Rating: 
Summary: Witty take on relationships in New York's East Village!
Review: The Losers' Club chronicles the life of Martin Sierra, a struggling writer and reluctant bachelor. In an attempt to shatter loneliness, Martin relies on newspaper personals. Even though he'd rather woo Nikki, his bisexual best friend and object of desire, the aforementioned relationship is impossible, for Nikki is in an on and off relationship rut with another woman. With New York City's East Village as the novel's backdrop, Martin gets in one misadventure after another as he attempts to find success, happiness and, more important, love.I agree with the critics that have said that The Losers' Club is a modern and better written version of Bright Lights, Big City. There's no particular plot development here, just a look into the life of a struggling artist and his search for his other half. I love the author's dark approach to romance and his descriptions of New York City's East Village are insightful and precise. Richard Perez is quite a promising up-and-coming author. His takes on relationships are above most of today's "Lad Lit." I recommend The Losers' Club. I have no doubt that it'll become a cult classic...
Rating:
Summary: Welcome to the Club!
Review: THE LOSERS' CLUB, winner of the Ludlow Press Breakout Fiction Award, is clearly a unique story, and a work that should be recognized. This first novel by Richard Perez is, in its own odd and obscure way, a romance novel that takes place in the East Village of New York in the 1990s.
Martin Sierra is a man without his woman, a struggling, unpublished writer who suffers from lack of stimulation in a dead-end job. His best friend, Nikki, is the woman of his dreams -- except that she is a bisexual and involved in a lesbian relationship. He and Nikki spend evenings together, visiting an array of deranged and eclectic clubs in New York. At times the two blend, melting into each other, becoming one. Though it feels right, Nikki backs off, realizing that because she has someone else in her life, what she and Martin are doing together is not right.
Tired of the more direct avenue of meeting someone and then going out on a date, Martin becomes dependent on, even addicted to, placing and responding to single ads in the paper. Once he starts getting calls and meeting the women who call him, his entire life is turned upside-down in a very short time. He begins to stay out late, hitting the different clubs with different women, and starts reporting to work late day after day at risk to his job.
Meeting a strange mix of intriguing women through the ads, the reader gets to learn more about Martin, his dreams, and his failures. But we also get to learn something about the women he meets. One, who lives at home with a mother who hates her, is an art student. Her canvasses depict unsettling images of intense violence, anger, and hatred. Though these two have a lot in common -- they both want to be artists, and they both have certifiable mothers -- she's coming off a breakup and Martin just might be her rebound guy.
Then Martin starts seeing an exotic woman who once let a vampire suck blood from her fingertip. A single mother and part-time schoolteacher, she enjoys hanging out and having sex with her students. Sure, they're old enough, nothing illegal, but she blatantly disregards the seriousness of minding a student-teacher relationship. Though this weirds Martin out, there really isn't anyone else answering his ad. Not to mention that they click. What hurts the relationship, oddly enough, is her attempts to probe his feelings. The truth she uncovers may be more than she cares to bare.
The novel is splashed with flashbacks. We get to see Martin's home life when he was a young boy, and learn that his depressed mother physically, and possibly sexually, abused her only child. Martin, abandoned by her and removed from her custody, is placed with his grandparents.
Hopelessly getting nowhere, things unravel quickly with women, work and relationships in this humorous, yes, but sad novel that attempts to take a look at the dating scene, at least as it occurred in New York in the mid 90's. Perez writes poetically in tightly-crafted chapters telling several stories: One about dating, one about belonging, about friends and about dreams. Saturated with bars and nightclubs, slamdancing and obscure characters, THE LOSERS' CLUB is not a loser book. It is a fast and easy read, but not something that will be soon forgotten.
© 2003 by Phillip Tomasso III for Curled Up With a Good Book
Rating:
Summary: very interesting Book&on time
Review: this Book is the type of read where you can relate to right off the bat.most books try to build up a world&drawn you into it way past the time when the book should have already peaked but this book stays on point all through out.the many ups&downs of life&Relationships.Richard Perez is a top notch writer to me.this is the kind of Book that truly hits home if you were dating&meeting&trying to make sense of things&Perspectives.
Rating: 
Summary: Underground View of the World
Review: This is an odd little book. It definitely has an underground feel to it. The story takes place in New York City pre-9/11 and follows the exploits of a unpublished writer as he attempts to hook up through the personal ads and find meaning in his life. It's strange to read this novel and recall how different things were even 10 years ago. Few people had cell phones, no e-mail, no online dating...just quaint little details that make this book seem from a very different world. Anyway, this is certainly a fun book, one that I enjoyed and laughed out loud reading. Part romantic comedy, part New York City travelogue, part bohemian tale, I recommend this book to those looking for something a little off the beaten path. The Losers' Club is certainly unique. If you're not afraid to try something different, check it out! I also recommend: Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, High Fidelity by Nick Hornsby
Rating:
Summary: Welcome All Lost Souls
Review: Welcome to "THE LOSERS CLUB." You may not want to be a
member, but it makes for entertaining reading. Written by Richard Perez, "THE LOSERS CLUB" is not
about events (as with "THE DA VINCI CODE" type titles).
This is a book about people - very odd, damaged,
eccentric people. It is the search of these "losers" to find a somebody
to validate their worth that makes this such an
excellent book. Pure and simple, the detail with which Perez creates
his club of eccentrics is what makes "THE LOSERS CLUB"
shine on the same scale as "MY FRACTURED LIFE" by Rikki
Lee Travolta.
Rating:
Summary: Young, intense, vivid
Review: What I especially liked about this promising first novel is the lack of phoniness and pretension that could easily afflict someone writing about the New York club scene, especially someone writing from such a youthful point of view. While Perez has an aware sense of the style and pretense of the scene, part retro, part hip, part nouveau chic, and part just plain lost, he takes everything at its face value and just "reports." This "reporting" style makes for vivid tableaux and lends psychological veracity to the life of his characters. His protagonist, Martin, one feels, employs the tabloid want ads for dates not because he is incapable of finding his own, but because he has a kind of inner wisdom that is directing him to try something he would not ordinarily try. One also realizes from the very beginning that Martin is not seeing his somewhat Platonic friend Nikki correctly with full vision, that he needs some sort of contrast or enlarged experience in order to fully appreciate her and their relationship. While at first blush (and well into the novel) it may seem that what Richard Perez really needs is a plot, it really isn't so. True, his plot is as tenuous and subtle as a weave of spider's silk, but it's there; and after one has finished reading, one realizes what has happened, and how what has happened is resolved. Nonetheless I think that some readers will miss the sense of rising tension and the clear resolution found in most novels, and will wonder if Perez's novel is not just a string of episodes vividly but meaninglessly told. Clearly he has a fine eye and ear and a vivid style as he writes about the New York City club scene in the nineties, and clearly he is the kind of young and expressive writer who might find a plot confining. And perhaps even more so, clearly he has been influenced by the style of the contemporary short story as found in literary magazines in which what happens is as faint as a glance from across the room. But sometimes a writer, especially a young one, will write what he or she wants and the plot will discover itself. I think that is what happened here. Consider this: In a sort of unconscious/but conscious bit of irony Perez (who really is a gifted writer, plot or no plot) has his narrator describe Andy Warhol's film Trash (1970) as a "loosely structured story centered" on a character who..."stumbles from one listless adventure to the next, hoping to somehow score." (p. 90) And then the narrator asks, "Could this describe Martin's own life?" Nice. And yes it could describe the life of Perez's protagonist, and therefore it could also describe the structure of Perez's novel and reveal that the author realizes the slightness of his plot. Interesting. Such inadvertent and semi-intentional revelations about the writer's consciousness are one of the things that make reading novels so satisfying. Martin does indeed wander from one day to the next seemingly without aim or purpose, feeling for what he wants and what he can get. In this sense the story is real because when we are very young we really do not know exactly what we want or where we are going or why. We are discovering the world and ourselves. We follow not only our inclinations and our hearts to see where they might lead, but we also stumble about. When I was 17 or18 I was like Martin in that I was swept along by events in my life, free from the restraints of school, home and family, in the big city, free to do what I wanted, to make my own life and mistakes, to find true love or not, to work at some job just to pay the rent and keep gas in the car. I met girls but didn't know whether I loved them or just desired them or something in-between. What Martin discovers is the nature of his feelings for one special girl. Nothing is consummated, and we are left to anticipate the future. What has happened (and this is the "resolution" of Perez's story) is, as the novel ends, Martin knows himself better, knows more closely what he wants out of life, and we can expect that he will probably go after it. In this sense Perez's novel falls into the category of a coming of age tale. Martin comes of age, subtly, almost imperceptively after many pages of aimless wandering. This is something we all do, and only later discover that there was a purpose to our behavior that we could discern only after some years had passed.
Rating:
Summary: The asi-asi Club
Review: When my friends and me sit down for a cup of coffee at the local coffeehouse, we like to discuss books. All of us have read THE LOSERS' CLUB and we all agree that it's a fun book. It's gives us an interesting glimpse of New York City through the eyes of a "loser" addicted to the personal ads as he seeks love. There are a few laughs here and there, but I could not personally relate to being so fixated on finding "love" -- so much that it was the only thing on my mind twenty-four hours a day. I don't think that's reality.....and if it is, then I'm glad I'm not one of those people. Amazon sells THE LOSERS' CLUB at a bargain if you purchase LITTLE NEW YORK BA$TARD by M. Dylan Raskin with it.....I HIGHLY suggest you buy the latter book, if not both. Although I don't believe these two books are even remotely similar, in style or literary value (I believe Raskin's book to be in a class of its own), I think you'll get something from each book, and the juxtaposition of the respective authors' opinion of New York City is beyond fascinating.
Rating:
Summary: We Can All Relate
Review: Who among us hasn't felt like a loser at some time? Who among us hasn't had our share of bad dates? Richard Perez writes with a manic energy reminiscent of Rikki Lee Travolta's My Fractured Life and Jay MacInerney's Bright Lights, Big City and beautifully captures the loser spirit in us all. The defeatist humor is superb. A book I recommend that only the perfect will not be able to relate too.
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