Customer Reviews

Dictionary of Modern Anguish

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Aside from a small publishing blunder (the first 30 pages of my copy of The Dictionary of Modern Anguish were out of order), this is a compelling book of short fictions. Definately not your momma's stories. Most of them masquerade as reviews of films that have never been made or books that have never been written. Berry, at his best, wraps an excellent story around literary theory to create a nice pill that's easy to swallow. "A Theory of Fiction," "Torture!" and "Knott Unbound" stand out in this regard. Some of the stories are uneven, however, failing to satisfactorily mix intelligent discourse with an experimental impulse. So when Berry is good, he's very good. When he's not, he's just okay. I'd recommend this book for anyone interested in American experimental fiction, critifiction, or needs the number for professional justifications (paid advertisement, page 130).

I agree with the first reviewer; it's a very uneven collection. There are many promising premises; one begins "Among the novels I will never write..."And there are some wonderful prose poems, such as "Pretense," which are more or less in the manner of Barthelme (and, more distantly, in the manner of Borges (or, although this a long shot, in the manner of Lem (or, ultimately, even more distantly still, but really more plausibly, in the manner of Kafka's one-page stories))).