Tag Archives: John Warner

Mar 23 2012
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Recs

#fridayreads

As we ready ourselves for a week of new content — the aforementioned Beinart and Lakhous, along with a special guest review — I must admit that I’ve been enjoying the fake-summer heatwave, so my reading time has taken a hit. I have — like so many other like-minded folks — been absolutely engrossed in the Trayvon Martin tragedy. There is little more to say than this whole situation is very bad, in every imaginable way.

Many have recommended Teju Cole’s Atlantic piece, “The White Savor Industrial Complex,” a wonderfully measured, provocative-in-that-it’s-so-fucking-spot-on piece about not only the intrinsic wrongheadedness of Kony 2012 and the Invisible Children organization but also the attitude — or perhaps worldview — that enables such lily-white activism. It’s worth reading, not only because it’s a wonderful piece of writing, but because it links to the work of African scholars who take issue with the Kony 2012 movement. Continue reading →

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Dec 20 2011
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Feature

The Year in Stuff We Liked: Quality Design

This week, in lieu of a BEST OF 2011 series, we’re running five stories focused on Stuff We Liked in 2011.

Book design: You’re not going to get much of an Inside Baseball discussion from us. We don’t know much about it. We can’t offer much in the way of judgment other than that looks cool, yuh-huh, yuh-huh. Still, we know what we like — and what we don’t like.

The Publisher’s Weekly blog PWxyz offered their favorite covers of the year. It was something of a puzzling list, as the explanations were lacking (for Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods, they said: “The bright blue background conveys the off-the-wall aspects of the book, and the repetition of the eyes hints at a maddening condition.” Hm.) and their number one choice — Colson Whitehead’s Zone One — baffling. Another weird explanation:

The best book cover of the year offers a glimpse of an empire, mostly obstructed, put through a filter so desaturated it’s almost black and white, making the book’s dread insidious rather than explicit. It looks like an old, important photograph, but with something unsettling, though you can’t quite put your finger on it. The zombie apocalypse has never looked so subtle or refined.

What is an “important photograph”? Jackie O. with blood on her dress?

Anyways, we’re being too critical, due in large part to how much we adored certain designs this year. Here’s a few, in no particular or-der.

Continue reading →

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Dec 08 2011
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News

The Week in Tweets

Oh, hey guys. Ever have that thing happen when Friday arrives and you’ve no idea what cool things in the world of publishing happened since Monday? Well, that’s why we’re going to start reviewing the week—in tweets!

Bonnie Nadzam’s Lamb was awarded the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize by The Center for Fiction. We reviewed Lamb way back in September, and had generally pleasant comments, noting its “sharp” prose and Nadzam’s willingness to focus on a topic has unpalatable as child molestation. Upon reflection, it’s a book that’s stayed with me; one driven by plot (gasp!), a plot that’s brave and unexpected and winding. Good for Nadzam. She deserves the honor.

You can read our review of Lamb here.

Now this one’s not really news. FotB (friend of the blog, peepz) John Warner made a pretty solid point here about Jeffrey Eugenides’ critically acclaimed third novel, The Marriage Plot. Though few would dispute its sheer pleasantness, The Marriage Plot isn’t a great book. It’s an example of a great writer’s great storytelling, but not a great writer’s great story. Get it? Kind of?

It’s fiction for a very particular crowd. And that crowd, as it happens, is already well catered to in the literary fiction genre.

You can still read our exchange from earlier this year at The Morning News, and the review that prompted it. You should also buy his debut novel, The Funny Man. 

There is a point when an organization’s or individual’s evilness transcends reality, becomes so imposing that it borders on comedy or camp or parody. What Amazon rolled out this week reads like an article from The Onion. Very short summary: Amazon will pay you up to $5 to scan items in local stores—using your smartphone—so long as you then purchase the item through Amazon. It’s bad enough that bookstores can’t compete with Amazon’s bargain-basement pricing; now Amazon is literally handing people money to not buy from other retailers. The good folks over at The Rumpus have got it right: Amazon is extremely wrong here.

And in response, we will no longer link our readers to Amazon. They’re everywhere already. You may have noticed in this post that we linked book titles to Powell’s, America’s (probably) most famous independent bookstore. (Another great idea from the fine folks at The Rumpus!) We don’t expect you to buy anything from Powell’s; just don’t buy from Amazon. Buy local—before it’s too late.

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Nov 16 2011
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Guest Post

Defend or Refute: John Warner

Ed. note: New feature here at DBC! Instead of doing the traditional Q and A interview, we thought we’d do something slightly different. We’re approaching authors with a simple task: defend or refute this statement. Here is the first edition, featuring John Warner. His first novel, The Funny Man, was published earlier this year by Soho Press. He recently discussed that book, and writing-slash-reading in general, over at The Morning News.

Defend or refute the following statement: Post-publication is a mongrel period: it combines the sadness and vulnerability of postpartum with the crushing mood swings and emotional hollowness of post-coitum.

The French call orgasm, le petit mort, “the little death.” We recognize it as that particular empty feeling (emotional hollowness) that seems particularly cruel, since moments before, we never felt more alive. Scientists say it’s likely linked to the dumping of oxytocin into the system, and that hollowness is actually a misreading of an overwhelming calmness that’s supposed to make us feel connected to the world. It’s supposed to be a letdown, but in a good way. Continue reading →

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Nov 13 2011
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News

Housekeeping

I can’t decide if this actually is the last weekend for beautiful New England foliage. I feel like I should spend my weekend really appreciating it, taking long walks, and noting how much more beautiful—how much more rich—the landscape is out here than in my hometown of Machesney Park, Illinois. But I can’t seem to pull myself away from David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, which is, itself, slow going, but only because it’s DFW-dense and of course thrown together—not haphazardly, there’s clearly some things I’m sure Michael Pietsch wanted to fuse together better or pitch all together—in a way that makes the reading experience more of a challenge.

I’m finding it to be a pleasant read, if not a little creepy, given that one of the characters—the “irrelevant” “wastoid” (but never together) Chris Fogle, of the “wastoid” novella in chapter 22—went to my elementary school—Machesney Elementary—and is from that un-rich, un-beautifully landscaped hometown and (almost) shares an odd mental tic, that being his ability to count the words on a page/in conversation, mine being the ability to count the letters in a word on a page/in conversation.

I feel a bit like Harold Crick, to be honest. Continue reading →

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Nov 10 2011
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News

Alert!

I had a long conversation with John Warner about his book The Funny Man. It’s been posted over at The Morning News. Hopefully I’m cast in a decent light.

You can read the review in question here.

 

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Oct 27 2011
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Recs

Some Passing Thoughts on George Saunders’ “Tenth of December”

Writing about books in the way we do, that is subjectively — hopefully not superficially — has some distinct disadvantages versus the academic alternative, that is some methodological critique rooted firmly in a (hopefully) tried-and-true objective form of analysis. Primarily, that the DBC form sometimes boils down to an uncomfortable and difficult-to-write-about reality: I don’t like this and it’s kind of difficult to articulate why. See: The Funny Man. There was no pre-Ford (either one, actually) critic in my holster to reach for; it came down to arguments that, upon re-reading, seem mean and petty and difficult to defend. I stand by the fact that that book was egregious in its miserable deployment of humor, relentless in its inability to make me crack a smile; it sucked.

But someone could ask why? And I could say to that someone, “It’s not funny.” And someone — maybe not that someone but another someone — could say it’s funny. Some people must think so; John Warner’s a well-known, respected dude. He works for McSweeney’s. He just led a two-day bootcamp on humor writing. All this despite the fact I don’t find him funny. Come on, America! Rise up! Continue reading →

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Oct 12 2011
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Review

John Warner’s “The Funny Man”

When a work hinges on an implausible premise or an annoying concept, a doubtful set-up or a poorly assembled criticism, can it recover? If its foundation is faulty, can anything that comes from it avoid failure?

John Warner’s debut novel The Funny Man seems like it was written only to provoke—and emphatically answer—such questions.

The premise is rather simple: there’s a middling stand-up comedian (referred to in the prose only as the down-style “the funny man”) who achieves incredible, unprecedented, and unexpected overnight success because he finds what his prospective agent—known as “the clapping man”—refers to as a “thing,” a distinctive trick, a bee in his comedy bonnet that sets him apart from the other comedy club jockeys, a ticket to the mainstream.

Continue reading →

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Sep 30 2011
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Recs

#fridayreads

Whether you are failing to write an adequate review of Justin Torres’ We the Animals, moving to a new apartment this weekend in the uber-literary Somerville, Massachusetts, or just looking forward to seeing “Moneyball,” this is what you should be reading this Friday, the last day of September.

(The above are all about me. I apologize.)

Hannah Pittard’s The Fates Will Find Their Way
Pittard, the 2006 winner of the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, unleashed her debut novel last January. Reviews were, for the most part, positive. I picked up an advance reader copy of this at a certain unnamed bookstore in Boston which, I’m pretty sure, shouldn’t be selling ARCs! Even if it was for, you know, one measly dollar. Even if it did, I admit, make my day.

John Warner’s The Funny Man
Released Tuesday, Warner’s novel explores the strangely unfunny world of comedy. But if Michael Ian Black’s clunky blurb has any weight to it, I expect this to be a very entertaining read. Look for a review next week.

Jonah Keri’s The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First
Moneyball, this is not. Keri used to be a financial writer, writing about baseball only in his (seemingly fulsome) spare time. Now he’s fully focused on baseball, and in The Extra 2%, Keri looks at how the Tampa Bay Rays—you may have heard about them sometime yesterday—have used financial principles to build a better baseball team. A timely, worthwhile read.

Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squid, and the Long Con That is Breaking America
The “Occupy Wall Street” protests continue. Taibbi’s book on the soulless nature of high finance serves as not only an accessible manual on corruption for laymen but also a well-written, humorous read.

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