Lucky Alan and Other Stories by Jonathan Lethem (2015)

I really want to like Jonathan Lethem's stories.  I couldn't get into anything from his 2004 collection Men & Cartoons, and I hoped for better luck with Lucky Alan, from which I heard him read excerpts at the 2015 Festival of Books. Of the nine stories in the collection, I'd only feel the need to recommend two: "Their Back Pages" and "The Porn Critic."  The first is a strange story in which a number of invented pre-golden age comic strip characters (a clown, a theater critic, a villain, the king of the phnudges, among others) are stranded on a desert island.  The humor is surprisingly dark, the story is inventive, and it does things I haven't seen before.  The latter is a realistic story of Kromer, a young Manhattanite who gains the reputation of "a Rasputin" or "satyr," eventually becoming the thing he is believed to be.

The problem I have with a lot of Lethem's stories is that, though they often have fascinating imagery, they just feel insincere. They feel like anecdotes that have been told again and again, massaged and perfected, but end up sounding rehearsed.  

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Calvino's "The False Grandmother"

A story from Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales (1956; which, as the title suggests, is a collection of Italian folktales), The False Grandmother has obvious ties to the medieval French folktale, Little Red Riding Hood, and illustrates many of the classic tropes of folktales (e.g. pathetic fallacy, the rule of three, etc).  Embedded here is the story as read by John Turturro (Barton Fink) and illustrated by Kevin Ruelle.

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons by Kurt Vonnegut

NOTE: The review of Allen Drury's Advise and Consent will run next Monday, at which point the bestseller reviews will resume their weekly update schedule.

I'm a pretty big Kurt Vonnegut fan.  I've written about him on my blog before.  I recently finished reading a collection of articles, essays, and speeches, titled Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974).  The title comes from his novel Cat's Cradle, specifically from the imaginary religion Bokononism.  If you didn't already know that, this collection isn't for you.  The collection contains five speeches, nineteen articles, and one short science fiction script.  While some are worth reading even if you've never read a page of Vonnegut before (especially "There's a Maniac Out There", Biafra: A People Betrayed, and In a Manner that Must Shame God Himself).  But many of the articles and speeches assume a knowledge of Vonnegut's work, history, and philosophy on life, or, at the very least, are weakened without it.

One of the great things about Vonnegut is that his works illuminate each other.  Though they often tread similar ground, they take different paths.  So, frequently when reading Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, I'll come across sections that illustrate or define a concept dealt with in one of Vonnegut's novels, often there will be long passages explicitly about the novels themselves and their backgrounds.  

One thing that surprised me about this collection was it's cynicism.  Don't get me wrong, I don't read Vonnegut when I'm looking for an uplifting, optimistic outlook.  But a couple of the pieces in the collection were very cynical, nihilistic even.

Overall, I'd recommend this book to fans of Kurt Vonnegut's other work, but I'd argue against this as an introduction to Kurt Vonnegut or even to his non-fiction specifically (for that, I'd recommend Palm Sunday (1981).

Overall Rating: 3.5 stars