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Text New Releases: May 1st-8th
Haruki Murakami (trans. Jay Rubin) - After Dark
 The 12th work from popular Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami takes place over seven hours on a Tokyo night and focuses on the inter-cutting narratives of two sisters: Eri is a fashion model and does nothing in the novel but sleep (in a malicious netherworld of course). Her sister, Mari, is a college student who stays up all night drinking coffee in a Denny's encountering increasingly strange night patrons (a jazz musician, a Chinese prostitute and the proprietor of a "love hotel"). Murakami creates his stories according to a disconcerting but hypnotic aesthetic, oscillating between absurdism and surrealism. His central themes are the dualism of perspective and the diffuseness of conscious identity. The novel is a short read and either a great introduction to the author's work or a quick fix for long-time fans waiting for the next epic. |
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Chuck Palahniuk - Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
 Palahniuk's eighth novel is a grim religious parable set in a gritty future anchored around a deceased naturopathic serial killer, Buster "Rant" Casey. The novel unfolds as an oral history as Buster's friends, enemies and acquaintances retell episodes of his life in conflicting accounts. These include childhood friends elucidating the boy's masochistic behavior (getting snakes, scorpions and spiders to bite him and induce erections; repeatedly infecting himself with rabies), policemen and doctors who had run-ins with Buster; and "Party Crashers," a thrill-seeking gang who purposefully crash cars for the adrenaline rush (Hello J.G. Ballard). Fans of Palahniuk (or "teenagers and the sort of young man whose disaffection springs from hazy origins" according to Laura Miller) are again treated to the author's
minimalist style, black humor, theme of willful alienation and trademark celebratory destruction. |
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Rebecca Barry - Later, at the Bar: A Novel in Stories
 The debut novel from Rebecca Barry is ten interlinked stories that revolve around one Lucy's Tavern in upstate New York. The slice of life stories examine the bar room intimacy of strangers and their drunken, whimsical, desperate, blissful, depressing, circular existences. Lee K. Abbott, author of
All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories, writes, "Those down-and-out and never-were, those bushwhacked by want, those haunted by hooch, those pining for an imagined past and about to charge into public square to howl at heaven, these are the men and women who people
Later, At the Bar, Rebecca Barry's movingly splendid novel, a book as much about what mends as what rends." |
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Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics
 Pessl's debut is an elaborate text modeled on the syllabus of a college literature course: 36 chapters are named after everything from
"Othello" to "Heart of Darkness" to "The Trial" to "Paradise Lost" to "The Big Sleep." The novel posits an inquisitive "Introduction" and culminates into a frenetic last chapter entitled, "Final Exam." Each chapter is plot driven although thematically tied to the famous literary work of the chapter title (Chapter 6, "Brave New World" describes a character's first day at school).
Special Topics is a mammoth novel and many reviewers have brought attention to its size (over 500 pages) and rigorous prose (parenthetical sentences abound, as do dense laborious sentences and academic jargon). Structurally the work appeals to fan's of Umberto Eco's exhaustive conspiracy constructions and Borges's idiosyncratic, arcane academicism. |
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Dean Koontz - The Husband
 Dean Koontz has just released his weekly novel. It's called
The Husband. It's a crime, action, suspense, thriller, Hitchcockian thing about a man (a husband!) called Mitch who must raise 2 million dollars in three days or kidnappers will murder his wife. According to one Amazon reviewer, "Mr. Koontz has focused on themes of love, goodness, family, and kindness confronting evil, despair, and self-interest in many of his recent books and this one is no exception." Another reviewer simply stated: "The Husband is written with such extraordinary skill that it draws you in as if you are a physical witness to each scene."
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