Look Down, This is Where It Must Have Happened

March 14, 2011
Niedzviecki, author of the timely and scathing non-fiction book, The Peep Diaries, once again chooses voyeurism as a central theme in his latest short story collection. In "The Sexographer," a married man snaps pictures of randomly chosen women in the act of having sex with him for his art project. In "Real Estate," Mr. Zikowitz wants a child prostitute, even though his wife is ready to have a baby, and in "Sometime Next Sunrise," a grown son wants only to sneak away from the family vacation to have sex with his girlfriend, while his depressed father tries endlessly to take him to a theme bar called "Tequila Mockingbird." Most of these stories deliver the small, narrowly focused point-of-view of men, but the most successful, "Prenatal," is a brief portrait of a high-school girl named Charlie whose growing fetus connives to get himself aborted. For all the oddities and sexual deviance in these stories, most fail to circumvent expectation, ending abruptly and without clear resolution. Since many of these tales fall flat in both premises and characterization, perhaps voyeurism's inherent passivity is the author's biggest hurdle.

April 15, 2011
With dark humor and deep compassion, Niedzviecki, cultural critic and author of The Peep Diaries (2009), delivers a haunting collection peopled by characters on the verge of despair. An aging Jewish businessman, tormented by memories of his youth in a post-WWII displacement camp, becomes more popular than he can handle after creating a successful line of flavored cream cheese. A pregnant tenth grader is morally torn when her unborn fetus tries convincing her to abort it before both their lives are ruined. A dying man commissioned by the government to create new colors is challenged by a young revolutionary. Gods personal assistant, tired of his bosss tyranny and hypocritical lifestyle, concocts a plan to rid the world of God once and for all. And a lonely husband develops an obsession with watching funerals online after his wife proves incapable of processing her friends recent death. Like David Means stories, these convention-defying examples written in tight, punchy prose examine the fine lines between love and obsession, failure and success. A moving and amusingly varied collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)