Super Mario Bros 3: Brick by Brick is a strange, strange bird, man.
If you don’t know anything about Bob Chipman’s small measure of internet celebrity status (as a vlogger responsible for creating MovieBob and The Game OverThinker), then SMB 3: Brick by Brick functions as nothing more than an account of one individual’s love affair with one of the most popular video games ever released.
A consistent thought that follows Bill DeYoung’s enthralling, painstakingly-researched book Skyway is that this is a story DeYoung has wanted to tell for quite some time. The book relates the history of Tampa Bay, Florida’s first Sunshine Skyway Bridge, focusing primarily on the terrible events of May 9th, 1980.
If the kids talking about college on Tumblr (whether they’re still immersed in the “experience”, or if they’re reflecting on their carefree days of a youth that occurred less than two years ago) are really interested in reading something worthwhile about the subject, they’re either going to love or be severely traumatized by Nathan Graziano’s novella.
It’s true that Michael J. Seidlinger’s new novel The Laughter of Strangers has something to do with boxing. However, to say that it’s a book about boxing is a lot like saying My Pet Serial Killer is a book about serial killers. Boxing is a big part of The Laughter of Strangers. Serial killers figure heavily into My Pet Serial Killer.
According to the back of Lindsey Thomas’ intensely funny (in the most beautifully depressing way possible) novella, Thomas hopes that Blind Date at the Glass Eye Disco will get her excommunicated from the Catholic Church. If anyone with sway in such matters does in fact get a hold of this unapologetic, deranged thrill ride, and if she hasn’t been already, she’ll probably get her wish.
All of us have images, memories, anxieties, and general topics of discussion, which we would just as soon not hear about in any form or fashion. When it comes to those things, whatever they might be, some of us want to avoid the temptation to even glance at them for the rest of our lives. Most of us are simply waiting for someone to make us deal with uncomfortable, troubling things. That’s because most of unconsciously want to.
For someone who doesn’t want to be identified as a poet, Ian McLeod certainly seems to be at home using poetry to express his varied powers of observation. In the introduction to his collection Bilge Pump of a Turgid Mind, McLeod seems uncomfortable to be compared to poets.
It’s taken us a little while to get there, but another chapter in Jhada Addam’s excellent Vengeance Cycle is certainly welcome to hit the scene whenever it wants to.
For whatever reason, popular literature is positively obsessed with the apocalypse, and has been for the past decade. On the pop end of the spectrum that results in works of entertaining fluff like The Walking Dead and on the more high-minded literary end we end up with a singular work of genius like Cormac McCarthy’s stark The Road. For the reader these stories allow a safe vicarious thrill, a game of “what-if”, in which we can place ourselves in danger and imagine that we’d react heroically.
Being a fan of Lance Henriksen, one of the most underrated actors of the past forty years, carries with it the same unfortunate reality that goes along with a number of other actors closely associated with horror movies. That reality being that they’re almost certainly going to die.