This morning, a visibly frustrated Jonathan Safran Foer cooked himself some sausage and bacon for breakfast, vowing to the world that he would begin eating meat. “They’ve been making fun of me for the past few years for being young and successful,” said Foer, whose growling stomach was clearly not digesting the sudden carnivorous eating habits very well. “I want to show those bastards that I mean serious business.”
Foer’s wife, Nicole Krauss, revealed to reporters that she didn’t see this coming.
“I certainly didn’t expect him to turn to pork right before passover,” said Krauss, who was quite adamantly against eating meat. Krauss, however, did confess that Oprah had made the right move bringing baby-in-a-spit narratives to surburban audiences. Staffers from the Wall Street Journal plan to have Krauss take a polygraph test.
When a journalist remained unconvinced of Foer’s meat-eating habits, Foer grabbed an expensive-looking knife, proceeded to slice his wrist open and began supping of his own blood.
“You see! You can call me Jonny “Hard Core” Foer from now on, you little prick!”
The journalist then apologized. He worked for the New York Sun.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (