author:
KEVIN BROCKMEIER

Fiction
272 pages
Vintage

There’s a sweet little track on the South Park album Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics called “Dead, Dead, Dead,” which sums up the spirit of the holiday season: “Dead, dead, dead / Someday you’ll be dead / Dead, dead, dead / Someday we’ll all be dead.” And by sweet, I mean depressing as hell, even if it’s absolutely true. Quite a downer, almost a slap in the face, amongst all the other cheery holiday tunes involving musical pooh.

Kevin Brockmeier’s novel The Brief History of the Dead, does much the same thing (although without the pooh). A literal end-of-the-world novel where a pandemic nicknamed “The Blinks” (so called for one of its early symptoms) wipes out huge swathes of the world’s population. Laura Byrd, a wildlife specialist employed by Coca-Cola, is unaware of this fact, as she is stranded in Antarctica with two colleagues while on assignment for her company. When their communications system goes down, her associates take off to find help at a nearby research station, but they don’t return, leaving Laura to make the decision to follow them.

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author:
JOE MENO

Fiction
272 pages
Akashic Books

Joe Meno’s coming-of-age/coming-to-punk-rock novel Hairstyles of the Damned met the world in 2004. With a collection of resonant themes and defiant first-person narration—not to mention Meno’s outspoken sentiment in favor of independent publishing—it found an unlikely audience in a cross-section of punk rockers, independent media advocates, and literary aficionados. Of Meno’s four novels, though, Hairstyles is in some ways atypical. His earlier How the Hula Girl Sings and Tender As Hellfire (revised for its 2007 reissue on Akashic) were laced with noir tropes and occasionally beatific moments of surrealism. That trajectory was even more manifest in 2006’s The Boy Detective Fails, which impressively sustains a tone somewhere between postmodern pulp and wrenching emotional examination throughout.

Demons in the Spring, Meno’s second collection of shorter work, delves into both the realistic and the surreal, accompanied by illustrations from the likes of Charles Burns, Archer Prewitt, and Paul Hornschemeier. “The Sound before the End of the World,” with a KISS Army-obsessed policeman protagonist named Ron, seems to be an offbeat period piece right up until a black hole shows up in its small-town setting. While some of Meno’s more surreal elements have a dreamlike component (as in “Miniature Elephants Are Popular”), the black hole’s mirroring of Ron’s personal life feels more metaphoric than necessary.

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author:
MARK DALY

Non-fiction
144 pages
Plume

What an unbelievably stupid book this is. The premise: Metal gods, as they were known, like Ozzy, Alice Copper, Judas Priest, and even Lita Ford, not only rocked through the eighties like bats out of hell, but also answered life’s greatest philosophical quandaries in their lyrics. Heavy metal is high art, folks—this is the memo.

The book is about one-hundred-and-fifty pages long. There is usually a full-bleed photo on the left-hand page, while on the right sits those tiny of nuggets of “wisdom,” which are usually no longer than ten or fifteen words long and have been set in a blood-red, gothic-y serif. That’s pretty much it. By the way, this book was manufactured then shipped on freight across the country. Well, here’s a quandary: At what point can a book be considered a crime against the environment?

Anyway, here’s an example from the book. It’s from Black Sabbath’s “After Forever.” Guitarist Tony Iommi is featured in the photograph, though I have no idea why since he didn’t write the lyrics: “Perhaps you think that when you’re dead you just stay in your grave?” Why, yes, as a matter of fact I do. So does Salman Rushdie, who once said, “When you’re dead, you’re dead forever.” Ah! A really smart guy setting the record straight on something some idiot in some rock band said. Now there’s a book I might actually want to read.

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author:
CHRIS ADRIAN

Fiction
229 pages
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux

Chris Adrian doesn’t think small. His first novel, Gob’s Grief, concerns itself with the construction of a machine to resurrect the Civil War’s dead. His second, The Children’s Hospital, opens with the modern world swept away by deluge. Each one sprawls, blending hard-scrabble realism with outright fantasy, enmeshing historical figures in ahistorical moments, colliding mysticism and scientific rationality. The endurance of trauma and the horrific side effects of a forceful will are themes that recur throughout Adrian’s fiction, and A Better Angel offers nine distillations of his preferred themes.

In “Stab,” a child in silent mourning for his twin brother develops something—friendship isn’t quite the word, but neither is relationship—with an unstable classmate. Adrian’s strength here is in charting areas of uncertainty, of questioning the narrator’s perceptions—some may be authentic, while others may be byproducts of his own mythologizing. “Why Antichrist?” circles around a similarly flawed pairing—here, a pair of high school students whose fathers have recently died. In Adrian’s hands, the story veers into ambiguous horror, with its narrator uncertain of his own desires and comforts. There’s a surreal, supernatural component to both, though Adrian blurs the line between overt mysticism and a more un-tethered realism. In particular, one story’s closing lines could be taken as an affirmation of something beyond tragic or a retreat into fantasy triggered by the denial of everything around him.

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author:
ALEX ROBINSON

Fiction
125 pages
Top Shelf

Publisher’s Note: We here at Lit Mob are constantly looking for ways to expand our coverage of literature and content offerings. Like many of you, we are very interested in Graphic Novels and will begin reviewing them on a regular basis.

The recurring nightmare. How many of us have been woken from a deep sleep in a full sweat, reliving days long since past? Did we cram enough for that geometry exam? Does she/he really like me? Will my complexion ever clear up? High school can be a real bitch, so much so that it continues to haunt us well after our yearbooks become covered in dust and placed in the attic. What if we could go back and do it all over again? What if we were sent back knowing what we know now?

In Alex Robinson’s graphic novel, Too Cool to be Forgotten, a middle-aged Andy Wicks seeks assistance to quit smoking and ends up in a hypnotist’s office. Once hypnotized, Andy finds that he has somehow been transported back to high school where he comes face to face with old friends, girls he never had enough balls to speak with, bullies, and, of course, the moment when he first lit up. This, Andy believes, is the reason that he has been sent back, and if he can resist that first cigarette, he can finally kick the habit!

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author:
SARAH VOWELL

Fiction
272 pages
Riverhead Press

“…readers who squirm at microscopic theological differences might be unsuited to read a book about seventeenth-century Christians. Or, for that matter, a newspaper,” Sarah Vowell notes at the beginning of The Wordy Shipmates. Ignore that. In a country where the secular and sacred are becoming more like kissing cousins than the First Amendment might like, Vowell pens a book about the early history of Anglo-America and its religious and political tides. These men and women left a lingering trail of words behind, from books to sermons to what Vowell terms “pamphlet wars,” allowing her to piece together this history as well as make it pertinent to the twenty-first century. Which is what Vowell does best.

The Wordy Shipmates follows Massachusetts in the years from the launching of the Arabella from Southampton in 1630 to the late seventeenth century, focusing on the world of Boston, John Cotton’s proclaimed city on a hill. Chiefly figuring among the cast of characters are the on-again, off-again governor John Winthrop, who would prove to be by turns progressive then excruciatingly conservative, and the rebel-preacher Roger Williams, who was exiled to what would become Rhode Island when he refused to reconsider his religious beliefs. The supporting cast includes believers and beleaguered alike: Henry Vane, Anne Hutchinson, Uncas, the Bishop Laud, John Cotton, John Mason, John Underhill, Miantonomi, and Canonicus, through speeches, pamphlets, sermons, battles, pamphlets, massacres, revelations, exiles, pamphlets, law-making, king-breaking, and pamphlets. And some more pamphlets. (“These people killed themselves to make sure there was a paper trail,” Massachusetts State Archive Assistant Archivist Michael Comeau declares at one point.)

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author:
DAVID J. DANELO

Non-fiction
256 pages
Stackpole Books

The economy is the dominant issue in the current election season, and rightly so. Mentions of health care, taxes, America’s two wars and foreign policy also abound, but immigration has fallen by the wayside. David Danelo’s The Border points to this not staying the case for very long.

Danelo is a journalist, former Marine officer and a veteran of the Iraq war. It’s an unusual background from which to write a book about illegal immigration from Mexico. Danelo brings a refreshing and unusual point of view to the matter. Part travelogue and part social commentary, Danelo also sheds a lot of light on the history of the region. In the course of his travels along the border, he meets a lot of people that, in some way or other, are impacted by U.S. policy towards Mexican illegal immigrants. It’s a colorful cast of characters, and Danelo is very good at drawing out the stories that give the book a more personal feel than other “wonkier” books.

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author:
LUCA TURIN
AND TANIA SANCHEZ

Non-fiction

384 pages
Viking

Perfumes: The Guide is a dishy little affair. Over a number of years, biophysicist Luca Turin and perfume aficionado Tania Sanchez smelled nearly fifteen hundred fragrances, and the two have recorded their findings in this alphabetical catalog. Sound girly? It sort of is. But even men (well, the men I like most) will discover bits of advice worth holding onto, and pleasures rugged enough (such as Himalayan musk deer, civet cats, and ambergris, a substance that great big sperm whales cough up into the ocean—all providers of fragrance you may be wearing right now, gentlemen). Ladies, if you want to drive men wild, you are advised to rub yourselves with bacon. When you are ready to discuss the more sophisticated and finer points of fragrance, Perfumes is ready.

The book starts out with a collection of essays from Turin and Sanchez designed to get our heads in the game, sketching out the first criticism of perfume that I think I’ve ever seen. Of the perfume industry itself, they are witty and illuminating: perfume companies “change formulas without telling customers,” “lie about contents,” and “shill shameless copies of great ideas and hope no one notices.” Scandal. Also, they dismiss the idea that perfume is a “science” supported by pheromone mumbo jumbo: “Tocade is not a better fragrance than Dior Addict because it better approximates the mix of odors released by a fertile female. Tocade is better than Dior Addict because it’s more beautiful.” Turin and Sanchez make it clear that perfume is an aesthetic form and should be treated as such, and the first forty-nine pages reveal to us the tools by which we should evaluate the art, with words like “drydown” and “top note.” Finally, oenophiles don’t have a monopoly on connoisseur lingo.

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author:
ARAVIND ADIGA

Fiction
304 pages
Free Press

How to get on the Booker Prize shortlist in six easy steps:

First-time novelist? Check.
First-person narrative? Check.
Ethnic background? Check.
Story about up-and-coming developing country? Check.
Outré protagonist? Check.
Class warfare? Check.

If it isn’t clear already, I am very cynical about Aravind Adiga’s debut novel The White Tiger. Adiga, a journalist by trade, probably felt he was writing an important book. Vindication duly came in the form of being short-listed for this year’s Booker Prize. Adiga may well win the prize, announced on October 14th. On this evidence, though, I am not even sure how this novel made the shortlist.

Striving to paint an honest picture of modern India, the novel concerns Balram, servant and chauffeur to the rich and influential Mr. Ashok. The struggle between the class that Balram and generations past of his family have belonged to and the upper class that his master belongs to are the central focus of the book. Balram is trying to break free of this perpetual servitude but Adiga doesn’t hold out much hope for Balram or his kind; indeed, the only way for him to become his own man seems to be by resorting to crime.

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