Face it: The economy for regular people isn’t any better, even if
Wall Street is booming. Unemployment is still too high, which means
many people are struggling—so why not buy your friends and loved
ones books for the holidays? After all, books are cheap, and if things
get desperate, they make great kindling once the power gets turned
off!
Here’s an indie-book/potential kindling guide to help you with your
holiday shopping.
Lynn Breedlove’s One Freak Show (Manic D,
$14.95) offers hilarious, gender-bending comedy that will spread
much mirth among your LGBT friends. Breedlove penned the acclaimed and
more downbeat speed-dealing bike-messenger novel Godspeed, so
it’s cool to discover a more humorous side of this author, who also
fronts the queer punk band Tribe 8. One Freak Show hits every
funny bone, from the inherent gayness of Oktoberfest-inspired
lederhosen to the easiest way to maintain your female-to-male tranny
figure (“at five bucks a roll, you can wear duct tape for weeks in jail
before it starts falling off”) to the best technique for boosting one’s
immunity: licking public pay phones at the Greyhound bus station. If
there’s a hard-core freak in your family, stuff this book into
his or her stocking.
For the short-fiction lover on your list, we recommend Tod
Goldberg’s Other Resort Cities (OV, $16.95),
which features 10 tales set in various vacation towns (Las Vegas, Palm
Springs, etc). Each is funny, insightful and overflowing with
fascinating characters. Take, for instance, “Mitzvah,” in which a mob
hit-man disguises himself as a Sin City rabbi to avoid being hunted
down by U.S. Marshals. To his own amazement, Rabbi David Cohen (aka Sal
Cupertine) makes a pretty decent Jewish religious adviser: “He’d found
that if he simply dropped the Midrash into conversation, rejoined with
the word ‘essentially,’ and then paraphrased Neil Young or Bruce
Springsteen, people left him feeling that they’d learned something.”
Darkly funny and ferociously readable, Other Resort Cities is a
book you’ll want to spend your entire holiday reading. Because of the
subtle crime plots that give each story momentum, Goldberg’s book
doubles as an ideal choice for mystery-lovers.
Somewhere in every family or group of friends, there’s a closeted
poetry aficionado—in which case, we suggest Travis Wayne
Denton’s awesomely in-your-face debut, The Burden of
Speech (C&R, $14.95). His poem “The Dickens” is
everywhere on the Internet and stands as one of those instant classics
that will likely outlive us all, especially when you consider lines
like: “Outside tonight mosquitoes buzz like alarm clocks, sirens. / And
on the radio is Miles Davis blowing like the Dickens, / lulling me to
the island of my bed / where I will sleep like the Dickens.” Denton, a
Georgia professor, has that rare ability to be both erudite and
intelligible, making his work the perfect choice for both novices and
verse fiends. He writes down thoughts the rest of us spend our whole
lives trying to push away. If the title “Postcard to My Wife Who Thinks
of Leaving” doesn’t intrigue you, nothing will.
For the comic-book enthusiast/borderline alcoholic in your life,
pour ’em a stiff shot of graphic goodness with Drunk, a Comic
About Bar Stories (www.vegasdrunk.com, $25). This
limited-edition hardcover contains stories by 25 national alt-comics
artists, including Ivan Brunetti (Misery Loves Company), Kim
Deitch (The Stuff of Dreams) and Laurenn McCubbin (Rent
Girl). Whether chronicling the misadventures of a hand-puppet demon
that parasitically attaches itself to a tavern-dweller until the host
dies of starvation (thanks, F. Andrew Taylor) or profiling a distant
relative of Billy the Kid who once got so bored that he tattooed the
head of his penis (much obliged, Jim Pink), Drunk delivers tall
tales of watering holes and is never less than fun—or, in the
case of Noelle Garcia’s untitled alcoholic-dad ditty, totally
heartbreaking. Pick up this book if you want to understand the darkness
and light that comes from too much time bellying up. (Full disclosure:
I wrote the foreword. Don’t let that dissuade you.)
For the semi-literate metalhead in your midst, we gently ask you to
crank up the literary volume to “11” with the excellent Precious
Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal
Masterpieces (Da Capo, $18.95). Decibel magazine
editor-in-chief Albert Mudrian uncovers the hidden stories behind some
of the greatest death-metal, grind-core and doom releases of the last
three decades, and many of the selections—Slayer’s Reign in
Blood, Converge’s Jane Doe—are no-brainers, while
others are a little head-scratching, like, say, Kyuss’ Welcome to
Sky Valley. But once you read this fantastic series of interviews
with the artists responsible for all of this top-notch noise pollution,
you’ll know why even the snobbiest rock critics have no choice but to
throw up devil horns to these imaginative, if violent, works of sonic
art. If you’re a musician, though, learning that Ronnie James Dio only
took a few minutes to compose the lyrics to Black Sabbath’s “Heaven and
Hell” may depress you.
For the political junkie/historian in your posse, here’s a very
thought-provoking pamphlet that is almost guaranteed to piss off both
sides of the aisle: Laurence M. Vance’s Rethinking the
Good War (Vance, $5.95). A libertarian thinker and Baptist
theologian, Vance reconsiders the dark legacy of World War II. Although
the war resulted in Hitler’s defeat and Japan’s surrender, the Good War
kicked off a lot of bad things in the world, like the first nuclear
attacks on civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the vast build-up of
America’s military-industrial complex, and a body count that exceeded
50 million. What’s so good about all that? Vance, whose previous books
include Christianity and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare
State, condenses much of the information found in Pat Buchanan’s
Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, and Nicholson Baker’s
Human Smoke, but also provides his trademark analysis and pleas
for a more sane interpretation of the past.
Looking for a debut novel about a 14-year-old who lusts after his
mom? OK, don’t answer that. But do give serious consideration to
Thomas Nesbit’s exceedingly funny Deep Fried (www.smashwords.com, price
varies), in which Eddie Funderburke’s temptation is described as
not “some flippy-dippy hunger like a craving for Twizzlers. We
mean serious. Despite negotiations with his id and Jesus of
Nazareth, neither would take away the obsession.” Nesbit earned his
Ph.D. in religious studies at Boston University in 2005, transforming
his dissertation into his first book, Henry Miller and Religion.
Indeed, the author of Tropic of Cancer is a big influence on
Nesbit, as is Clyde Edgerton. In any case, Fried is a cool,
picaresque story of a showtunes-obsessed young man striving to escape
his North Carolina trailer for a cruise-ship singing gig. The best
part: Fried comes in several different e-book formats, and you
can name your price—even if all you can afford is free!
Finally, for the cookbook bandit in your clan, there’s the
beautifully illustrated Easy Japanese Cooking: Veggie
Haven (Vertical, $14.95), a Japanese take on the hippie
lifestyle. With vegetables as the focus, the 80-plus recipes include
seasoned tofu salad, spicy pickled cucumber, lotus root and tofu
burger, and veggie fried rice. There is also a section on soups and
pasta dishes. Culinary artist Kentaro Kobayashi, formerly a
carnivore, was blown away by a veggie curry and became a convert to all
things green and leafy. Give this to a meat-eater in your family, and
tell him to chew on it.
There you go: an indie book for every kind of literary soul.
Remember to visit Tucson’s (very few) local independent bookstores
while shopping!
This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2009.