YA Author By Day... So I can’t believe I did it, but I did—I watched them all. Well, mostly. I only made it through part of Reign. 30-second reviews of the wildly entertaining and slightly overwhelming Thursday line-up. THE VAMPIRE DIARIES: So, we all agree that last week’s episode was ridiculous, yes? GREY’S ANATOMY: This was mostly a relationship/sexy times episode with a sad cancer story worked in. PARENTHOOD: OMG, Parenthood, I just love. GRADE: A (because Parenthood rules) SCANDAL: (Are you dying yet? Oh, Scandal.
The Techno-Pagan Octopus Messiah - Review - Mumbai Vacation Ian Winn's debut novel, The Techno Pagan Octopus Messiah, is nothing less than superb. It is a shame that Terrance McKenna, internet shaman, advocate of psychedelics, and author of Food of the Gods, he who had predicted the end of the Mayan calendar, did not live long enough to read it. Imagine if you would, a Jewish-American writer from California that is part Jack Kerouac, part William Burroughs, part Timothy Leary, part Paul Theroux, with a dash of Shirley MacLaine thrown in, and that is what you have in the novel and writings of one Ian Muir Winn (named after the Naturalist John Muir), a self-imagined messiah and the self-proclaimed Serpent Muse of Poetry.
Stories Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh I passed a lithe cormorant of a woman trying on gas masks at a street kiosk. She was gazing intently into a little round mirror mounted on a telephone pole, wearing a cute round avocado-colored mask. I loved the way she moved, loved her librarian glasses and her buzz-cut. The lanky beauty left my field of vision. Not that I'd ever approach a woman on the street; I hated guys who did that. And like a line of song stuck in my head, I thought of Deirdre, who had last ignited that flame, and felt a familiar stab of guilt. What had she done with my photos? There had been no cut-up pile greeting me in the doorway the day I broke up with her. I missed them to my bones. I slowed as I passed Jittery Joe's Coffee, hoping against hope to score a cup. I spied a sexy pair of legs in the crowd, strutting my way. A busty black woman with dreadlocks and tribal scarring hurried past. There was a bamboo outbreak on thirty-ninth street. The asphalt cracked and popped. “ID?”
Swati Avasthi: Writer Cory Doctorow?s craphound.com ? News Satori in the Dust Bowl: A Review of Seed by Rob Ziegler About a century from now, climate change has caused a new Dust Bowl in the Corn Belt, resulting in major famine across the United States. Most of the surviving population leads a nomadic existence, migrating across the ravaged landscape in search of habitable, arable land. Decades of war, resource depletion and population decline have left the government practically powerless. Gangs and warlords rule the land. The only thing staving off full-blown starvation is Satori, a hive-like living city that produces genetically engineered drought-tolerant seed. Seed follows three separate but connected plots. What’s interesting about Seed are the huge differences in tone between the three plots. The way Rob Ziegler manages to weave these three highly disparate stories into one cohesive narrative is impressive. The resulting novel is a real page-turner filled with interesting characters and pulse-raising action scenes.
Jandy Nelson Southern Enlightenment With healthy doses of Axl Rose and methamphetamines, two new collections, from journalist John Jeremiah Sullivan and crime fiction writer Frank Bill, call forth the power of place and personal history in the Shallow South. Axl Rose makes it out, escapes. He spends his youth stealing televisions, brawling and losing fistfights, assaulting the occasional neighborhood mom. Then—fiery red mane presumably flowing behind him—he boogies. “Kiss my ass, Lafayette,” he’s rumored to spray paint on the street the night he flees his hometown for good. Twenty years after Ax takes flight, journalist John Jeremiah Sullivan— JJS to his growing legion of adoring fans—spends a few days poking around the Hoosier State, digging up old police reports and childhood friends. An inane lede, perhaps, from any other GQ writer, parachuting in from New York, surveying the bad and worst of the local color, and then beating hell back to Brooklyn. Not everyone makes it out, of course.
Jennifer Donnelly