A brilliant little book that speaks to all manners of creating a poem andor musings on the nature of the creative act that makes readers reevaluate the methods used andor a wonderful stream of consciousness akin to smart freewriting as promoted by Peter Elbow and

Yep, this is the style all the way through, with imaginative swings of mind and word-fun that reminds one of childhood swinging and tipping one's head way way back. Really, it's a broad categorical listing of ways to create poems, he's thought of many and has wrapped them in a punctuationless package separating each thought with "andor." Yeah this little trick may be based on a historical precedent but who cares. Buy this book for the fun of it and because it broadens what poetry is today.

When ice gets old it gets muddy and dull. This is not a story about keys and affairs, don't read it for that. It's about weak threads trying (because the characters are shallow and wooden)to sew two coming of age stories amidst adult emotional flopping. As plot, it's an overwritten short story. As a novel it's contrived, laborious, plodding. The death at the end is gratuitous. Moody finds nice small moments but for the most part his writing is like a migraine. He can't say one paragraph without digressing into listing items from the era, and this is bad. It's like he received the Big Book of the 1970's for Christmas or Hanukkah he decided to mention every proper noun. Yet for all that we do not sense the period at all. Anne Rice does this too in the same ugly way. Read Burgess if you want to see how it's done seamlessly or read Ellis in American Psycho to see how it becomes a wonderful stylistic device. As for Ice Storm, do what you would normally do in such a weather event, stay inside, drink warm liquids, and read a good book -- which means it won't be this one.

This is a collection of essays about prose and poetry that is as random as it is intended. The best essays really shine. I discovered and appreciated Charles Baxter only because of Brett Lott's article(which I'd read in a slightly different form in another book on writing.) Still I enjoyed it once again. Kate Fetherston, a young poet according to her bio, was co-editor and her own submission is perhaps expected from someone so unpublished -- it's interesting in discussing a rippling effect. The drawback with so many of these books is that when an essay is off topic or poorly researched we hold it against both author and editor. We expect editors to have the guts to stand up against such poor submissions or at least to ask for revisions. Robin Behn gets really carried away with language and swimming in a way that only detracts from her argument. Worse is the essay on camouflage by Michael Martone that tries to relate Gestalt to art to writing to Dada to, well you name it. It has spelling errors and mis-definitions, he misunderstands Cubist art and even spells Robinson Crusoe incorrectly. He also left in indications of figures that were, most likely, part of another lecture. Beyond that it's nearly unreadable because it's so rambling. Did the editors bother to look at this?

Read this book for the best essays and trust me when I tell you the bad ones don't get better. Just skip those and feel no guilt.

Who gets behind books like this? With what was it last count, 500? 800 writing programs in the US at the masters and PhD levels? Well this is the sort of stuff the workshops in such places crank out. The plots of this little town are oh so "outre" but the writing is as bad as its future. Ok, not seriously bad, a few grammatical tics and some errors in spelling for the most part, but bad enough to be absolutely average. Take one small town, fill it with losers and idiots who do something and then reflect momentarily without insight and you have the general plotline of nearly every story here. To say they are related stories is nearly a misnomer, they mention a character here and there from another story but one does not lead to consequences in another. Hey Carver could do this if you're interested. Now take characters who arrive into scenes that, if thought about for two seconds, would never happen. Example, the feature movie of a drive-in starts and the father and son go into the bathroom. Wow, the trough is full of men and there are even more men lined up waiting, hopping on one foot as they wait. Think twice, at the start of the feature? And men don't hop around like that. It's really a shallowness that infects most of the stories. Another example, two children go missing because they are killed by the village idiot (OK one of a town full) and nobody every goes to find them. Really? Is it normal that kids just go missing and their family moves away? This is a highly problematic book in that respect. Add to this no memorable moments or lines. In a number of stories the writing voice shifts all over, sometimes into slang then out then back again. This is a sign of a writer without much experience. These feel like workshop stories--formulaic and predictable. What was Dorothy Parker's aphorism...this is a book not to be put down lightly, it should be thrown with great force.

And so did Dickens but it didn't stop Dickens from doing some pretty dang good writing. First off, anyone who says they can't get through a Clive James' essay is going to argue with me. James writes some brilliant, trenchant stuff about a wide range of issues. I think Hornby probably didn't like James because the great man is perceived as a threat. In comparison Hornby's musings are rambling and not particularly deep. He mentions books he bought, discusses some of them and promises to discuss other things that he just doesn't get to. Basically the book feels like old newspaper columns and without a serious reedit, they appear to have been published as a money grab. That's my opinion on them. I wondered why the book was so short, and now I know, it's without meat. If you want a similar book with lots of great substance, get Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. That is one you won't regret.

What other book can you get that shows a woman smoking on it's cover? It's almost worth it for that. Ok not really, but the art is fantastic. The book's full of colour plates and essays that go a long way to seeing her career and understanding her art. By the way if you like this check out the new book Unmonumental. That too is really really cool.

Genzken is one of the combine a whole lot of various things, often including plastic flowers, into a sculpture. It's beyond postmodern, it's not really fluxus or arte povera. We need a new word for this sort of smart assemblage.

Look it over and coin one, we'll be grateful to you while you'll be grateful you bought the book.

I like the idea of linked stories quite a bit and grabbed this book based on that cover description.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong about the book or even individual stories (except for a number of typos and fact checking errors that look like sloppy work on someone's part). But that said, there's nothing really great about them either. They are average, plodding stories, the sort that fill up journals because it would be hard for anyone to prove they're not written of a certain length. But on a serious note, nothing happens worth caring about. They really just shuffle along with sentences that never thrill, plots that are like eating dry crackers, and epiphanies that never really come. Here are two sentences as an example, "All of a sudden I wonder if their ghosts are here. Watching me." Passive verb, a non functioning 'all of a sudden' a pseudo third person reflection on a first person thought. And then the breaking of the sentence, the reinforcement for no reason. Again, not terrible but not a form of rarefied wordspersonship. The blurb from someone anonymous at The Malahat Review says, "I found myself laughing frequently." We must have been reading the different books, there's no humor here either.

Think of the phrase, where there's smoke there's fire and recall that the first smoke of the book is extinguished and tossed from a balcony. That's a warning.

I'm a real fan of Will Self but this book is downright uncharacteristic of what I expect from Self in terms of imaginative writing. Similar is the way Homes' The End of Alice (a brilliant read) then became a dull plodding regular, average work in This Book Will Save Your Life. It's as though something happens, the effort spent in writing the really good book is lost and the next one is a writer's holiday or something.

In a way his style here is closest to what he used for Tough Tough Toys. The main character tosses his butt, it burns onto the head of a man below, and our protagonist, if we want to call him that because our identification with him is shallow, is dragged through a tale he has little control over. Things get worse, of course, as though he were the Vicar of Wakefield and the sole purpose of plot is to make things worse. Yeah, it's outdated except in Hollywood. So he gets stuck on a vacation island due to little known laws send fingers across lands, so if he were to merely leave the island people have a right to destroy his belongings up to the two million dollar bond. It sounds a bit like Mark Leyner's "New Jersey State Discretionary Execution Program." I found myself wondering if Self is making fun of peoples of color generally, or whether he understands the implications of his words as he discusses those who inhabit the island since there are a few very stereotypical cliches at use -- he could follow them up to make a point about capitalist society and visible minorities or first versus third world peoples but he doesn't.

Most shocking is the way the book offers so little. Self has admitted he's weak on plot and here it shows more than ever. You really need to force yourself to stick with this one, but afterwords you wonder why you kept at it. Maybe this is the joke, we're held prisoner too, in a little island called a book. You title a book Butt and you seem to ask for a whole lot of jokes at your expense (you get my drift). This one deserves a kicking or to be tossed into the ashtray, the way we treat most butts.

A critical study of Will Self is welcome since so many reviews have been written about him but little analysis. This was the first book I grabbed and held tightly, rushing home to start. So it's strong points: A brief bio, emphasis on the psychological aspects of the work, picking at the gender, power, capitalist, drug, and London as a sence of place issues that flow through Self's works. What it doesn't include: Deep consideration of the works, (if you believe Self's work can be deep, which apparently is debatable)and really no, none, nil, dissection of what makes Self's writing tick. This is very disappointing.

Let's examine one, My Idea of Fun, terrific book, based on an older but we know this. We learn Broadhurst is the Devil, but we know that too, and we know just about everything that is mentioned and discussed, we see the Capitalist thread running through, theme 101 in a way. Do we get id, ego, superego? Yes. What we may not get from the book is how Ian's mother relates back to Self's mother, for what it's worth. Isn't all writing autobiographical to a degree. And to push a bit further into associations, do we really see the Devil in this book as addiction? That for me is a bit of a stretch. Beyond the simplicity of the dissection I come away actually wondering what made the book so good because from this analysis it seems puerile. Take for example the next to last sentence of this section, "This is one key element of Self's satirical target, it seems' exposing the ways that people attempt to thwart what might be a habitual drive toward inertia." This is like, it seems, a schoolboy's paper where at the last minute he gets a new idea and tosses it in as though it reconfigures all the previous arguments. And this "it seems" only discredits the authoritative voice. A critical analysis is not the place for any old speculation but consolidation and defense. I read overviews like this for insight and depth rather than synopses and junior psychology.

You don't understand Will Self from this book so don't expect it. Cock and Bull, Great Apes, the short stories, almost all of his work is diminished in this book, in my opinion, and I've read the majority of Self's works. So if you really like reading Self for his bravado and his lexical fireworks, you just may get irritated by what you read in this book.

In the press about this book Stewart says she is a "literary proctologist." I'm not sure that's what I'd want to be considered. And, while I could joke about the relationship of the phrase to the writing, I will let it pass -- no pun intended. Suffice it to say that "literary" is absolutely the wrong word to use in describing these stories. They lack the literary. They are just very poorly constructed and written. I'm not trying to be mean here, just honest. I've taught so many beginning writers it makes my head floppy. And here's another. Stewart appears to be a writer with hardly any experience, evidently this is her first work of fiction. She took only one class in writing, evidently, and she is a member of a writing group.

This is work common to the world of self-publishing where a lack of sensitivity to language, clear vision, unique phrasing all are lacking. Bland television sort of predictability are the norm. She struggles to get stories to emit feeling but they consistently fall flat. Yeah, I read the whole book, not because I expected it to get better but because I wanted to write a review that took it all into account. Sadly I cannot cite a single line to prove this writer has anything to offer beyond the most mundane level of sticking words into a linear form.

Thus it galls me to see what seems to be arrogance in stating she is literary in any form. To be frank, there are so many wonderful short stories and short story writers out there that there is no need to waste time on this book.

On the positive side, the book has a nice cover with nice paper.