You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll feel angry, ecstatic, scared, sad. enlightened. You will feel the disturbingly-awesome, terrible glory of. life. There is nothing more fascinating than a desperate, yearning, misanthropic. humanist. For when he's done with you in the purgatory of Pleasant Hell you'll feel braver, wiser more alive and cleaner than you've ever been. None of which, of course, he intended. Just make sure you ask him not to take his shoes off.
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
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
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hellishly Pleasant,
By Tim Roessler, book lover (Boulder, CO USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Pleasant Hell (Paperback)
The howls and shrieks of the negative reviews offer the most positive reasons for reading Dr. Dolan's novel, but they left out many of its other fine qualities. Above all, Pleasant Hell courageously and painfully honest. It's one of the first, true books I've read about my generation and about what it was like to grow up in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is also beautifully written, as if Nabokov and Céline's literary DNA got spliced. It's often quite funny. And, unlike nearly other literary project, it reveals an amazing lack of vanity, right down to the author's jacket photo. In fact, Dr. Dolan is my new hero, our very own suburban Solzhenitsyn. Buy it. Read it. Make your friends buy it, too. This is a book that can't have too many readers.
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The California loser as Cúchulainn,
By
This review is from: Pleasant Hell (Paperback)
Be warned: Wound a nerd and you create a monster. Poet Dolan's glorious meditation on the inner life of the outcast manages to make misanthropy feel fresh. No compromises or happy lessons here -- just dreams of Tolkien elf girls lost to a world whose pain is recorded in the stigmata of moldy karate uniforms, runny foot scabs and dog bites. An unconscionable perspective on the value of human life. I loved it.
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Staggering,
By Billy Willy "Johnny" (Chicago) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Pleasant Hell (Paperback)
I inhaled Dolan's book in a single sitting, barring a few interruptions. While each individual page could theoretically be rationalized by the sympathetic humanist, the cumulative impact is amazing, nauseating. Dolan animates cowardly failure and youthful ignorance with no net at all. The freefall of tedium may remind one of personal history--if not, check your contempt and incomprehension at the door. Personally, the viscous bile of my life stuck in my throat, leaving me riveted, terrified and angry.
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
|
Listmania!
|
|
So You'd Like to...
|
|
