Book Forum reviews Girl Factory, by Jim Krusoe:
As strangely whimsical as it is macabre, this tale could easily have become an on-the-run-from-the-law picaresque or an animal rights satire, but in Krusoe’s spirited hands it humbly fades into the backdrop, as the real story, far more sinister and equally madcap, unfolds...he is never heavy-handed—his writing is too unpretentious, his characters too wonderfully peculiar...We never learn, for instance, who the women are or how they came to be in their tubes. But this, too, underscores one of Krusoe’s themes: that life, unlike most stories, leaves so much unknowable. And this makes Girl Factory the best kind of novel—a wildly imagined tale with its own rules. A word of warning, however: You may never look at your yogurt the same way again.
Read the full review
"DESPICABLE" says New York Magazine
The arbiter of taste for all things...New Yorky, has decreed in its Approval Matrix that the cover of Do Me, Tin House Book's anthology of Tales of Sex and Love, is indeed despicable.
That is "Highbrow Depsicable," however, not "Lowbrow."
WE HAVE A WINNER!
Literary Arts just announced the winners of the 2007 Oregon Book Awards and Lee Montgomery, Editorial Director of Tin House Books and Executive Editor of Tin House was the winner of the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction for her memoir The Things Between Us (Free Press).
One of the judges, Lee Gutkind, described Montgomery’s work as “vivid and riveting like cinema” and praised her ability to craft “real-life characters with evocative sensitivity.”
Congratulations to Lee!
Publisher's Weekly reviews Saving Angelfish, by Michele Matheson:
Matheson's promising debut, a gritty novel from Tin House Books' New Voice Series, tells the bleak story of a wayward L.A. junkie named Max. Virtually disowned by her dysfunctional parents, out of a job, sickeningly underweight, months behind on rent and unable to kick her debilitating heroin habit, Max flits from day to depressing day in a constant state of decrepitude. When she's not shooting up, she's snorting coke, and when she's not doing that she's thinking about her next fix. Despite her spiraling decline and a number of near-death experiences, nothing really changes for Max throughout her story. Her dealers (Grandpops, her crusty, repulsive landlord; and Carlotta, a beastly legless woman) and fellow junkies (Wolf and a roller-skating waif named Tutu) share Max's single-minded pursuit of getting high. Though initially mesmerizing, the drug-centric plot begins to ware a little thin; the crux of the book can be found in Max's unchanging attitude toward her life: "The goal is not to think-about anything. She winds up places, and that's fine." Nonetheless, Matheson's sharp, highly detailed prose thrusts readers in the driver's seat of an out-of-control life.
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LOS ANGELES TIMES NEW DISCOVERIES!
Food & Booze:
Essays and Recipes Edited by Michelle Wildgen, illustrated by Nicole J. Georges, Tin House Books: 226 pp., $16.95
“MOSTLY booze. Thank God. Maybe it's coming back. Or maybe it's just that, as Chris Offut writes in his contribution to this marvelous essay collection, "[t]here are two kinds of writers, you will hear people say, the ones who drink and the ones who quit." Then again, Offut's recipe is for baked possum; who wouldn't rather have a drink? Elissa Schappell, in "Ode to a Martini," quotes Dorothy Parker: "I like to have a martini / Two at the very most / After three I'm under the table, / After four I'm under my host." Lydia Davis, in "Eating Fish Alone" (one imagines a raccoon washing its paws in the river and looking anxiously about), provides a recipe for a smelly sardine sandwich. Sara Perry's essay on the apple is a walk in the park that begins with Eve, moves through Alice B. Toklas and ends with an uplifting recipe for pâte brisée and several versions of pie. "My first loaf sucks," reports Matthew Batt in "The Path of Righteousness," on his efforts at sourdough bread ("a Quonset-shaped loaf of despair"). "I feel like a soiled, unfaithful, pathetic man" ˜ this after having attempted a "nice brown sauce," inspired by Julia Child. These essays are pure fun, pure joy, every last honey-colored, 80-proof, diet-be-damned one of them ˜ and excellent attitude training for the coming holidays.”
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