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thanks to Sarah Heady [ read the review here], who not only had the guts to read the book in the first place but was also able to engage its more alarming contents--"the blunt physicality of child rape"--while navigating with seeming ease China Cowboy's myriad formal experiments: "a network of dreams, self-delusions and mini-universes reveals itself through Nabokovian footnotes, appendices, crime reports, fake nonprofits (Cowboys Against Child Abuse), press releases for suspicious art galleries...."
As a result, Heady writes one of the best reviews of a Tarpaulin Sky Press title, like, ever.
Indeed we'd like to believe that Heady's pithy summation of Short's abilities is also an apt description generally of the work we publish, work in which the author "has expanded and fused the poetic and narrative fields, creating a zone where elegance and grace can gambol with the just-plain-fucked-up."
Early in her China Cowboy review, even Heady's synopsis sears:
A ring of hellfire encompasses La La from the moment of her birth, when the devil himself (“a white dark man”) wraps a searing-hot hand around the breech fetus’ calf and delivers her into the harsh world of Kowloon, 1977. La La’s parents make their living “taking the tourists to an alley stabbing them stealing their stuff,” and the child is used as a prop to gain victims’ trust. Early on, to cover up the odd claw-shaped birthmark on La La’s leg, her mother dresses her in “cowboy boots tube socks,” and Patsy Clone is born: La La’s country star alter ego, her ticket to America, where children “have their own rooms.”
Unfortunately, one of her family’s victims is an American ex-con/soybean farmer/child abductor who sticks around Hong Kong following the assault, and one day La La never comes home from school. Maybe Ren, a.k.a. Bill, a.k.a. William O’Rennessey, is really the devil incarnate, or maybe he’s just one of the devil’s many agents on a confused, globalized earth circa 1989. He is certainly an updated (and actually American) Humbert Humbert whose version of the coveted nymphet is called a “la la” (with a lower-case L). China Cowboy’s heroine is just one of many la las in the world, an unlucky abductee who’s bribable by sugary cereal, plastic microphones and flouncy skirts. And Ren is a man who will do anything the voices tell him—assuming aliases, squirreling away la las in remote corners of the country, wrestling with his own delusions of grandeur and multiple personalities. In China Cowboy, “Hell is red carpeted stairs lined with plastic runners smell of wicked shit”—a particularly cheap and Americanized evil. Ren “goes all the way inside,” and La La never comes out—smuggled through the port of San Francisco, sequestered in a shoddy Missouri cabin, serially raped and, finally, poisoned. But, says Heady, "if this all sounds too hideous to be enjoyable," it's also important to note that
Short infuses the story with kitsch, humor and addictively playful language that balance out the heartbreak. The dark subject matter is made lighter by La La’s protective pantheon of American deities: “Loretta Lynn Patsy Cline Emmylou Harris beautiful cowgirls,” Clint Eastwood, Woody Guthrie. She complains: “In my sleep I am starring in Coal Miner’s Daughter. I am as convincing as Sissy Spacek except I am Chinese and just can’t help it. I can’t.” " The Lovely Bones this ain’t ," says Heady. Instead China Cowboy is
a satanically intricate narrative with seemingly infinite vantage points in space, time and sympathy. After all, Ren isn’t always evil and he’s 'not never the victim,' as Short admits in her acknowledgments.... [China Cowboy] is an account of trauma and the stories people tell themselves to survive, in the larger context of colonialism (1997 representing the British handover of Hong Kong) and cultural tensions between China and America....
Read the entirety of Sarah Heady's review at HTML Giant.
Read more about the book, read excerpts, and order via the official webpage for Kim Gek Lin Short's China Cowboy.
At HTML Giant, Kristin Sanders reviews Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them:
Sanders discusses structure and hybridity and all that good stuff, and her engagement is wholly intelligent and insightful throughout--
. . . perhaps most prominent are questions related to traditional gender roles and the budding sexuality of the story’s youth, which every other adaption appears to have dulled down . . .
--though it's Sanders' appreciation of the book's humor that we particularly enjoy:
. . . [not merely] offers more questions than answers. Who are the Lost Boys, really, and why are they clothed in bearsuits? What’s the history between Peter and Mrs. Darling? How many other little girls did Peter whisk off to Neverland? How does one properly dispose of Never poo? About Tinkerbell, Boully wonders: “where ever will we get such small medical supplies for you? The Tinker dental dam; the Tinker tampon.” . . .
Read the full, totally awesome review here.
Read more about the book at the following link, where you can also buy Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them for $2 off the Amazon price, with free shipping.
Johannes Goransson's Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate is reviewed at HTML Giant, thanks to Ryan Downey
"A hybrid form somewhere between or among the categories of poetry, prose, essay, theatre production, and instruction manual. . . . There is much in the absolute inability of this production to be realized in physical terms and space which leads us to see a relationship to an Artaudian Theatre of Cruelty being played out. There are masks and intricate costumes aplenty, from the infamous sacks worn by Guantanamo detainees seen in the earlier passage being worn by THE PASSENGER, to the recurring “Pussy” costume fabricated “from Charlotte Bronte’s gauzes”(42). There are dresses made from looted items, prison-style clothes, black and polished bodies, cowboy costumes, skins charred from suicide bombings, heaps of dead horses, birds bursting from bodies, wounds, basketball jerseys on androgynous children, kissing faces and murder victims, exoskeletons, audience members in whiteface, and many more get ups. The costumes sometimes act/exist as characters in and of themselves, and sometimes they are affixed to bodies which are keen on morphing and wrecking any attempt at stability or a false sense of character development. What develops is the spectacle. It is a pile up of sequined things and fleshy things. . . . The audience is often implicated. After all, torture and interrogation is not borne out of individual will and action alone. . . . All aboard."
Click here for the full review
Click the following link for more information about Johannes Goransson's Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate
Entrance special pre-publication price:
$12 includes shipping in the US ($16 in stores)
Add to PayPal Cart or order by check (ships May 2011)
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