From the man The New York Times Book Review called "an uncommon diagnostician of the curiosities of the human heart" and hailed on NPR (National Public Radio) as "the stand-up comedian of the unconscious" comes this extraordinary new collction of metaphor-rich, wildly imaginative short-short stories. Barry Yourgrau, who performs his written work in clubs across the country and on NPR, Comedy Central, MTVs Spoken Word programs, and in an upcoming one-man feature film, now explores the imagination's twilight terrain in which love, lust, and loss reside in this achingly beautiful and rich surreal tour de force. An affair with a cannibal woman is filled with devouring kisses. A flower sprouts from a woman's flesh wherever a man kisses her, impeding their lovemaking. An abandoned lover seeks repair of the cuckoo clock that is his heart. Exploring the archetypal he-and-she from the first glance to the last tortured look, this exhilirating new collection of flash-fiction--short-short stories thematically connected--merges Freud with Fellini, Kafka with Woody Allen. At once sad, alarming, and wickedly brilliant, Barry Yourgrau is, in the uneasy land of desire and heartbreak, the spokesman for our secret self.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A group of women remove their private parts, wash them, and hang the pelts on trees to dry. A woman masquerading as a lioness devours her lover. A man carves out his wounded heart, buries it and becomes all the more successful with women. The figure of a clothed girl trapped for centuries in an icy glacier causes the ever soulful male narrator to relinquish his hopes for his own romantic future. In performance artist Yourgrau's new collection, such odd, luminous visions pulse with sadness and humor, loss, irony and desire. The 90 brief but achingly substantial stories most often include a lovelorn male voyeur whose surreal encounters with otherworldly women highlight his suspicion that his is the weaker sex, given to pleading, victimization and endless unnameable yearnings. Death figures again and again, but in the hands of the author of Wearing Dad's Head and A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane, mortality is marked not by finality but by transformation, so that the reckless impulses of the living give way to a somnolent and receptive grace. A drowned man, ministered by mermaids, muses, "They laugh, and push me and pet me, in ignorance of my condition, my sad, human flaw." These are deeply convincing, uncommonly imaginative fictions, told with unparalled style and elegant emotion.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From the Publisher
From the man The New York Times Book Review called "an uncommon diagnostician of the curiosities of the human heart" and hailed on NPR (National Public Radio) as "the stand-up comedian of the unconscious" comes this extraordinary new collction of metaphor-rich, wildly imaginative short-short stories. Barry Yourgrau, who performs his written work in clubs across the country and on NPR, Comedy Central, MTVs Spoken Word programs, and in an upcoming one-man feature film, now explores the imagination's twilight terrain in which love, lust, and loss reside in this achingly beautiful and rich surreal tour de force. An affair with a cannibal woman is filled with devouring kisses. A flower sprouts from a woman's flesh wherever a man kisses her, impeding their lovemaking. An abandoned lover seeks repair of the cuckoo clock that is his heart. Exploring the archetypal he-and-she from the first glance to the last tortured look, this exhilirating new collection of flash-fiction--short-short stories thematically connected--merges Freud with Fellini, Kafka with Woody Allen. At once sad, alarming, and wickedly brilliant, Barry Yourgrau is, in the uneasy land of desire and heartbreak, the spokesman for our secret self.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Sadness of Sex: An intoxicating adventure,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Sadness of Sex (Paperback)
When was the last time that you read a collection of short stories so
well written and colourful and that you could taste the words
thick in your mouth and you flinched at the imagery.
Seldom does one stumble across the work of a writer
that can demonstrate such a clear understanding and command of the
English language as Barry Yourgrau. In The Sadness of Sex,
Yourgrau cleverly exposes an upside-down and inside-out
non-reality to us by skillfully articulating those curiously
insane and fleeting thoughts that most of us would fear to
ever entertain. He writes in a contemporary style that is
nothing short of profoundly unique. Unique because his
words innocently catch you up in imaginary nets fashioned
from the fabric of insightful and disturbing comedic absurdities
and imagery.
The Sadness of Sex is a collection of short attention
span short stories, most between two and three pages long.
This book is a charming collection of fiction that tricks you
into simulaneously entertaining a poetic intimacy and a twisted
sense of melancholy. It is a quiet journey into a world of
colourful visions and lucid dreams that are a delightfully
engaging and startlingly surreal.
Yourgrau's The Sadness of Sex is not for everyone though.
He often entices the reader into follow him down cerebral avenues
where all his, and sometimes our, most peculiar psycho-sexual
images and ideas hide. This book is a tribute to the unchecked
thoughts, desires and innocent human emotions in all of us.
If Pablo Neruda and a not-so-crass Charles Bukowski got
together and wrote stories about Salvador Dali paintings while
they watched Monty Python re-runs, it might start to sound a
little like The Sadness of Sex.
5.0 out of 5 stars
So good it inspired a shift in my own art,
By Oedipa Hex "Oedipa Hex" (New York) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Sadness of Sex (Paperback)
My first copy of this book was bought at New York's Strand bookshop, and within four hours I had annotated and illustrated my copy so intensely that it became the best representation of my own interior world. The stories are so brief and so evocative, I couldn't resist filling the rest of each page's blank space with sprawling doodles and word constructions that took these ideas further. I loaned this copy to a friend, who I felt needed to see this treasure I had co-created. She left it on a bar. Gone! Yet somehow the stories within inspire me to believe some other lonely drinker found it and was encouraged on a similar quest of his own. This was microfiction before microfiction existed, and I haven't seen it done as well again since.
5.0 out of 5 stars
I think about it all of the time,
By
This review is from: The Sadness of Sex (Paperback)
I read this collection of stories several years ago after finding it in my college book store. It is so beautiful and crazy and the title always intrigues everyone that reads the red letters on the yellow spine.
Somehow the stories in this book have never left me. I think about them all of the time. Definitely Yourgrau's finest work.
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