Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The Love Book: Gritty with Unexpected Tenderness, February 12, 2009
These stories of sex and death, attraction and repulsion, men and women, start out in a gritty mode, exposing the less pretty realities of some of life's unfortunates. One triumph of The Love Book is the tenderness Wohlrob reveals in the course of writing each relationship, a raw and recognizable humanity he brings to the surface in places the reader least expects: Compassion for just the characters with whom I was most uncomfortable crept over me in absorbing Wohlrob's deft and distilled prose. The stories in The Love Book are never veiled autobiography, but add up to an original vision all Wohlrob's own, one that has been piercingly and wisely lived, felt, and imagined.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stories About Things, Funny And Memorable, February 14, 2008
Disclaimer: Ken is a friend of mine, we go back a number of years and have collaborated on a lot of stories and ideas. He ran the great webzine Bully, where I was a frequent contributor. When Ken decided to shut down Bully, I wondered what he was going to do. "The Love Book" is part of the answer to that. Ken has transformed himself in the last several years from a Menckenesque curmudgeon, hilariously skewering all aspects of pop culture, to a serious short story writer with a truly original and refreshing vision. These are stories that actually dare to be about things--that is, they have characters who are invested, committed, or otherwise trapped in certain strange or absurd lives who are looking for freedom and release. It's the basis of all great fiction, imo.
Short fiction has been dominated by several trends over the past decades: Carveresque/Bukowskian castration (the dreaded "she done me wrong" school), Barthlemian cutesiness and faux-shock/schlock ("Yesterday I put a pipe bomb in mother's duvet"), or simply vapid, narcissistic navel-gazing posing as wisdom (once brilliantly skewered in a Writer's Digest article as the type of poetry that goes "I look out/the window/and I am/important"). There's also the general "wallpaper" genre, literary decorations of earnest people having mild epiphanies, or being groped by the paper boy, or digging their hands in the earth, etc.
Well, Ken Wohlrob is having none of that, thank you. His writing isn't an answer or antidote to anything, except for maybe bad and fashionable fiction that leaves you feeling a little sick and ripped off when you've finished reading it. If you're still not sure, go to Ken's site and listen to the audio book version first. Then come back and get a copy to throw at somebody you love.
Tim Hall, author of Half Empty
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