Ma itibaren Musselshell, MT 59059, Birleşik Devletler
i struggled between four and five stars. i grew a bit antsy during some sections. all in all, though it was brilliant and beautiful. i was very effected and moved by the ending and wanted to choose five stars based on the last chapter and how it colored the whole book. however, it was a bit too neat and tidy. still... i didn't really mind. if i based my rating purely on enjoyment throughout... i would choose four stars. plus, there were some sections that seemed a bit forced. but this book strikes me as one that i should read over and over and that will mean more each time. i think there is much to learn and discussions to be had based on this book... the many descriptions of battle maneuvers and what not make me unsure as to whether i'll do that. maybe this is a good bookclub pick? defintely a god book to write about. Read the second time in january 2010 - I only did it because my bookclub made me... And I almost skipped it altogether. I think the first time I read the book I felt slightly disappointed. Somehow the way people spoke about the book set me up for a let down upon the actual reading. However, going into the book with my expectations lowered the second time made it a totally different experience. I LOVED it. I loved Ender. I even found the battles interesting this time. Really beautiful book. Totally worth the second read.
This appears to be some kind of lit journal for madmen, here in its third volume containing only long works (three) and a Pushcart-Nominated exquisite corpse by 65 people who each paid $10 to be here. (The deal (joke?) was: for $650 we will publish your story and nominate it for a Pushcart Prize. The deal was: 65 people got together over at htmlgiant and totally did it. The deal is: the story is published on pink pages in the middle of the journal and is openly mocked by the editors. Which may be amazing. And that is all I will say about that.) There are three other stories here. I picked this up entirely for the closing M. Kitchell novella Paul Garrior in Jacques Riverrun's "The Abyss is the Foundation of the Possible". Kitchell, also responsible for the cover photography, is a someone I am aware of as an essential critical presence around the web and here on goodreads. The books and films Kitchell seeks out and writes about triangulate a very particular territory, a haunted aesthetically-refined surrealism of austere forms and warped desire. It is precisely this uncanny territory mapped out in other media into which Kitchell's own fiction directly plunges, creating here a pristinely distorted meditation on terminal(?) obsession with that which exists between absence and presence, with ghosts of a metaphysical sort. Gracefully conveyed through several narrative layers (deft use of mis-en-abime, a phrase I learned through Kitchell writing about Zulawski, in fact) of film ephemera and dialogue dancing around cinema, pornography, design, and the desperate search for something inexpressible (and the means to express it). It's terribly good, in precisely the ways that (having read his criticism and a few shorter stories) I've hoped Kitchell's fiction would be good. This is his longest published work, I believe, and his most developed, and entirely worth seeking out. Krammer Abrahams (also here) offers "CEOs" which appears to be about dismal prospects and extremely cracked out parents. If it is about anything at all besides the words it spews across the page. It might be a sort of broken version of that one twitter sitcom. It might have been unethically transcribed from the rantings of real schizophrenic ex-CEOs who regret having given up their MIDDLE CLASS NOSES. It might be the vomiting of an unblanced mind. It is a good opener in the sense that it completely unmoors whatever expectations might have been brought into reading this book. Peter Markus, then, seems totally coherent in his bleak, minimal "Dead Dog Sleeps", which in its claustrophobic casual brutality, clipped affectless prose, and collective second-person-plural brother-narrators recalls The Notebook. It was on a night like this when the sun rose up at dawn the next day that we saw for the first time that dog Dead Dog dead on the side of the road. When we first saw Dead Dog, there on the side of the road, the dog that we saw, we thought that it was a dog dead. Interesting. As oddly pretty in its sleek prose as it is distinctly unappealing in consistent content. Hermetic unfeeling despair, rarefied.
Max and Zoe have problems getting pregnant. They use all their money using artificial means and then Zoe has a still birth. Zoe wants to try again, but its too much for Max, so he asks for a divorce. Zoe and Max don't have money, so they handle the divorce themselves. Zoe remarries, while Max returns to alcohol. After a car accident he becomes religious. Zoe wants to use the three frozen embryos, but Max doesn't know what he wants. They end up in court, where secrets are revealed. The book is told from different characters point of view so some parts are repeated, which slowed it down for me, otherwise, I liked the story which does take place in 2011.