshop. During the event, I met a lot of great authors, one of which was Denis Johnson, author of, among many other books, Jesus’ Son.
This newest installment of Getting the Singed Book features my heroic story of how I got my copy of Jesus’ Son signed by the author. It involves, among other awkward situations, the author nearly, almost, kinda drinking my pee. Read all about this almost happening at Dark Sky Magazine, here: http://www.cjrlit.com/DrinkingPee
The Orphan Master’s Son is a remarkable book. I’ve been a fan of Adam Johnson’s work since his story collection Emporium(which I credit as being a primary impetus to my own fiction writing), and though both books are stellar, they are so in such different ways. It’s hard to believe that the man who wrote Emporium is the same guy who wrote The Orphan Master’s Son. Perhaps the two personalities are a Jun Do/Commander Ga thing (reference to the book).
In this video review you’ll suffer through my overt praise as well as my amazing Photoshop skills. Who knew Adam Johnson could so easily become Kim Jong Il?
The stories of Fuckload of Shorts by Jedidiah Ayres, which includes the stories that inspired the short film Fuckload of Scotch Tape, are the best kind of short stories. Each one takes an idea that, realistically should make for a horrible, shock-driven story, and instead delivers amazing noir fiction with beautifully rendered characters. Ejaculating a dead man? Yep. Selling corpses to a dog foot plant? Yep. In the hands of a lesser writer, these ideas would amount to nothing more than throwaway snuff fiction. But in the hands of Jedidiah Ayres, these ideas are simply climaxes of and catalysts for truly compelling stories.
This video book review examines one of those scenarios in-depth: how exactly, logistically speaking, can one ejaculate a dead man? Yes, there is a whiteboard and drawings included.
Hear the amazing, mostly made up story of how I got my copy of Joe Meno’s How the Hula Girl Sings signed by the author during the 2004 Association of Writers and Writing Projects conference in Chicago, IL. You’ll hear the first-hand account of how I knew Meno as a musician first and an author second, why I should be more sensitive to Hula throat issues, and why Joe Meno owes me a royalty check.
