I've read other stories told in vignettes, and it is not my favorite type of narrative. However, I don't think there is another way this particular story could have been told. The detachment we feel toward Abbott gives us a better sense of what he's feeling than a straightforward narrative would. ...
Too funny. Funny and smart. Probably not your thing if you don't appreciate politics at least in part for the irony, but a must-read for aspiring but lazy leftie do-gooders, naysayers and/or cranks like myself, especially if you've a soft spot somewhere for Upton Sinclair. A cross of sorts between P...
Too funny. Funny and smart. Probably not your thing if you don't appreciate politics at least in part for the irony, but a must-read for aspiring but lazy leftie do-gooders, naysayers and/or cranks like myself, especially if you've a soft spot somewhere for Upton Sinclair. A cross of sorts between P...
Chapter 19, entitled "Abbott and the Sticky Shit All Over the Fucking Steering Wheel Again," reads, in its entirety,Gone are the daydreams of academic notoriety and glistening vulvas and whatever else. All Abbott wants right now--the only thing--is to be knocked unconscious by the long wooden handl...
Originally published at my blog Chasing Empty PavementsThe Good: I can certainly appreciate when an author experiments with a different ways to tell a story. I haven't really seen a book that operates in the way Abbott Awaits does.It's like a mixture of stream of consciousness yet told in third pers...
I ordered this on a whim and after a couple pages I thought it was going to turn out like most of my whim books - like crap. A few pages in, it occurred to me that this was the kind of pop culture satiric overload that I'd like to avoid. But very soon I was laughing like crazy. I was laughing until ...
I'm terribly excited about Paul Thomas Anderson's forthcoming "There Will Be Blood," so I got tempted to go back and read some Upton Sinclair, but... well, I didn't think I really had it in me. He's the literary equivalent of castor oil. So I grabbed this as a substitute and, ah, man I dug this bo...
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