Thursday, June 21, 2007

Brainiac's bedside table, 4th edition

Here are a few June titles that I'm currently reading/skimming:

* "The Atheist's Bible" (Ecco), ed. Joan Konner. Nietzsche, Bierce, Voltaire, Santayana, Twain, Woody Allen: These are but a few of the thinkers who've entertainingly attacked organized religion and belief in God. (Allen: "Well, I believe that there's somebody out there who watches over us. Unfortunately, it's the government.") This slim, attractively produced volume will amuse nonbelievers -- and, ironically, cause them to spend hours reading about God and religion.

* "Russian Lover and Other Stories" (Yeti), by Jana Martin. The excellent Portland, OR-based book-plus-CD arts journal Yeti is branching into book publishing, in association with Verse Chorus Press, and "Russian Lover," a collection of stories about tough-yet-fragile women drifting into new cities, is Yeti's first title. (Scoop up a first edition while you can!) Martin, who grew up partly in Boston, employs the city in much the same way that midcentury, live-action Disney movies used to: as a repressive place that you must leave if you want to be happy and fulfilled. In Martin's "Hope," the protagonist -- about whom we know nothing except that her father is a projectionist at "a Cambridge art house" -- abandons her lousy Boston apartment and her boyfriend ("a pseudo rocker in smallbutt jeans," this means you!), and leaves "that bleak northern city" on a bus headed for Florida. Buy a copy to read at the beach; you will not be disappointed.

* "Bow-Wow Bugs a Bug" (Harcourt Children's Books), by Mark Newgarden and Megan Montague Cash. Newgarden, creator of the Garbage Pail Kids, is perhaps the most sophisticated, darkest, grown-up cartoonist around; according to an Ideas essay by A.S. Hamrah, he's

mined the comic-strip and cartooning ephemera of the last hundred years for the exact combination of outward yock and inner pain that produces what Newgarden has identified as "laffs," the joyless mirth that's all too aware of the suffering at comedy's roots.

Cash, meanwhile, is a children's illustrator and graphic designer of the softest, sweetest variety. She and Newgarden have teamed up to create a wordless book for children, and the result is delightful. Bow-Wow, a terrier, fiercely pursues a bug around the city -- and gets into one surrealistic scrape after another in the process. This is one of those rare books that a parent who still has two brain cells to rub together can read to a toddler without falling asleep at the switch. Toddlers will also enjoy Bow-Wow's fine website.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:34 PM

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