Sea Monkeys

Sea Monkeys
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A Memory Book

مشارکت: عنوان و توضیح کوتاه هر کتاب را ترجمه کنید این ترجمه بعد از تایید با نام شما در سایت نمایش داده خواهد شد.
iran گزارش تخلف

فرمت کتاب

ebook

تاریخ انتشار

2012

نویسنده

Kris Saknussemm

ناشر

Catapult

شابک

9781593764944
  • اطلاعات
  • نقد و بررسی
  • دیدگاه کاربران
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نقد و بررسی

Publisher's Weekly

July 9, 2012
This memoir by novelist Saknussemm (Zanesville) of life in late 1960s California—much of which has already appeared in more than a dozen literary journals—is for the most part surprisingly pedestrian, enlivened only by certain chapters that are crafted like great short stories. While Zanesville was a hologram-filled black comedy, the author’s memoir is a fairly straightforward look back at points in his life—including schools, teachers, friends, and early loves. While his social observations are often banal (“The Cold War and the Dick Clark disease of television go claw in glove”), his psychological insights are sharp, especially in a short account of his being raped at age nine. And a much longer piece, “Mr. Very Late Night,” about being the only white D.J working the graveyard shift at a black radio station, is a superb piece of writing about how he turned his music program into a call-in show that touched “a congregation of strangers,” putting his finger “straight on a vibrating harmonic nerve of the red taillight central coast California vampire redemption hour.”



Kirkus

September 15, 2012
Noted cult writer Saknussemm's (Reverend America, 2012, etc.) darkly funny, offbeat memoir of growing up around San Francisco in the 1960s. It's immediately evident that we're dealing with a poet who's operating in a sublimely blurred space between poetry and prose. The opening sentences of many of these fractured vignettes are some of the most strangely evocative lead-ins out there: "I turned ten inside a giant tire, honoring the engineers and earthmoving machines of the Oroville Land Dam, and a memorial to a mummified Indian chief who disintegrated into dust the moment he was exposed." So goes the amusingly confounding opening of the short piece "Fire and Forget," in which the author recalls his life at 10, when he was apprehensive of both the future and the past, just wanting to hide away until everything made sense again. Much of Saknussemm's early childhood, as captured in short sketches and longer, more essayistic remembrances, often seems little more than common childhood horseplay, but filtered through the author's undeniably funhouse-mirror sensibilities. Nevertheless, there are some truly singular incidents that almost read like a West Coast take on Southern Gothic fiction (especially the scene involving the author as a young kid finding the bloody severed limb of an amputee friend). The autobiographical sketches that cover the author's early adult years are full of the sort of boozing, drugging and sexcapades one would naturally expect from an alcoholic preacher's son. Highlights from these years include the author's stint as a soul radio DJ ("Mr. Very Late Night") and a Henry Miller-esque romp through Saknussemm's many sexual conquests as a randy college professor. A wonderfully warped grab bag of memories from a wilder and weirder time.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.



Booklist

November 1, 2012
The author of four ingeniously original novels, including the acclaimed Reverend America (2012), Saknussemm is in his element here, bending his offbeat prose around his boyhood recollections to create a distinctive autobiography. Growing up in the Bay Area during the post-Eisenhower 1960s, Saknussemm was raised by an eccentric cast of role models, including an aunt with a prosthetic arm, a mirthful minister father, and a resourceful older sister responsible for their dominating their grade school's Halloween contests. An abundance of colorful personalities and captivating details such as those thread through a narrative that is more kaleidoscopic than chronological. There's Mrs. Maury, a teacher who inappropriately pampered Saknussemm as a substitute for her dead son, his sister's ear-mutilating accident on a Shetland pony, his father's unwitting joke-telling to a bear while camping. Fans of Saknussemm's inventive story lines may be disappointed by this plotless sifting through random memories, but a wealth of quirky anecdotes and descriptions of even quirkier true-life characters keep this memoir as engaging as any of Saknussemm's novels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)




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