Come and experience the misadventures of a man with a fish-bowl for a brain, a woman who gives birth to bunnies, and Pterodactyl Man, who has raw egg for a heart. All of this and more in ten twisted tales from a master of Bizarro, Vincent W. Sakowski. Dive deep into the surreal and satirical realms of his neo-classical Blender Fiction, filled with television shoes and flesh-filled skies. You'll be both glad and disturbed that you did.
Book Description
Special Offers and Product Promotions
- This item is eligible for our 4-for-3 promotion. Eligible products include select Books and Home & Garden items. Buy any 4 eligible items and get the lowest-priced item free. Here's how (restrictions apply)
Editorial Reviews
From the Inside Flap
"Genuine vision, knowing nastiness, and beautiful bewilderments. Misadventures in a Thumbnail Universe is an enchanting batch of black-hearted tales. We can only hope that when the world ends it will do so with the same strange beauty that Sakowski has scribed." - JEREMY ROBERT JOHNSON, author of Angel Dust Apocalypse and Extinction Journals
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sky as contusion,
This review is from: Misadventures in a Thumbnail Universe (Paperback)
Reading Mr. Sakowski's compact Bizarro prose is like swallowing Lord Buckley in reverse slow motion. He donates shining hammers to the groin in perfect guise of paragraphs, thereby sprinkled with laudanum and small campfires behind the eye. Buy this to scrub your face with the ink in praise of some holy avant thirst or die willing in some traffic of automatic dreamscape. The strange pagan-ite calligrams homed beyond this glowing cover will follow you like smoke until you dis-acknowledge the weak function of any heart.
The peeling need of the Bizarro movement is flexing its muscle above the tombstones of literature. Keep drooling over the television shoes.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Once it puts the foot to the floor, look out.,
By
This review is from: Misadventures in a Thumbnail Universe (Paperback)
Vincent W. Sakowski, <strong>Misadventures in a Thumbnail Universe</strong> (Eraserhead Press, 2007)
Vincent W. Sakowski is a young, somewhat cracked, Canadian writer who works in a realm he calls "blender fiction", as in "take influences x, y, and z, put them in a blender, and see what you come up with." What you come up with is very weird indeed, but don't let that stop you from picking this up. When Vincent W. Sakowski is good, he is very very good. When he is bad... I don't know, because there's not a bad story to be found in this book. Sure, there are the gems and there are those that are less gem-like, but it's all good reads. I was going along okay, enjoying but not being completely sucked into the worlds Sakowski was creating in these stories (though Sakowski mentions in his afterword that "Television Shoes" is set in the same universe as an earlier novel of his, which definitely makes me want to go back and read that). They suffer from the same problem, early on, that I have with a number of bizarro authors; I can't really find enough emotional depth in the characters to push me into really caring for them, because the pieces, be they stories or novels, are so short that there's not enough time for that to develop. All that changes, however, when you get to "The Other Side of the Fence", as good a short story as I've read in recent memory, and one where Sakowski uses the bizarre surroundings in which he sets his character to do more than be bizarre. Yes, it's all allegory, but it all <em>works</em>, and works very well. Even if "The Other Side of the Fence" had been the only story to reach the heights it does in the book, I'd be telling you that you need to go buy this thing posthaste. And then comes "See Emily Play?". And it will roll over your head with a steamshovel and you will ask for more. Aside form the utterly gratuitous Pink Floyd reference in the title (and that can never be a bad thing), the story itself is an odd and entirely wonderful blend of steampunk, "Jabberwocky", and Jacqueline Susann that must be read to be believed. If you're not used to bizarro trappings, it may take you a while to adjust to some of the odder set pieces Sakowski uses in these stories, but once you've connected with that particular vein, it's wonderful stuff, well worth your time, and Sakowski, with this volume, plants himself at the top of the bizarro heap with Forrest Armstrong and Andersen Prunty as "most likely to become a rock star (even if of the <em>Hard Core Logo</em> variety)". You want this. ****
5.0 out of 5 stars
Delightfully Bizarre!,
This review is from: Misadventures in a Thumbnail Universe (Paperback)
I loved the ten tales of surreal strangeness you get with "Misadventures". Sakowski builds a world within these tales, one you can envision the characters bouncing around in. It starts with "The Screaming of the Fish", which was one of my favorites. The narrarator explains the misunderstood life of his friend, who has a fishbowl for a head. It felt very personal to me, like Sakowski had poured his heart into it. The man feels pressured by society, but doesn't let it phase him, he tunes it out.
Another story that stood out to me was "On the Other Side of the Fence". A young girl constantly cleans her yard of the dead chickens, burying them in the ground, but they continue to appear. You can feel that she is trying to escape something, but cannot. It was a disheartening story, which ends with a blossom of hope. Yet, another beautifully emotional piece. The obvious crowning jewel was "It's Beginning to Look a Lot like Ragnarok". A couple is tricked into believing it's the end of the world by the Norse god Loki. It's a very dark satire that will have you smiling throughout the entire story. This was the first book I have read by Sakowski, but I will grab more based on this collection. Every story is worth the money. He made great use of the metaphor. Read IT!
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
