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The Karaoke Singer's Guide to Self-Defense: Excerpt |
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Sunday, 18 September 2011 |
Tim Kinsella is a creative force. Starting in 1995 with his widely influential and short-lived band Cap’n Jazz, he forged the way for a whole new kind of post-punk, lighting the way for countless bands including many of his own: Joan of Arc, Owls, Make Believe and Friend/Enemy. Kinsella’s tireless creativity is poured into albums, soundtracks, films, and lyrics. His most recent record is the blistering Life Like (Polyvinyl), a stripped-down, road-tested album recorded by Steve Albini. Now he’s turned his hand and relentless energy to another creative endeavor: the novel.br>
Kinsella’s lyrics are abstract, sardonic, wise and twisted. Here his sensibility explodes in a 376-page cliche-obliterating wall of sound. Reverberating syntax builds into a gripping plot, pulling the reader forward even as it drags its characters down. The book was written during a break in Kinsella’s tireless touring schedule while he attended the writing program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago to hone his distinct prose style.
Excerpt:
"The Camera Behind the Mirror" - Monsters and Dust, Spring 2010
Tim's Blog:
http://timkinsella.wordpress.com/
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The Karaoke Singer’s Guide
to Self-Defense
By Tim Kinsella
For all this novel's depth of story, and that story's grip and wealthy undercurrents, Tim Kinsella's rushing, trippily meticulous prose is so exciting to follow that the story seems as much the novel's soundtrack and topography as it is the point. A thorough and wildly distinctive read. -Dennis Cooper, Author of The Marbled Swarm Reunited for a funeral and leery of one another, a family compares splintered memories. Will bathes his grandmother. Mel gives her wig a haircut. Norman is not prepared to take over his father’s club. Jesse has never known how old he is. They each cope with limited options and murky desires.
An irreducible collage, as intuitive as it is formal, The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense drifts between story lines and perspectives. Long bus rides through a post-industrial Gothic Midwest, Classic Rock, and compulsive brawls hum a requiem for the late night life of Stone Claw Grove. |
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