- Paperback: 216 pages
- Publisher: Bully Press (18 Dec 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0615171427
- ISBN-13: 978-0615171425
- Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm
The Love Book
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Five gritty, absurd and darkly comic tales. Five characters at a crossroads in their lives. While recovering in a New Jersey motel room, an obese female pro-wrestler is confronted by the demons of her past, as old memories she long ago wanted to bury keep surfacing. An Italian man who has a fetish for Asian women meets his match when he starts dating an Asian woman with a fetish for Italian men. A woman who loses her right arm in a car accident tries to return to normal life and subjects herself to the horrors of online dating. A man obsessed with time has recurring dreams that he is always late for odd events and struggles with his psychiatrist to figure out the source of his fixation. An epidemic of suicide hits a retirement community in Ohio and one couple begins to question the value of their final days together. These are very modern fables, with a great heart, a very biting sense of humor, and fully-fleshed out characters that you can sink your teeth into. Hear the audio version at www.kenwohlrob.com.
About the Author
Ken Wohlrob was the cofounder and editor of Bully Magazine from 1998-2003. THE LOVE BOOK is his first collection of short stories. It is also available as an audiobook podcast from Podiobooks, which you can listen to via iTunes or Podiobooks.com. He lives in Brooklyn, NY which is a hell of a lot better than where you live.
His writing has appeared in The New York Press, Go Metric, Friction Magazine, FreeWilliamsburg, Motel, and AlcoholReviews.com. He has also participated in the Perpetual Motion Roadshow and the Needle Exchange Hour reading series. In 2006, he became a co-founder--along with indie writers Tim Hall, Brian Cogan, and Mike Faloon--of the Blacksmiths For Literary Progress.
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3 reviews
A Fine Collection of Stories
30 Mar 2010
Format:Paperback
No surprise this book is about love. Wohlrob's characters, real and flawed, remind us that indeed there is someone out there for everyone. Yet, the true question is whether one will make the necessary sacrifices in the name of love. The final story in this collection, "Taking the Happy Bus On Home", is beautiful and reminiscent of Mishima's story "Patriotism".
The Love Book: Gritty with Unexpected Tenderness
12 Feb 2009
Format:Paperback
These stories of sex and death, attraction and repulsion, men and women, start out in a gritty mode, exposing the less pretty realities of some of life's unfortunates. One triumph of The Love Book is the tenderness Wohlrob reveals in the course of writing each relationship, a raw and recognizable humanity he brings to the surface in places the reader least expects: Compassion for just the characters with whom I was most uncomfortable crept over me in absorbing Wohlrob's deft and distilled prose. The stories in The Love Book are never veiled autobiography, but add up to an original vision all Wohlrob's own, one that has been piercingly and wisely lived, felt, and imagined.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Stories About Things, Funny And Memorable
14 Feb 2008
Format:Paperback
Disclaimer: Ken is a friend of mine, we go back a number of years and have collaborated on a lot of stories and ideas. He ran the great webzine Bully, where I was a frequent contributor. When Ken decided to shut down Bully, I wondered what he was going to do. "The Love Book" is part of the answer to that. Ken has transformed himself in the last several years from a Menckenesque curmudgeon, hilariously skewering all aspects of pop culture, to a serious short story writer with a truly original and refreshing vision. These are stories that actually dare to be about things--that is, they have characters who are invested, committed, or otherwise trapped in certain strange or absurd lives who are looking for freedom and release. It's the basis of all great fiction, imo.
Short fiction has been dominated by several trends over the past decades: Carveresque/Bukowskian castration (the dreaded "she done me wrong" school), Barthlemian cutesiness and faux-shock/schlock ("Yesterday I put a pipe bomb in mother's duvet"), or simply vapid, narcissistic navel-gazing posing as wisdom (once brilliantly skewered in a Writer's Digest article as the type of poetry that goes "I look out/the window/and I am/important"). There's also the general "wallpaper" genre, literary decorations of earnest people having mild epiphanies, or being groped by the paper boy, or digging their hands in the earth, etc.
Well, Ken Wohlrob is having none of that, thank you. His writing isn't an answer or antidote to anything, except for maybe bad and fashionable fiction that leaves you feeling a little sick and ripped off when you've finished reading it. If you're still not sure, go to Ken's site and listen to the audio book version first. Then come back and get a copy to throw at somebody you love.
Tim Hall, author of Half Empty
Short fiction has been dominated by several trends over the past decades: Carveresque/Bukowskian castration (the dreaded "she done me wrong" school), Barthlemian cutesiness and faux-shock/schlock ("Yesterday I put a pipe bomb in mother's duvet"), or simply vapid, narcissistic navel-gazing posing as wisdom (once brilliantly skewered in a Writer's Digest article as the type of poetry that goes "I look out/the window/and I am/important"). There's also the general "wallpaper" genre, literary decorations of earnest people having mild epiphanies, or being groped by the paper boy, or digging their hands in the earth, etc.
Well, Ken Wohlrob is having none of that, thank you. His writing isn't an answer or antidote to anything, except for maybe bad and fashionable fiction that leaves you feeling a little sick and ripped off when you've finished reading it. If you're still not sure, go to Ken's site and listen to the audio book version first. Then come back and get a copy to throw at somebody you love.
Tim Hall, author of Half Empty
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