This was a bit of a pleasant surprise, actually.... I really love Open City as a magazine, which makes it so frustrating that their books often disappoint me, feeling more like gratitude to hipster friends than really good reading. This was a lot better than that, thankfully-- the stories here are "linguistically active," which is to say a good part of the pleasure of reading them is the way the sentences sound, the way they structure themselves into these sentences that you read two and three times aloud to yourself because they do things they ought not to do, in ways that you've never seen before. Shklovsky talks about deceleration, and this is an extreme example of what he meant.

The stories themselves: lots of stuff about sadsacks, a more than passing familiarity with people living on some familiar but no less real edges: punk rock musicians, small town sadnesses, eating disorders, kids not well cared for by their parents. I think in some ways this is where the book is weakest, because the territory, while well-presented, is kind of familiar, and I'm not sure Zumas has much new to say about it... The last story, told from the POV of a B'lyn gargoyle is sort of a poetics for the collection-- the goal of the stories is to scare us into a place of doing something. I'm not sure that, by itself, is enough, though.

I really did like this. It just feels a little lopsided.

Dark and strange - a lot of interesting writing here. A couple of the stories really hit home and most created the feeling of their own time, place, and space, but some missed the mark for me. Certainly unique and deeply creative, but not thoroughly enjoyable, in spite of a few really great vignettes.

My favorites in the collection: Farewell Navigator, The Everything Hater, Heart Sockets,and How He Was A Wicked Son. All wonderful, original, and originally TOLD.

I probably would've liked these stories more if I'd read them separately instead of in a single volume. There were a few I liked, but mostly I found it difficult to differentiate between the characters from story to story, because most of them were screwed up teenagers of indeterminate gender. And I know that my opinion of the book was immediately swayed by the Miranda July (ewwww) quote on the cover (swayed to the point where I almost just didn't read it). I really like Leopard Arms, though. I just wish that I hadn't read a bunch of other stories that I didn't like before it.

This is the worst book I've read in a long time. The stories are full of themselves, dripping with this "ooh, I'm so deep because I write about X" feeling, yet they're so fake, like the author obviously has no clue what she's talking about. A good example would be the one about a girl who supposedly comes from a town so small it's not on any map, past or present, yet the town not only has a YMCA, it had two high schools until recently! A town as small as the one this girl is supposed to come from would probably not have a school at all, much less multiple high schools. I live in a city with a population of...wikipedia says 88,000 in 2006, surely more now, and there is only one high school! [return][return]That's the point at which I almost gave up on the book. I was halfway through and getting more and more annoyed with each story. But I did see it through to the end, mainly because it's only 170 pages. [return][return]But from the very first story I was annoyed. The first story is about a boy with blind parents. The portrayal is pretty damn offensive (the dad serves dinner full of blood because he cuts his fingers when he cooks; the mom is portrayed as a pathetic loser who tries to seduce the son's friend), and also sets the tone for the fatphobia that is a running theme throughout the book. Bad people are not only fat, but described in detail as being gross and disgusting and lazy slobs who sit around doing nothing and have no lives. Also all fat people are, of course, fat because all they do all day is stuff their faces. [return][return]There are also stupid factual errors like a girl's (fat, loser) mom who watches an old program about the Challenger, except the author couldn't be bothered to find out that the Challenger exploded on takeoff, not after it had been in space. (And it's just a casual mention, obviously not meant to be an alternate universe or anything.)[return][return]Like, do you have to be lazy on top of being offensive and pretentious? Really? Meh.

Worth it for "The Everything Hater" alone. Great collection.