Josh Kornbluth

I read this years ago when I worked at the publishing house that published this book. It was hilarious, so much so that I gave copies to several people that Christmas. It disappeared from my collection at some point, but recently I was reminded of it and bought another copy. Now that I am older, I notice more of a bittersweet quality to the pieces, but that doesn't change the fact that it is still hilarious. I literally laughed out loud many times when reading the first piece, in particular--Kornbluth's recollections about growing up with both of his unusual, and separated, parents in New York: his mother, who gave him a double espresso every morning, and his father, a larger-than-life Communist who spent a lot of time naked and knocking down walls. The second piece chronicles Kornbluth's "hitting the wall" in math at Princeton, and has a more contemplative quality. The third piece recounts his temping experiences.

Everything is transcribed from what were originally monologues, so the writing is correspondingly punctuated, and has a somewhat informal feel--but that worked very well for me as a reader; I had a good sense of how the monologue probably sounded.… (mais)