9 Video's to show Aliens - should they arrive on Earth.

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August Review 2014

Maybe like a few readers, I first got wind of Yates thru the Hollywood film version of Revolutionary Road.

This is the perfect intro to this great writer. His writing is a brutal lens on ordinary Americans - the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

His prose has a quality that cuts through to the heart of the matter and I found the stories had to be read in one sitting. It's a wonder why Yates isn't lauded as an American great, he deserves to be.

Give this book a chance and enter his world where the suffocation of existence has never been so well told..


Franco currently teaches at UCLA, between movies and writing, which demonstrates the versatile nature of this young hollywood property. There's a good novel struggling to get out of this book, maybe Franco is too close to the fire to avoid getting burnt. While there are snatches of good prose in this loosely connected short stories...the overall shape of this book is garbled and at times incoherent.

Worth a read if only to take an insiders view of Hollywood from a young man who certainly has a lot of talent

Siri has surpassed herself with this. It reads like an interesting non fiction, but no, this is a novel. This work is best enjoyed if you let Hustvedt transport you.
This is a novel about masks, levels of perception and there were times when Harriet Burden was as real to me as any dead artist. The writer has pulled off a masterpiece in fiction - in letting the reader be transformed into a willing piece in their universe. The mechanics of the book is an assortment of voices that knew the dead artist - grown up children, friends, critics and lovers and is nothing like I've read recently. Like 'What I loved' a deeply intellectual book that doesn't shut out the very well read. It's a very easy book to read and in a celeb obsessed world of skin deep; important in these times.

I would say this is the most important book I've read in some time as it challenges what we consider a novel, while challenging the ideas of gender in the aloof New York art scene. Like The Flamethrowers, by Kushner, it raises important questions of the female in art - so much the object rather than the artist . It's interesting that Harriet's husband is an art dealer who 'picks her up' - yet whose voice is only found once her husband dies and she is no longer a 20 something woman with striking breasts, but middle aged and invisible.

Genius.

Review page added

I've finally got round to posting a review page, each month I'll add books that I like or really love...


Let's start with a recent buy....

 

C J Anderson's Enter Ruinland grabbed me for the cover, which just shows a good cover can grab even an old cynic like me! It tells the story of a neurotic AI and a group of survivors at a military underground shelter, after a devastating nuclear war has ravaged the outside world. Anderson according to his bio, is a born again Atheist and it shows deeply in his/her writing. 

The writing burns with emotion, set against a solid good sci fi yarn, rather like Atwood this is literary sci fi from a self published writer who, if they stick at it, have a promising future career ahead. It's as much as a theological discussion on what is good or bad, whether we are ever born good or bad and big questions in a post nuclear world.

The super intelligence that runs the facility, an AI named Sophie, computes that the survivors who demonstrate gene deficiency for psychotic behaviour should be eliminated. It finds ten of the group of seventy as incapable of full human emotions...do the others not selected stand back and allow the others to die? Or does the greater good logic make sense to them. 

One of those selected for termination is a soldier who the AI test positive for having psychotic tendencies, who decided he aint going quietly.....

A welcome addition to the growing literature that blurs literary fiction with sci fi and so leaves that genre a richer place....

The writer is currently giving away the novel free HERE