Headless

Rating:
Summary: Bedtime Stories for the Disturbed
Review: "Adolf Hitler was not known for his skiing ability."

So opens Headless by Benjamin Weissman and it sets the tone perfectly. In this short story collection about skiing, excrement, sex, and maiming, Weissman surprises you into laughing at horrible things again and again. These short short stories (the longest story is thirteen pages, and most are no more than two) read like Russell Edson if he wrote short stories. They are a study in dark comedy. They would fit in nicely with McSweeney's Online Concern.

(...)

Weissman's prose is dry and wry. By maintaining a matter of fact tone about killing your mother ("Bloodthirsty Man"), flooding the toilet with a too large bowel movement ("The Fecality of it All"),(...)Weissman turns dark non sequitors into compelling-and damn funny-fictions. And no matter how outrageous the claim ("At first I was horrified when they drew swastikas on their foreheads, but then I remembered that all of their markers are water-based and non-toxic so there would be no side effects." "My Two Sons"), the tone is always one of calm distance, confidence in the ordinariness of the situation.

I laughed out loud when I started reading the book in the bookstore (and there I was standing with a book that had a bunny with a "circus-style organ between [his] legs" on the cover calling attention to myself), and I laughed at home as I sped through the book in almost one sitting. If you were disappointed that you finished Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans and have nothing left to brighten your day, than mope no longer, because Headless is for you (and the serial killer inside you, or the twelve-year old, or Aunt Marney's parrot, which she still suspects you of eating.)

Rating:
Summary: The Headless Weissman
Review: Benjamin Weissman is a unique voice in fiction. His mix of humour, sexuality and neuroses has proved a winning formula for many authors, but I can't say I've read anything quite like him. His new book, 'Headless', part of novelist Dennis Cooper's Little House on the Bowery series, is a collection of thematically-related short stories, the themes here being (among others) sex, masculinity, skiing and scatology. As is to be expected when you have over 20 stories collected in one place, I found some of the stories to be forgettable, and some to be just average, but there are some real gems in here, too.

The book is divided into 4 sections: Bloodthirsty Man, Marnie, Tips From the Sensual Man, and Technically Dadless. My favourite section was Marnie, all the stories in it really worked for me, especially the one from which the collection takes its title. Some other notable stories are: 'Of Two Minds', not necessarily amazing for the plot, but I thought the idea of a schizophrenic narrator who writes one sentence in past tense, the next in present tense ("each sentence, a shadow of its former self...")to be pretty darn cool. Also, 'The Fecality of It All', about an overflooded toilet, and 'Pink Slip of Wood', a monologue in which a man is fired for a reason I can't mention if I want my review to appear on this website.

If you're looking for something smart and very different, and aren't the type to get offended by extremely graphic writing, this might be the book for you.

Rating:
Summary: Colossal Waste of Time
Review: I'm not sure how this book wound up on my Recommendations list, but OUCH. I took a chance on it due to the low price and glowing editorial reviews. I read the first few stories and was surprised by the lack of substance and intelligence, but I pressed on, assuming there had to be a few gems further on. No dice. Usually in a book as profane and perverted as this, there are at least a few stories worth reading for their erotic value, but this collection was devoid of even that.

I suppose it might appeal to folks who fancy themselves extreme nonconformists -- the stories certainly don't deliver on the the typical reader expectations of plot, character, or interest. I've certainly learned a lesson regarding the editorial reviews on this site -- caveat emptor, and don't believe everything you read.

Rating:
Summary: The Return of the King
Review: One of the best readings I've been to took place in early March of this year at the venerable old City lights bookstore here in San Francisco, when Benjamin Weissman, who had not visited us for many years, took over the house and made it his own. He read two stories from his new book HEADLESS, each of them completely different but complementing the other with what one had felt to be the missing piece out of American fiction. Reading his new collection HEADLESS is like breathing pure oxygen at the top of some snowcrested mountain of madness. Every page is embedded with a jewel that will make you crazy. Perhaps this is what happened, without him knowing anything about it, to the earliest Amazon reviewer of this book. Weissman's best stories are as beautiful as the long poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, but it's a Rilke with a Chris Rock kind of postmodern irony and culture blasting. Try reading the opening lines of HEADLESS, you will already have discovered the seedbed of a classic act of love.

Rating:
Summary: Running naked and wild outside of the box...
Review: This book is simply beautiful, ugly, and brilliant all rolled into one sublimely satisfying read that flat out gives new meaning to short story collections - "cult" or otherwise. This reading experience is what reading CAN be, but sadly so rarely is. Weissman's stories are definitely outside the box, sometimes FAR outside the box, but once you get there, they are some of the most beautifully constructed pieces of individual truth I've ever had the opportunity to read. Clearly not for the average, mainstream reader, or someone hoping for happy little Hollywood endings where the hero gets the girl, this collection of the bizarre and heartbreakingly beautiful has shot straight to the top of my list and I really don't see it being replaced anytime soon - if ever.

Rating:
Summary: Running naked and wild outside of the box...
Review: This book is simply beautiful, ugly, and brilliant all rolled into one sublimely satisfying read that flat out gives new meaning to short story collections - "cult" or otherwise. This reading experience is what reading CAN be, but sadly so rarely is. Weissman's stories are definitely outside the box, sometimes FAR outside the box, but once you get there, they are some of the most beautifully constructed pieces of individual truth I've ever had the opportunity to read. Clearly not for the average, mainstream reader, or someone hoping for happy little Hollywood endings where the hero gets the girl, this collection of the bizarre and heartbreakingly beautiful has shot straight to the top of my list and I really don't see it being replaced anytime soon - if ever.