Tag: satire
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Interview With Steve Aylett
This interview first appeared on Literary Kicks, May 26, 2006 Postmodern novelist Steve Aylett was born in 1967 in the Bromley Borough of London, England. His first book, The Crime Studio, was published in 1994, and his later works include Bigot Hall, Slaughtermatic and his most recent tour de force, Lint. Aylett’s work has been…
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Souls on Paper: Nikolai Gogol on Bogus Financial Schemes
Some images in the above collage were taken from The Overcoat & Selected Stories, Special Edition, published by Special Edition Books, and Dead Souls, the Yale Edition Gogol’s Dead Souls is a perfect analogy for today’s economy. Instead of buying junk bonds, the main character in Dead Souls purchases the names of peasants who have died but…
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Connections
I often write about the exhilaration I feel when one good book leads to another and another. After reading and enjoying Ticket to Minto, I interviewed the author, Sohrab Homi Fracis. He mentioned that he was pitching his novel-in-progress as “Jack Kerouac’s On the Road meets Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake.” This piqued my interest in The Namesake. I picked it…
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Satire, Cyberpunk, and Synesthesia
Preliminary notes on my Steve Aylett thesis. I used to called Aylett’s work a combination of cyberpunk, satire, and psychedelia. But “psychedelia” is too limited, too narrow. Aylett’s work is characterized by three things: Cyberpunk settings, classic satire, and a visual image orientation. I. Cyberpunk a. Rudy Rucker’s definition of cyberpunk: “Fast and dense. It…
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Thorne Smith: Satire and the Supernatural from the Roaring 20’s
Thorne Smith wrote towards the end of Prohibition until the opening years of the Great Depression and left behind one of the most delightful mirrors of contemporary American Life of the era. Thorne was a junior member of the Algonquin Round Table and a friend (maybe lover) of Dorothy Parker, but his books were considered outright scandalous…