Not much has changed with Junot Diaz‘s writing style since he dropped his debut collection of short stories, Drown, in 1996. In seventeen years, he has released three works of fiction: Drown, his famous Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and, most recently, This is How You Lose Her, another collection of intertwining short stories that bounce between the Dominican Republic and New Jersey.

I liked the short book of nine stories. Only 212 pages long. The Spanglish voice is always refreshing. Plus, I love the image of Americans reading it with a Spanish dictionary opened up next to them. Google Translate on standby.

This is How You Lose Her reads like a sequel to Drown. All of the stories could be scrambled together and they would still work. While both books have multiple narrators, the main character is Yunior. Both books deal with cheating on women, daddy issues, drug addictions, and following down a wicked path that the narrator tries so desperately to avoid.

After reading all three pieces by Diaz, it is hard not to assume that these stories are semi-autobiographical. My friends offered this explanation: “Regarding Diaz, whether it’s autobiographical, I often waver. I’m torn in deciding whether it is or if his genius lies in making us believe that it is. Every time I see him in a video (my brother’s talked to him twice, as well) I feel like it’s not really him, rather perhaps the Dominicans he grew up wanting to be, but I dunno. Complete speculation.”

Here is my favorite piece from the book: “Squatter chawls where there are no roads, no lights, no running water, no grid, no anything, where everybody’s slapdash house is on top of everybody else’s, where it’s all mud and shanties and motos and grind and thin smiling motherfuckers everywhere without end, like falling off the rim of civilization. You have to leave the rental jípeta on the last bit of paved road and jump on the back of motoconchos with all the luggage balanced on your backs. Nobody stares because those ain’t real loads you’re carrying: You’ve seen a single moto carry a family of five and their pig.”

If you couldn’t tell, I prefer the parts where he is in the Dominican Republic. Maybe because the descriptions reminds me of parts of Ecuador. Maybe because Diaz is more nostalgic and writes more beautifully when talking about his home country.

Don’t read This is How You Lose Her and expect to smile. A depressing journey down regretful alleys and late-night booty calls, Diaz has created a voice so strong that you are thrown into the story, whether you want to or not.

“You call an ex-lover, knowing you might stir something up, then you call a friend who is struggling, to offer whatever help you can. You go to a play, spend hours in your car, wander a saltmarsh, erase emails whatever – when you sit down to write it all swirls around inside your head.”

Nick Flynn is one of my favorite authors. A poet, a playwright, and a memoirist who has released three collections of poetry, two plays, and three memoirs. I recently read his most recent book, a memoir called The Reenactments.

His most famous book is Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, a memoir about working at a homeless shelter and seeing his estranged father walk into the lobby, asking for a bed. The book deals with drug abuse, his mother’s suicide, odd jobs, and searching the bottom of a bottle for a direction in life. Not necessarily a heart warmer, but a beautiful tale of spinning out of control and landing on your feet. One of my favorite books, one I’ve highlighted entirely and dog-eared to death.

Following the success of Suck City, the book was picked up to be adapted into a film. After years of pre-development hell and production company confusion, it was finally made into a movie in 2012: Being Flynn, starring Robert Deniro (Flynn’s father), Julianne Moore (Flynn’s mother), and Paul Dano (Flynn). It wasn’t my favorite movie, the pacing seemed off, but it wasn’t bad, and it was still great to see a favorite book transformed visually.

Because Nick Flynn is a writer, one who over-analyzes his life and takes his reader down philosophical journeys they might not grasp at first, he decided to write his third memoir all about watching his life made into a movie. “Coffee and bagels, we shake hands all around, each will pretend to be someone I once knew.” The Reenactments is a 250 page mind fuck.

Flynn begins with excitement about the movie, then uncertainty, wondering if it will toy with his brain to see such traumatic personal incidents dramatized. He writes: “I get to the edge of knowing, then teeter back and forth…It is all we can do, all I’ve ever done – stand before what I know, and pulse into the unknown.”

Flynn watched Julianne Moore pretend to be his mother. He watched her write the suicide note while the cameras roll. He watched Robert Deniro pretend to be his alcoholic father, full of racial slurs and cold nights on the street. He analyzed all of these events psychologically, discussing the whole concept of a movie within a movie within a movie. Less Inception, more Being John Malkovich. “Does this mean that inside us is a film, vague and blurry, of everything we have ever seen? Does this mean that in thirty years we will be able to project our dreams onto the ceiling as we sleep? What does this say about the stories we tell ourselves to keep ourselves afloat?”

The entire experience proves to be therapeutic for Flynn. He reflects heavily and researches the meanings behind his emotions. By seeing Julianne Moore pretend to be his mother, pretend to kill herself, he finds relief in the reenactment. “She went away one day, carved a door in the air, but it was written in the book that she would come back, that the hole would heal, that the door would close.”

Read everything by Nick Flynn. He never disappoints, and his newest only continues his legacy as one of the most poetic memoirists in the game.

Tom Parking is a regular kid in his school. He’s a drama-geek getting average grades, leads an average life with an absentee dad, he’s secretely in love with a sort-of popular girl at school and his best friend from way back is this sort-of popular guy (much more than he is, anyway). Oftentimes he wishes his life were more exciting; one day after a theatre performance at school, his dad shows up, takes him to his rental vam and they drive off. Then his dad barfs all over the windshield and start to act all erratic, and turns out not to be his dad: this is Gark, a guy from an alternate kingdom-universe, who came to find the Chosen One from a prophecy. That Chosen One is Tom! Just like in the movies! Except that his kingdom-universe is crappy. Not shitty, though. People there are generally bummed out, they drive crappy cars they cobbled together out of what earthlings consider garbage, wear crappy clothes that have apparently been discarded in another era, etc. The portal to that universe is located in a donation box sitting in a K-mart parking lot. Crappy.

This is DC Pierson’s second book, after The Boy Who Could Not Sleep And Never Had To. If you have read that one, the tone is pretty different. If you’re at all familiar with his comedy, you will hear DC’s voice a lot as the narrator of this story; whereas TBWCNSANHT focused more on the impressions of a protagonist in an episode of his life, Crap Kingdom is more of a coming-of-age story, and Tom Parking is a pretty credible character, full of insecurities like the rest of us. (more…)

Pickup the latest issue of Front Magazine to see an interview with Greg Rivera about his expansive collection of rare toys, artwork, and collectibles. If you ever wanted to go inside the mind of a dude who has procured an anatomically correct, vintage Mr. T doll, now’s your chance. Read the article to find out how you to can become a modern day Indiana Jones of pop culture ephemera.

Front Magazine is out of the UK, so heads in the U.S will have to head to the upscale magazine shops that carry import magazines to get your hands on a copy. On the plus side though, those places usually have wild fashion magazines from all over the world which feature wild nudity and crazy future stylings from Japan. Flip through one of those while you’re copping Front and laugh at the Japanese kids wearing neon pink garbage bags as shirts. Two years from now laugh at all the lames you know, not wearing a day glow, compactable, water repellant, overshirt—aka a garbage bag.

“The visit had been for a week, a week of bewilderment and curiosity, moods and images, names and rhythms, contours of a mystery world one could perceive but not grasp.” Most people have dreamed, at least once, of escaping all that they know for a brand new and unreachable life. Jumping off the grid into an unknown land, searching for something alive, searching for relaxation, searching for escape. In his 2011 novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care, which seems to be rather autobiographical, Rahul Bhattacharya writes about a journalist from India who escapes to Guyana for a year. He visits Guyana initially to cover a cricket match for India, and he finds himself coming back to live. “I told him I came here once and afterwards had dreams.” Mystery as a motive, he left all that he knew to jump from group to group of Guyanese bohemians and landlords.

“On the ramble in such a land you could encounter a story every day.” He takes day trips with new friends to enormous, untouched waterfalls (“Water fell, I suppose that was all there was to it. The top was a foam of thunder, the bottom a pandemonia of reactionary spray shooting up like geysers, and in between, the utter, cathartic wall of…something like an emotion, a large feeling, both stoic and ecstatic, a triumph and, to the eyes of mortals, a humiliation, a momentary reconsideration of the world.”). He sifts through mud, looking for gold, the poisonous vipers always nearby within the bush. He smokes foot-long Marley joints inside humid huts that blast dancehall (“We’d gyaff, smoke herb, though I had nothing like their capacity. It was breathing to them. They took entire little branches, didn’t bother with cleaning, housed them loosely in paper and lit up.”). He learns the beautiful slang of a country that speaks English like no other. He talks about cricket. He takes a lover he finds in Brazil to Venezuela. All of the words are written through the eyes of a sad soul looking for beauty in a confusing world. He rarely tells the author what he is doing, focusing more on the magnificent happenings going on around him, the beautiful chaos, be it crossing the Brazilian border illegally or having his apartment searched for drugs. “Everybody in the bush was a hero in a small way, and they thought of themselves as heroes in much bigger ways…They thought they could do anything, turn flimstar, fly fighter jet, fuck the greatest women, open casino in Brazil.”

Learn about the history of Guyana. Read about the happenings of the capital Georgetown. Understand new slang within a Caribbean and South American coast. Discover a culture. “As suddenly as dusk turns to night by the equator, so dawn turns to day in a snap. And as we bumped along the trail into the backdam the world had turned yellow-blue, cruel and dazzling.” This is not a book review, this is simply a demand to read this book. Half of this article is quotes from the book because it deserves that. I can’t recommend this novel enough. It is a poetic twisting story through a country most people know nothing about. It is a faraway daydream of finding yourself. It is enchantment. I leave you now with my favorite passage from this book, one of my favorite passages from any book:

“Sometimes there were trips to somebody’s cousin’s friend’s plot of land by the black-water creeks off the highway, trips that killed me with nostalgia even while I lived them, driving aback a pickup, silvery rain pelting bare backs, leaves dancing on the mud trail, branches snapping back onto faces, puddles like lakes forded in the sinking vehicle, bushcook and red rum and drenched cricket, jamoon splattered purple upon the wet soil – the remarkable freedom of a forgotten and irrelevant place on earth.”

Some people may not be aware, but the New York Times has all its archives uploaded, for free. Thus, the intrepid internet explorer can travel back to 1905 to find quirky oddities like “BLAST ODD CREATURE FROM SUB-SURFACE ROCK’. If that tagline doesn’t grab you, I don’t know what will. Read the story in full here.

There are a number of reasons why I fucking love this story. The ‘quizzical’ looking creature – a sloth, perhaps? Who the fuck knows? It’s 1905 and you just exploded some rocks and a weird looking animal with claws came out. What do you do? You fucking run away, as did the workers. It captures a moment when the world hadn’t been fully explored and Google Mapped down to the last square foot, when you couldn’t ask Siri to search Wikipedia for something you didn’t know. All they know is, a strange beast came out of the goddamn earth. The journalist (bless his soul) also renders all the Irish accents PERFECTLY. “Big Pat” Coughlin’s dreamy “Oi think Oi’ve kilt it,” will remain one of the best adaptations of dialect I’ve ever seen.

The story ‘ends’ with the note that the ‘baste’ was traded to a bar, and now sits with a bottle of liquor behind the counter. The other, much more important question is not really answered: What the fuck was this thing? How did it get there? Apparently, this doesn’t matter, as we’re in 1905, where you can kill a strange animal with a shovel and trade it into a bar all in the same day. Business as usual.

I made a mistake the first time I read this book. I read it over the course of several months, in between other things I was reading, and at some point my wife borrowed it, and never gave it back, and it turned out she hated it so she never finished it and by the time I figured that out I had forgotten most of what I had already read and by the time I was done I had no idea what I had just read.

So I re-read it. And I’m glad I did, because it went much faster the second time around. It’s a great book, but it is very… Troubling. Yeah I think that’s the word. First of all in its format: it is designed as a gazetteer of a series of islands. What is a gazetteer, you ask? Basically it’s a dictionary of places, an index of locales, a collection of topographic information. Each “chapter” in the book corresponds to an island in the Dream Archipelago, and each chapter is written by a different person, in a different voice, describing each island differently. I guess you get over that pretty quickly; from the first few islands, you learn about the weather and the winds and the currents and the languages that people speak there and why they were named that way, with a note at the end regarding currency. But something in the foreword clues you in that there’s something wrong: its author doesn’t care. He hasn’t ever left the island where he was born, and he probably won’t ever. He takes no responsibility for the gazetteer, someone just asked him to write the foreword, so he did.

Actually, few narrators in the book (there’s at least one per bottle chapter) are really invested in describing their island. Every now and then you stumble on an internal narrator, a character that has a vested interest in something – but not describing their island. At least not the cartographic island they live in. There’s artists, scientists, philosophers all more or less self-absorbed and therefore describing their microcosm. That’s the closest you get to anyone with a sense of empathy; but the focalized point of view really disqualifies them from being really likeable. When the narrator is omniscient, you get a scientific, dispassionate description that you kind of have to wade through.

That’s not all: you learn that some islands have magnetic anomalies so you can never pinpointg them on a map. Some islands have several names because there are several language spoken on the islands and some islands even have more or less the same name, give or take one letter. You don’t have to figure these out, the authors tell you; but you do have to pay attention (and there is an index at the beginning in case you need to refer back and forth). There’s one chain of islands described pretty early on as really nice, but unexplored; then it turns out to be inhabited by some parasite asshole species that kills everyone who goes there. So it goes. Good thing it’s an island, eh?

If you’re interested in such things as plots, there are a couple, and and they’re not too complicated: just follow the characters, those from the title. Pretty early on you hear about “tunneling” and you kind iof have to wait until the understand what the hell that is. Other than that, everybody has funny names so – unlike the islands – you can’t really confuse them with one another: Chaster Kammeston, Dryd Bathurst, Caurer pop up every now and then in the story and you can piece their histories pretty easily as long as you take each testimony as just that: a particular point of view. Forget about linearity and representation because they won’t help you here – if you engage with the book, you’re hooked. The Islanders and their Dream Archipelago, are a brilliant thought experiment that will get you mind wandering further and longer than other books typically allow you to. Quite a treat.

Take a walk through the streets of Bombay, India, through three decades of rotting teeth and back-alley illegalities. “…we walked the way smokers walk , horizontally, with long pauses, our words so soft they sounded like the incomprehensible phrases spoken by small children.” The narrator of Narcopolis is a dream seeker and a journalist, one who beautifies the sleazy opium dens and whorehouses, turning it into, more or less, his Golden Age. The nostalgic voice is fascinating and gripping, pulling you in just like the addictions that the novel offers.

Along this haze of memories, from the 1970s into the 2000s, you will encounter heroin addicts who try to sell Gandhi’s teeth for drug money. You will fall in love with an intellectual eunuch trying to find her way through the smoke and the sex. Cocaine parties, bathroom breaks in the street, and vicious murders. Tourist experimentalists, pimps, and African drug smugglers. The author even provides a flashback into the childhood of one of the novel’s voices of reason, an old Chinese man who lived with an addict father and a strict Communist mother. “A deep stain spread across the tablecloth and the commissar watched in fascination, as if it were the stain of communism itself, the unstoppable stain that had spread across the world and dyed it the colour of blood.”

According to the “About the Author”, Jeet Thayil has only done poetry prior to this novel. This makes sense, as most of his sentences need to be read multiple times in order to fully inhale the beauty. “Rashid was filling a cigarette with powder. When he lit up, the joint gave off a tang of derangement and for a moment I smelled the colour of it, acid green, like the barium of firework displays.” With the beauty also comes horror and harsh consequences. You saw the end of Requiem for a Dream, the turmoil of Candy. Expect similar situations, desperate junkies willing to do anything for more powder. Narcopolis will haunt you for days, weeks, waking you up in the middle of the night full of terror and a hungry curiosity to dance with the devil.

“…eat the air and drink the breeze and enjoy.”

“He woke up, and the moon was falling down on him. The moon had him looney tunes, a few monster things, a few ghosts, a few rrrrrrrrrr tiny psycho cyclers.”

Denis Johnson is slowly becoming my favorite author. Best known for his drug-addled collection of short stories, Jesus’ Son, Johnson also has a large collection of novels, poetry, and, my personal favorite, his Idaho panhandle, early 1900 epic novella, Train Dreams, a dark and beautiful masterpiece. Most recently, I finished a book that he completed back in 1985, Fiskadoro, which is maybe his most bizarre creation.

The book is set in a post-apocalyptic world, on the coast of Florida where Spanish and English mold into one confusing slur, where education is nonexistent, where fishermen are seen as kings, where deformed outcasts eat bugs and alligators in the swamplands.

As time marches onward, the generations know less and less about their past, about what destroyed the earth, about the contaminated, mythical buildings that haunt the Miami skies. Certain members of the make-shift communities worship Bob Marley, others build their own instruments, others drink potato wine and smoke marijuana that they received from an Israeli known as Flying Man. One of the main characters is named Cassius Clay Sugar Ray.

This book is a nice mixture of confusion and primitivism, as a world attempts to rebuild a culture. My favorite part of the book revolves around the swampland tribe of misfits, full of disfigured faces and missing limbs. During their ceremonies, they find two-headed coral snakes and feed them frogs full of hallucinogenic mushrooms. When the poison kicks in (what they refer to as the “rapto”), the snake’s heads turn on each other, fighting one another, and essentially killing themselves. “And the tattoo so many of them wore, the line with a loop at one end, like the empty outline of a spoon, was the snake trying to swallow its first head with its second mouth.”

If you are not familiar with Denis Johnson, this is not the place to start. Read Train Dreams, read Jesus’ Son, read Angels. But, if you are familiar and you feel like taking a coastal journey through tribal psychosis and jaw-drops, check out the monster Fiskadoro.

“Love kid. Lost until you give it some kick. You’re too young to leave it. Too young to keep it. Love’s the breath a Life still lifts when Life is finally over with.”

I am currently on my third or fourth read of Only Revolutions, a twirling mindfuck by House of Leaves author Mark Z. Danielewski. Where HoL terrifies and confuses the reader with schizophrenic nightmares, charcoal labyrinths, and monster echoes, Only Revolutions enchants through verbal vomit poetry between two lovers traveling at top speed, chasing death.

Despite being released in back in 2008, this book is still wildly significant and original; it is a book that can start again as soon as it is finished, the full circle concept never ending, hence the title and the 360 pages and the infinity of love. I sound like a Journey song. Only Revolutions received rave reviews from critics and mixed reviews from fans, because, at first, the style of writing and technique for reading is a bit overwhelming. Stay strong, continue, and the tongue twisters, made-up words, and clever rhyming will all make sense and you’ll appreciate initial nonsense and eventual gems like, “I’m the prophecy prophecies pass. Why need dies at last. How oceans dry. Islands drown. And skies of salt crash to the ground. I turn the powerful. Defy the weak. Only grass grows down abandoned streets.”

And, while you’re at it, grab Danielewski’s wide release of The Fifty Year Sword, a (YEAR) 70-page “adult ghost story” poem told by five female narrators about a mysterious magician who arrives at a children’s party with a long black box. “Did you know stars have shadows? They do. And can you imagine what it feels like to walk up the shadow of a day?”

Danielewski is one of my favorites doing it right now, I just hope that 2014 hurries itself up and we see the release of the 27 volume upcoming serial novels known as The Familiar. 27 volumes! All we know now is that, “It’s about a girl who finds a cat.” Expand.