The heading of this post offers a little nudge in the way of "What I learned from this book." I can tell you I learned that this book was not worth the $8 used dollars I paid for this used book. I could've bought 8 donuts (the good kind), or I could've sat in a sticky nudey booth for 8 minutes. Instead, I read 1 okay story that went absolutely nowhere. Then it hit me. I don't give a shit about upper middle class white people in the northeast. Yeah, yeah, Ice Storm was good (we're talkin' the mov...

Again, one of the masters of specificity...he's a more contemporary (and in my opinion) talented Cheever.

This is a very silly book made sillier still by its yearning to be taken seriously evident on every page. Another problem it has is its obsession with the technology and pop culture of its time, already 20 years old and embarrassing to behold, even by a reader like me who remembers some of it. I imagine a similar story, written in the late 1800's, about a young couple having a telephone installed in their brownstone apartment and the first call they make is to a bicycle shop which they find in a...

I love this collection of short stories because it's the young Rick Moody...the characters are young, punk, urban, troubled and poetic. I actually prefer this stuff to his more polished novels. I'm starting to feel like Moody gets worse and worse as he gets older...or maybe I just get more and more cynical. Could be both.

(view spoiler)[When I was young, I read too much too soon. This was probably one of them. The inscription on the flap of the paperback copy of this (which I intend to hungrily peddle today to the local bookmongers before an evening spent in the kitchen of a restaurant whose name literally translates to The Feast) is lovingly addressed to me with the following explanation and holiday cheer: "Because you like Wallace, we thought you might like this book — it looked cool to us! Let us know how it i...

Stylistically I love Rick Moody. I love his sentence structure, his word choice, his masterful comma usage, his constant italicizing. He breaks a lot of "rules" of writing (penning an 11-page story without using punctuation, writing a 4-page story that is one sentence long) and it is for this reason, and the occasional heart-stoppingly awesome passage that I keep returning to his work.However.This stylistic format is often a hinderance; too showy to create depth of character, too detached to sho...

Rick Moody is a brilliant writer whose narrators speak in a contemporary vernacular as they conflate past, present and future into tales that read like monologues. He gives voice to the disenfranchised -- the drug and sex addicted, the neglected, the lost -- and, without redeeming them, makes the characters worthy of compassion and remembrance. But the reader pays a price for entering this world as the darkness leaves a mark even on those who view it from afar. My three stars are not for the qua...

I once heard the bit Hemingway supposedly wrote about Miller, something about writing about a blowjob as if he invented it. Moody doesn't remind me of Miller, but he reminds me of this line. Anyway, Moody's noted sympathy for freaks, weirdos and other lost souls would ring truer if he didn't write as if he had discovered them. At every moment it reads as a Christopher Columbus style discovery. Kerouac's menagerie is left standing there holding their Roman candles with a look on their faces that

if that guy from the hold steady wrote short stories

All the reviews include a "But"! I sure don't know why. These stories are adventurous and well written. I'm glad I read them.

No one's more shocked than me that I gave this one star -- I mean, I own nearly every book by the man, have read all the others too, and for many years would have described Moody as one of my favorite authors. Thinking harder though, I guess it's been a few years now since I would have made that claim. And while I am pretty positive I liked The Diviners, I am more than certain I hated this collection.A few of the pieces ("The Preliminary Notes", "A Good Story") are quite familiar from college cr...

Review to follow soon.

Not my favorite, but a good read before bed. The title story is clearly the best. I have to admit that I wanted to read this book because it was by the author that the movie "The Ice Storm" was based on. I was a little disappointed by his style. ESPECIALLY when I found out that he is responsible for Garden State. Maybe I'm prejudice because I hate Zach Braff, but I hated that movie, and hence, the author. Even though I know Hollywood turns good books to crap. Anyway, I'll have to wait and judge

james dean garage band is the standout

Not as good as I'd hoped it would be, this one just failed to really hold my attention. Worse still, or maybe just strange, I got the distinct feeling reading it that I'd tried to read it before, and either quit or finished, but in such a way that left no real memory.Maybe goodreads will help me to remember:)

stupid

Much better than Demonology. Great writing. Fluid. It flows smoothly like a river on a hot summer day. No rapids. No waterfalls. I can't say the same about the subject matter though. Moody once again explores the warm underbelly of society. Depressing at times- but he always treats his subject matter with respect- and his characters always have a certain dignity about them- no matter how depraved or desperate they become.

My first time through this book was in graduate school before Rick Moody came to the university for a week. He conducted a workshop and gave a reading and never learned to fit in with the students or faculty. The remoteness of Idaho seemed continually to appall him, New York City being fresh in his mind--I suppose--and civilization being his default. Quickly enough the man himself crowded out all my impressions of his work, so when I picked up this collection it was like brand new, and some it w...

These might be some of the best short stories of Moody's I've read yet. Still not "The Four Fingers of Death" by any means, but really good. A few of them get a bit more complicated in form than I really got into, but that's my preference and no reflection on Moody. Regardless, these are some damn good stories.

Strong prose that focuses on the connections, simple and complex, between all of us. Especially New Yorkers. My favorite piece, The Apocalypse Commentary of Bob Paisner, is a revelatory ramble in which title character interprets his misadventures with drugs and women through the use of select passages in the New Testament. As for the rest of the collection, I am a bit sick of hearing about how poetically destitute the East Village was in the 80s, but this take on the subject is surely one of the...