Couch, by Benjamin Parzybok
by Phil Sandick
“So you boys are on a quest. That’s good, real good. You’ve got to have quests. The world has too few quests these days. We could all get off our asses and quest about some more.”
“So you boys are on a quest. That’s good, real good. You’ve got to have quests. The world has too few quests these days. We could all get off our asses and quest about some more.”
So you boys are on a quest. That’s good, real good. You’ve got to have quests. The world has too few quests these days. We could all get off our asses and quest about some more. — from Couch Benjamin Parzybok’s unique debut novel combines the mundane with the epic: in the process of moving an old orange couch across town, three young men embark upon a quest to save the world. Read Phil Sandick’s review of Couch here.
Lyrics 1964-2008 (Simon & Schuster, Nov. 2008), the first collection of every word to every song Paul Simon has written in the past forty-four years, reads like a collection of short-stories, something reminiscent of Grace Paley or Richard Ford.
Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection Knockemstiff begins with an epigraph from satirist Dawn Powell: “All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.” And yet, when it comes to Knockemstiff, Ohio—Pollock’s hometown and the purgatorial setting for these eighteen gritty stories—the fictional inhabitants rarely leave.
