My other books are also available for the Kindle at $3.99 each:

The Hermit

Goliath

Open Stage

The Hookie-Pookie Man

Cameron Perice’s The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island is a delightful fairy-tale-type story about a young pickle, Gaston Glew, who lives on the Pickled Planet. It’s a place where sadness is pervasive, birthdays are known as Sad Days, and, we’re told, all pickles kill themselves sooner or later. Desperate to escape, Gaston builds a rocket ship and flies into space searching for happiness. He ends up on Pancake Island, which he learns is the happiest place in the universe. Gaston meets and falls in love with Fanny W. Fod, a pancake who, in her state of constant happiness, has been wondering what sadness must be like. And as you would expect, complications arise.

The story is imaginative. The characters and the world they live in are well-realized and engaging. And underneath everything, there lurk a few musings on the nature of happiness and sadness, the relationship between the two, and the role they play in our lives. But like any good writer, Pierce doesn’t get all up in the reader’s face with the meaningful stuff. It’s just there if you want it.

Get this one and settle down with it on a rainy Saturday afternoon.

What we have here is a character, Marv Pushkin, who’s trapped under his SUV in the Alaskan wilderness while a bear lunches on his feet. And that’s the bulk of the story–although we see definite deterioration in Pushkin’s mental and physical condition as the book progresses, there’s not much “plot development” as such. The point to the whole thing is a sort-of stream-of-consciousness narration that gives us a look at Pushkin’s life and his views on the world.

I was tempted to call the book a character study, but that doesn’t really work. We learn all we need to know about Pushkin in the first few pages, and the remainder is simply elaboration. This man is self-centered, egotistical, narcissistic, selfish… and, well, you need only to break out your thesaurus if you want a more detailed description. He measures a person’s worth solely by what they can do for him, and his own worth by the accumulation of money, power, and cool stuff. If he has any redeeming character traits, we don’t see them. He insists that this predicament is not his fault (although Hansen, of course, sets it up so that it’s clear to the reader that it is indeed Pushkin’s own fault). I’m reluctant to say Pushkin is getting what he deserves… but then again, he doesn’t inspire much sympathy.

Normally, my mind would recoil against such a one-dimensional portrayal of a major character. Yet Hansen pulls it off nicely because:
a) By way of his mental ramblings and musings, we get a pretty good overview of Puskin’s life.
b) All of us know, or have known, someone like Pushkin. Most of us have probably met any number of Pushkins. That is to say, regardless of whatever degree of exaggeration (if any) that makes the book funny, it’s built on a pretty good foundation of realism.
c) You can get away with just about anything if you make it funny enough, and this book is hilarious. It’s on the short list of the funniest books I’ve read. In the opening pages, even as Pushkin is trying to stress how dire is predicament is, he goes off on a tangent, bragging about how impressive his car is–and then begins musing on the possibility of a lawsuit against the manufacturer.

I’m going to recommend this as an entertaining read with a satirical edge that takes some shots at materialistic consumerism, corporate America, sexism, and, of course, a lot of shots at people who are total jerks.

C’mon, it’s a steal at twice the price!

The experience was sort of like a chance encounter with an old friend. You chitchat for a few minutes, catching up, and he tells you a few genuinely interesting things, things that maybe give you a different impression of who you thought he was, and then you both go on your way. Having read this book at different times since I discovered Brautigan in the early 70′s, it comes across as a different creature each time.

My first brush with Brautigan came when I was a high school kid on the lookout for weird stuff. I had managed to see some Stan Brackhage and Maya Deren films. I had Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte books. So when I ran across Richard Brautigan in a bookstore, he looked like the writer for me. At the time, I was impressed by the weirdness. It was an imaginative tour de force the likes of which I had not seen before. As much as it pains me to use the expression, I can only say that it “blew my mind.” Is it experimental? Avant-garde? Surrealistic? Dada-istic? Postmodern? Just plain weird? I don’t know. Although any of these labels might seem to fit to some extent, none of them fit comfortably. But when you’re dealing with something as highly original as this, who needs a label, anyway?

First, a comment on the writing. This is the first-written (but second-published) novel by a writer who had been establishing himself as a poet. And this is very much the work of a novelist who was thinking like a poet. In one anecdote, Brautigan talks about mowing an old woman’s lawn; a few weeks earlier, an itinerant looking for work had cut off three fingers using the lawnmower: “I was always careful with that lawnmower, knowing that the ghosts of three fingers were living it up in the grand spooky manner. They needed no company from my fingers. My fingers looked just great, right there on my hands.” At another point, we’re told that “The sun was like a huge fifty-cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and then had lit with a match and said, ‘Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper,’ and put the coin in my hand, but never came back.”

It’s good to find out that someone looks at the world in that way.

Trout Fishing in America has no linear story of any sort. It’s a collection of vignettes, variations on the theme of Trout Fishing in America. Through the course of the book, we see the phrase used not only as the title, but also as an activity, the name of an entity who’s sort-of a character (the narrator exchanges several letters with someone identified as Trout Fishing in America), a disguise worn by a murderer (yes, he dresses as trout fishing in America), and (of course) a theme or metaphor that runs throughout.

In one chapter, Brautigan recalls an incident in which he and some of his friends in the sixth grade were on the playground at recess one day, and they started writing “Trout Fishing in America” in chalk on the backs of the first graders, much to the chagrin of the school administration and parents. In another chapter, the narrator goes to the Cleveland Wrecking Yard to check out a trout stream they’re selling in sections. One chapter is titled “The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America.” And some of the chapters are simply reminiscences of camping in the great outdoors.

It’s easy to look at the book as a jumble of disjointed and meaningless ramblings set to the page by some heavily-drugged hippy type, but I think that if you spend the time it takes to read the book, you owe it to yourself to think about what you’ve just read. Brautigan is inviting us to take a look at how we relate to one another and to the world around us. For example, reading the Cleveland Wrecking Yard chapter leads one to the observation that there are plenty of businesses that would, were it possible, rip a trout stream out of its surroundings and sell sections of it from a warehouse. That we abuse our environment in various ways isn’t exactly an astounding or profound revelation, but it is a point that needs to be made over and over again. Here, we get it in a fairly imaginative and entertaining way.

Trout Fishing in America is a slim volume, easily readable in a single sitting if you have a Saturday afternoon to give it. But I would also say that after finishing the book, you would do well to go back and read it again sometime soon, while it’s still fresh in your mind.

Brutal Bible Tales is a fascinating book. It’s violent, confrontational, and might even be uncomfortable in places, depending on your sensibilities. Rage takes a selection prominent Biblical figures and and puts them in a contemporary world full of drug dealers, gangsters, pimps, prostitutes, perverts, and even vampires. But this is not just a facile, updated retelling of old stories, nor is it shock value simply for the sake of shock.

Rage uses the Biblical material as a starting point to tell his own stories. This book is well-thought-out, told in a distinctive and confident style that keeps the reader turning pages. If you want to complain that some of the sex and violence is gratuitous, I won’t–I can’t–argue the point. I’m not sure I’d want to say that “gratuitousness is the point” is ever a valid defense, but then again, I would insist that in a book like this it’s better to go too far than not to go far enough.

The book gives us a new context for looking at this source material (if I may call it such), like a cynical Sunday school teacher telling the kids, “This is what these stories are really about.” And maybe it is, if you can approach the book with no expectations and just let it be what it is–tales of greed, ambition, betrayal, cruelty–and ultimately, salvation. In other words, As I said earlier, this is not shock value simply for the sake of shock. But if it shocks you, maybe you needed to be shocked.

My upcoming book, Soft White Underbelly, follows the adventures of Thor and his friends Collier Figg, Chickenfeet, a large, stuffed panda and various other assorted characters. Prepare to be amazed in jaw-dropping astonishment as they…

Overthrow the government from the comfort of Thor’s home.
Go to a yard sale and find a weapon so powerful that it can’t be used.
Encounter a soul-stealing snack machine at the airport.
Take inventory of everything on the planet.
Circulate a petition for a Better America.
Embark on a plot to assassinate Satan.

…and more, much more! Soft White Underbelly is on track to be released on August 25, 2010. Mark it on your calendar.