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Hot Pink
Adam Levin’s debut novel The Instructions was one of the most buzzed-about books of 2010, a sprawling universe of “death-defying sentences, manic wit, exciting provocations and simple human warmth” (Rolling Stone).
Now, in the stories of Hot Pink, Levin delivers ten smaller worlds, shaken snow-globes of overweight romantics, legless prodigies, quixotic dollmakers, Chicagoland thugs, dirty old men, protective fathers, balloon-laden dumptrucks, and walls that ooze gels. Told with lust and affection, karate and tenderness, slapstickery, ferocity, and heart, Hot Pink is the work of a major talent in his sharpest form.
*Hot Pink comes in three resplendent colors (pink, gray and blue).
Now, in the stories of Hot Pink, Levin delivers ten smaller worlds, shaken snow-globes of overweight romantics, legless prodigies, quixotic dollmakers, Chicagoland thugs, dirty old men, protective fathers, balloon-laden dumptrucks, and walls that ooze gels. Told with lust and affection, karate and tenderness, slapstickery, ferocity, and heart, Hot Pink is the work of a major talent in his sharpest form.
*Hot Pink comes in three resplendent colors (pink, gray and blue).
207 pages, Hardcover
First published February 7, 2012
75 people are currently reading
2258 people want to read
About the author
Adam Levin
19 books451 followersAdam Levin’s debut novel, The Instructions, was published in late 2010. His stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Esquire. Winner of the 2003 Tin House/Summer Literary Seminars Fiction Contest and the 2004 Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize, Levin holds an MA in Clinical Social Work from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. His collection of short stories, Hot Pink, was published by McSweeney’s in 2011. He lives in Chicago, where he teaches writing at Columbia College and The School of the Art Institute.
Authorial Influences and Inspirations: Adam Novy, George Saunders, Leslie Lockett, Stanley Elkin, Christian TeBordo, Rebecca Curtis, Jerzy Kosinski, David Foster Wallace, Salvador Plascencia, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, JD Salinger, and Katherine Dunn
Authorial Influences and Inspirations: Adam Novy, George Saunders, Leslie Lockett, Stanley Elkin, Christian TeBordo, Rebecca Curtis, Jerzy Kosinski, David Foster Wallace, Salvador Plascencia, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, JD Salinger, and Katherine Dunn
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 161 reviews
May 6, 2021
rating:
i didn't hem and haw over my star rating the way mfso did. this is an easy four stars. i loved reading it, but - nature of the beast - not every story was perfection. i lost no sleep over my rating.
review:
do you want the good news or the bad news?
the good news is, adam levin does not need 2000 pages to make his points.
the bad news is, in some of these stories, i feel like he was unconsciously punishing himself, foot-binding himself into smaller containers so that he didn't spill over into instructions scope. dear adam, didn't you mean to write about 400 additional pages to jane tell?? i feel like it must have just slipped your mind and maybe you can just pick up where you left off thanks.
again, mfso's review does a great job breaking the stories down into their salient points, while greg's does a great job stressing out over goodreads in general. distribute your votes accordingly, please.
but i have a few things of my own to say.
1) if mfso doesn't think frankenwittgenstein is totally a dfw story, he is either being disingenuous or deluded. because it totally is. and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that: anxiety of influence, schmanxiety of schminfluence. it is a good story in its own right, but there is no denying the tone, the perspective, the concerns, the turn are all delightfully reminiscent.
2) unreliable narrators. you think you know unreliable narrators because you've read some patrick mcgrath? you ain't seen nothing yet. what's great about the unreliable narrator in short story form is when the reader's penny drops. some of them are outed on the first or second page. some not until the closing lines. some are never outed, and it gives you that prickly, unfinished feeling, like you think "maybe that one was an U.R., too, but i just didn't get enough time to spend with them..." because in general, in life, everyone is unreliable in the end.
3) the thing that makes me think that maybe he was training himself to "write smaller" is the sheer unpredictability of these stories. they are like crazyballs - the trajectory seems to frequently boiiiiing to the unexpected. this is a complimentary observation, by the way. it is jarring because the stories are just these little short stories, and a turn like some of the ones here would feel more natural in a longer work, but here, compressed as they are, when you think they are headed in one direction and then suddenly - gotcha! now we are talking about this and the characters are doing this - keep up, fatso!
it is pretty cool, i think.
definitely worth reading, definitely not giving greg his copy back, and definitely want to see these other colors when they come in. a gray book called hot pink seems unfair.
but what would sarah montambo think?
come to my blog!
i didn't hem and haw over my star rating the way mfso did. this is an easy four stars. i loved reading it, but - nature of the beast - not every story was perfection. i lost no sleep over my rating.
review:
do you want the good news or the bad news?
the good news is, adam levin does not need 2000 pages to make his points.
the bad news is, in some of these stories, i feel like he was unconsciously punishing himself, foot-binding himself into smaller containers so that he didn't spill over into instructions scope. dear adam, didn't you mean to write about 400 additional pages to jane tell?? i feel like it must have just slipped your mind and maybe you can just pick up where you left off thanks.
again, mfso's review does a great job breaking the stories down into their salient points, while greg's does a great job stressing out over goodreads in general. distribute your votes accordingly, please.
but i have a few things of my own to say.
1) if mfso doesn't think frankenwittgenstein is totally a dfw story, he is either being disingenuous or deluded. because it totally is. and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that: anxiety of influence, schmanxiety of schminfluence. it is a good story in its own right, but there is no denying the tone, the perspective, the concerns, the turn are all delightfully reminiscent.
2) unreliable narrators. you think you know unreliable narrators because you've read some patrick mcgrath? you ain't seen nothing yet. what's great about the unreliable narrator in short story form is when the reader's penny drops. some of them are outed on the first or second page. some not until the closing lines. some are never outed, and it gives you that prickly, unfinished feeling, like you think "maybe that one was an U.R., too, but i just didn't get enough time to spend with them..." because in general, in life, everyone is unreliable in the end.
3) the thing that makes me think that maybe he was training himself to "write smaller" is the sheer unpredictability of these stories. they are like crazyballs - the trajectory seems to frequently boiiiiing to the unexpected. this is a complimentary observation, by the way. it is jarring because the stories are just these little short stories, and a turn like some of the ones here would feel more natural in a longer work, but here, compressed as they are, when you think they are headed in one direction and then suddenly - gotcha! now we are talking about this and the characters are doing this - keep up, fatso!
it is pretty cool, i think.
definitely worth reading, definitely not giving greg his copy back, and definitely want to see these other colors when they come in. a gray book called hot pink seems unfair.
but what would sarah montambo think?
come to my blog! 
March 8, 2012
No one probably noticed, but I've been on a bit of a review vacation lately. This is probably good news for the couple of people who have let me know in the last week that no one cares to read about (x) where x is whatever it is that I'm writing about that person y feels is not relevant or not sharing in their own opinion on a matter. Y's opinion of x hasn't been the reason G (that would be for Greg) hasn't been writing reviews, or sharing more x with the world. I've just been feeling overwhelmed, or busy or lazy or a combination of all of those things. I can point to Elizabeth's review of a book called something like The Thank You Economy and the discussion the review sparked (I'm so lazy I won't even go look up the proper name of the book, I suck). I got thinking once again on the whole topic of why do we write reviews, and I think this time the answer to myself was I have no idea. Maybe it was the tinges of commerce that seemed to kept coming up, that we are really just willing marketeers for the book world, unpaid workers so to speak trading our spare time above and beyond the money we've spent to purchase a book to now push it for other people and get more people to buy the book and maybe talk about it and get more people to buy it; uncompensated and in reality we are paying them (so to speak) to do this work for them, if we think that our time is worth anything.
For example, say I write a great review for this book that I thought was super. I bought the book at thirty percent off of 22 dollars, which is $15.40 plus tax. Then say I spent five hours reading it. I don't know what my time is worth, but say it's worth what the people at Barnes and Noble say it's worth (roughly, I'm not actually going to put my real wage here), and say that is $10 per hour. Now the book has cost $65.40 (plus the tax on the original purchase). Now it comes time to review the book, not taking into account anytime that I've spent thinking about what I'm going to say, while I'm doing other things like working, reading other books, walking to or from the subway, etc., I'll probably spend about forty-five minutes writing the review, so say an hour, but I doubt I really spend that long on any of these reviews. So now the book is costing me $75.40. What happens if there is any discussion on the review? The time it takes me to join in, answer, what about the mental anguish if some stupid motherfucker jumps on the thread to pick a fight? Is this going towards this hypothetical cost? I don't know, it's more time that I'm spending with the book, sort of, and it is keeping the book on the feeds and the words Hot Pink and Adam Levin are being seen and doing whatever it is that words on a screen do to memory, and you might even be seeing Hot Pink, Adam Levin, five stars over and over again, which you might remember and when you see the words Hot Pink and Adam Levin in a store you might think five stars and you might pick up the book and start looking through it, not because you remember anything I've said but because the words Hot Pink and Adam Levin have been linked to five stars, or maybe a confusion of stars because other people have also reviewed the book and some of them think that this is a too macho version of a wanna-be DFW and poo-pah the book in a way that makes them quite possibly wrong and having suspect opinions of books but still have put other number of stars to the words Hot Pink and Adam Levin.
I wouldn't even want to try to figure out the monetary value that my review of The Instructions cost.
If I thought of writing reviews in this way I'd never write another review again. Even if I was super-gung-ho about votes I'd think it was a fairly shitty trade to give a hundred dollars of my time and money to receive some strange validation on the screen.
But, what if I just wanted to write reviews to influence other people?
I thought Hot Pink by Adam Levin was a great book. I thought most of the stories were amazing and the few stories that weren't amazing were still pretty darned good. I thought that Adam Levin in Hot Pink shows that he has quite possibly the closest thing to the DFW voice out there. I wouldn't say he's ripping off DFW, but he's coming from the same neck of the woods and has incorporated some of the DFW's voice into his writing. This could be a bad thing, but it's not. This is a voice I enjoy and I would like to have more of it and the macho and jewey twist that Adam Levin throws into his writing gives it a definite feel of it's own (there are other differences, too, I like Adam Levin's writing quite a bit but I don't think he's nearly as smart as DFW, but I think he can do some of the stylized voices almost as well as DFW did). If I had one suggestion to give to McSweeney's and Adam Levin and a time machine I would have suggested they released this book before The Instructions, although it's ballsy as fuck to release a thousand page novel for a first time writer, this collection is a little more friendly and there are some of the elements of the novel here, you can kind of see him working out the way that Gurion's dad talks in the fathers in a couple of these stories. Gurion's miscreant friends and classmates could be populating some of these stories in slightly different forms. Plus this book is just a tad over two hundred pages, and it's not difficult to carry around. Although, would I have read Hot Pink by Adam Levin if I saw it at work and it wasn't the follow up to the amazing The Instructions? Doubtful? Maybe. Maybe Oriana would have still raved about it and I would have read that pre-release rave and filed Hot Pink, Adam Levin, five-stars, awesome, in my head and picked up the book when it arrived in the store. Who knows. I do know that I read raves from Oriana for The Instructions by Adam Levin, which compared it favorably to Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and months before it was released I already couldn't wait to get this massive fucking book in my hands, and I ended up buying it the day it arrived in the store because I wanted to be that type of person who bought the book as soon as humanely possible.
Do I want to write reviews to influence other people? Do I want you to go buy Hot Pink by Adam Levin? No. I don't want you to. I hate recommending books to people. I hate it when people read a book I've recommended and then don't like it and I have to hear about it and then feel like I have to defend the book or make apologies for why the person didn't like the book that I liked. Yes, it feels good when someone picks up a book because I said it was good and they think it was good, too. That is something good, but that good is small compared to the annoyance I feel when someone reads something I recommend and then comes back at me with their complaints, usually as if I were in some way responsible for the book and it being perceived as suck by the other person, when in fact the book is anything but suck and people the only think that is suck is the other person, although it is wrong to tell someone they are suck when their opinion differs from you, although isn't that what the other person is saying when they try to hold you responsible for their feelings of suck at a book which certainly isn't suck? It's a whole dynamic of suck and not-suck that I'd rather not live with, so I try not to recommend books, and even go out of my way to say don't read this book for five star books because of the strong possibility that others will mistakenly perceive suck where there is in fact a total absence of suck and I might be called upon to assure them that they are in fact not-suck but rather there must have been some suck in a book with an absence of suck. In the Old Testament nations were destroyed for less, so I hope not to influence anyone.
Although it's possible that the words Hot Pink, Adam Levin and five stars might get mixed up in ones head.
i might have broken my 'Lent' giving up of for this year in this review, but in case anyone was wondering this year for Lent (the scare quotes are because I'm not actually a Catholic in anything more than formality, I had some water dipped on my head, I ate the body of JC, drank some wine and then got yanked out of Sunday School never to go back to the church again except for a handful of holidays, weddings and funerals, but I guess I'm more Catholic than anything else (if you don't count atheist heathen as something), so I can give something up for Lent, but I think it must be done in quotes), I gave up being a dick to other people in my reviews. I've done well so far, yeah I haven't written a single review since Lent started but I haven't been a dick to anyone in the body of my reviews, so yay me! I was a dick to a Christian who trolled a review of mine, but he would think I'm going to be assfucked for all eternity by the devil for first being a Catholic (even if a non-practicing one, they like to call the Catholic Church, 'the whore of babylon' (hey, Catholic Republicans, what do you think about your last president thinking that your religion was 'The Whore of Babylon'? I would bet a million billion dollars that the term went through his mind at least once when he thought of the Catholic Church and maybe even when the new Pope was coming to visit, it's one of those things the Evangelical types can't avoid thinking)) and secondly for being an non-believer. But in the body of my reviews (of which none have been written in this time, but it still means I'm following my Lent giving up-ness), I haven't been a dick to anyone. Yay, me! But, but but what about that discussion of suck in the previous paragraph? That was written with no-one in particular in mind, if you think it is about you, it's not. Seriously. I'm in Not-being a dick for Lent mode so it's categorically impossible that I meant you. I'm just talking in general, like make believe. If you still don't believe me I don't know what to tell you, I didn't mean you and stop being so suck.
On one other 'Lent' note. Last year I stopped shaving for Lent. Some could call that lazy, I thought it was kind of Biblical. This year I haven't shaved during Lent either, but that's because I've been lazy and there is nothing Biblical doing.
Hot Pink
Adam Levin
Five Stars
So why do I write reviews?
I don't know. Maybe my endless rambling is a way to subvert the commodity aspect of writing reviews to either influence the sale of more books, or more insidiously try to halt the sale of more books so that an author possibly will be unable to pay their bills, feed their family and will feel like a total failure, all because someone said something mean about their book and other people listened and told their friends and no one went to the bookstore or amazon.com or wherever one would buy the book and bought something else instead, like say Hot Pink by Adam Levin, five stars. What if that is what you were going when you write a bad review? How could one live with themselves? The pressure!
I don't know if I can even say that I write these reviews because I want to be heard in some way, that I just want to make a connection with other people. Wouldn't I be lying if I said that since I don't edit these things, thus making them fairly difficult sometimes to make sense of, and then I do constant stupid shit like nesting parentheses which I'm not even sure come across correctly because I usually lose track of how many parentheses are going on at a time. There would be easier ways to communicate, to make connections (sad as they may be since they are through this medium of ones, zeros, fiber optic cables, signals through the air, circuitry and other physical and non-physical mediums, when shouldn't it be easy to just talk to someone in real with mouths that make sounds that hit the apparatus of the ear to pass words between two people in close proximity?), wouldn't there be?
I don't know why I write reviews, or why I wrote this one.
But, Hot Pink, Adam Levin. Five Stars.
For example, say I write a great review for this book that I thought was super. I bought the book at thirty percent off of 22 dollars, which is $15.40 plus tax. Then say I spent five hours reading it. I don't know what my time is worth, but say it's worth what the people at Barnes and Noble say it's worth (roughly, I'm not actually going to put my real wage here), and say that is $10 per hour. Now the book has cost $65.40 (plus the tax on the original purchase). Now it comes time to review the book, not taking into account anytime that I've spent thinking about what I'm going to say, while I'm doing other things like working, reading other books, walking to or from the subway, etc., I'll probably spend about forty-five minutes writing the review, so say an hour, but I doubt I really spend that long on any of these reviews. So now the book is costing me $75.40. What happens if there is any discussion on the review? The time it takes me to join in, answer, what about the mental anguish if some stupid motherfucker jumps on the thread to pick a fight? Is this going towards this hypothetical cost? I don't know, it's more time that I'm spending with the book, sort of, and it is keeping the book on the feeds and the words Hot Pink and Adam Levin are being seen and doing whatever it is that words on a screen do to memory, and you might even be seeing Hot Pink, Adam Levin, five stars over and over again, which you might remember and when you see the words Hot Pink and Adam Levin in a store you might think five stars and you might pick up the book and start looking through it, not because you remember anything I've said but because the words Hot Pink and Adam Levin have been linked to five stars, or maybe a confusion of stars because other people have also reviewed the book and some of them think that this is a too macho version of a wanna-be DFW and poo-pah the book in a way that makes them quite possibly wrong and having suspect opinions of books but still have put other number of stars to the words Hot Pink and Adam Levin.
I wouldn't even want to try to figure out the monetary value that my review of The Instructions cost.
If I thought of writing reviews in this way I'd never write another review again. Even if I was super-gung-ho about votes I'd think it was a fairly shitty trade to give a hundred dollars of my time and money to receive some strange validation on the screen.
But, what if I just wanted to write reviews to influence other people?
I thought Hot Pink by Adam Levin was a great book. I thought most of the stories were amazing and the few stories that weren't amazing were still pretty darned good. I thought that Adam Levin in Hot Pink shows that he has quite possibly the closest thing to the DFW voice out there. I wouldn't say he's ripping off DFW, but he's coming from the same neck of the woods and has incorporated some of the DFW's voice into his writing. This could be a bad thing, but it's not. This is a voice I enjoy and I would like to have more of it and the macho and jewey twist that Adam Levin throws into his writing gives it a definite feel of it's own (there are other differences, too, I like Adam Levin's writing quite a bit but I don't think he's nearly as smart as DFW, but I think he can do some of the stylized voices almost as well as DFW did). If I had one suggestion to give to McSweeney's and Adam Levin and a time machine I would have suggested they released this book before The Instructions, although it's ballsy as fuck to release a thousand page novel for a first time writer, this collection is a little more friendly and there are some of the elements of the novel here, you can kind of see him working out the way that Gurion's dad talks in the fathers in a couple of these stories. Gurion's miscreant friends and classmates could be populating some of these stories in slightly different forms. Plus this book is just a tad over two hundred pages, and it's not difficult to carry around. Although, would I have read Hot Pink by Adam Levin if I saw it at work and it wasn't the follow up to the amazing The Instructions? Doubtful? Maybe. Maybe Oriana would have still raved about it and I would have read that pre-release rave and filed Hot Pink, Adam Levin, five-stars, awesome, in my head and picked up the book when it arrived in the store. Who knows. I do know that I read raves from Oriana for The Instructions by Adam Levin, which compared it favorably to Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and months before it was released I already couldn't wait to get this massive fucking book in my hands, and I ended up buying it the day it arrived in the store because I wanted to be that type of person who bought the book as soon as humanely possible.
Do I want to write reviews to influence other people? Do I want you to go buy Hot Pink by Adam Levin? No. I don't want you to. I hate recommending books to people. I hate it when people read a book I've recommended and then don't like it and I have to hear about it and then feel like I have to defend the book or make apologies for why the person didn't like the book that I liked. Yes, it feels good when someone picks up a book because I said it was good and they think it was good, too. That is something good, but that good is small compared to the annoyance I feel when someone reads something I recommend and then comes back at me with their complaints, usually as if I were in some way responsible for the book and it being perceived as suck by the other person, when in fact the book is anything but suck and people the only think that is suck is the other person, although it is wrong to tell someone they are suck when their opinion differs from you, although isn't that what the other person is saying when they try to hold you responsible for their feelings of suck at a book which certainly isn't suck? It's a whole dynamic of suck and not-suck that I'd rather not live with, so I try not to recommend books, and even go out of my way to say don't read this book for five star books because of the strong possibility that others will mistakenly perceive suck where there is in fact a total absence of suck and I might be called upon to assure them that they are in fact not-suck but rather there must have been some suck in a book with an absence of suck. In the Old Testament nations were destroyed for less, so I hope not to influence anyone.
Although it's possible that the words Hot Pink, Adam Levin and five stars might get mixed up in ones head.
i might have broken my 'Lent' giving up of for this year in this review, but in case anyone was wondering this year for Lent (the scare quotes are because I'm not actually a Catholic in anything more than formality, I had some water dipped on my head, I ate the body of JC, drank some wine and then got yanked out of Sunday School never to go back to the church again except for a handful of holidays, weddings and funerals, but I guess I'm more Catholic than anything else (if you don't count atheist heathen as something), so I can give something up for Lent, but I think it must be done in quotes), I gave up being a dick to other people in my reviews. I've done well so far, yeah I haven't written a single review since Lent started but I haven't been a dick to anyone in the body of my reviews, so yay me! I was a dick to a Christian who trolled a review of mine, but he would think I'm going to be assfucked for all eternity by the devil for first being a Catholic (even if a non-practicing one, they like to call the Catholic Church, 'the whore of babylon' (hey, Catholic Republicans, what do you think about your last president thinking that your religion was 'The Whore of Babylon'? I would bet a million billion dollars that the term went through his mind at least once when he thought of the Catholic Church and maybe even when the new Pope was coming to visit, it's one of those things the Evangelical types can't avoid thinking)) and secondly for being an non-believer. But in the body of my reviews (of which none have been written in this time, but it still means I'm following my Lent giving up-ness), I haven't been a dick to anyone. Yay, me! But, but but what about that discussion of suck in the previous paragraph? That was written with no-one in particular in mind, if you think it is about you, it's not. Seriously. I'm in Not-being a dick for Lent mode so it's categorically impossible that I meant you. I'm just talking in general, like make believe. If you still don't believe me I don't know what to tell you, I didn't mean you and stop being so suck.
On one other 'Lent' note. Last year I stopped shaving for Lent. Some could call that lazy, I thought it was kind of Biblical. This year I haven't shaved during Lent either, but that's because I've been lazy and there is nothing Biblical doing.
Hot Pink
Adam Levin
Five Stars
So why do I write reviews?
I don't know. Maybe my endless rambling is a way to subvert the commodity aspect of writing reviews to either influence the sale of more books, or more insidiously try to halt the sale of more books so that an author possibly will be unable to pay their bills, feed their family and will feel like a total failure, all because someone said something mean about their book and other people listened and told their friends and no one went to the bookstore or amazon.com or wherever one would buy the book and bought something else instead, like say Hot Pink by Adam Levin, five stars. What if that is what you were going when you write a bad review? How could one live with themselves? The pressure!
I don't know if I can even say that I write these reviews because I want to be heard in some way, that I just want to make a connection with other people. Wouldn't I be lying if I said that since I don't edit these things, thus making them fairly difficult sometimes to make sense of, and then I do constant stupid shit like nesting parentheses which I'm not even sure come across correctly because I usually lose track of how many parentheses are going on at a time. There would be easier ways to communicate, to make connections (sad as they may be since they are through this medium of ones, zeros, fiber optic cables, signals through the air, circuitry and other physical and non-physical mediums, when shouldn't it be easy to just talk to someone in real with mouths that make sounds that hit the apparatus of the ear to pass words between two people in close proximity?), wouldn't there be?
I don't know why I write reviews, or why I wrote this one.
But, Hot Pink, Adam Levin. Five Stars.
March 9, 2012
I hate using stars. I wish I'd never started. I didn't realize you could add books without adding stars until long after having joined Goodreads. It's too late to stop and revise hundreds of ratings. In too deep to turn back now. I think everyone is aware of how problematic and nerve-wracking and inaccurate the stars can be, so I'm going to avoid a boring and prolonged explanation, which has already been given by others many times over on this site. I'll just say that there was a near-constant battle between 4 and 5 stars that raged in my head while reading this. I more or less just did a random coin toss to settle and said "Fuck it."
I get much more of a George Saunders vibe from Levin than a DFW vibe, and perhaps this is because I discovered that Saunders was Levin's mentor at Syracuse. Either way, I'm choosing to foresake all basically useless and ultimately dull hemming and hawing and over-analysing that could take place and am just accepting my judgment (at least at present and on the review screen). Also, I think comparing Saunders to DFW is pretty inaccurate as well. In fact, I don't really agree with any comparisons to DFW that I can think of. I think people that are influenced by him that are worth anything (Levin being one) are going to be self-conscious enough to avoid directly aping him in any overtly detectable way. That being said, Levin has occasional verbose eruptions of the humorous hyper-analysis of banality that characterize DFW's writing as well, but mainly I think he gets the comparison because he wrote a thick and apparently equal parts fun and smart book, i.e., The Instructions (which I shamefully still haven't read, though it's sat on my shelves since the day it was published). I really hate author comparisons sometimes, even though I'm guilty of them myself. Waah waah waaah.
I really like Adam Levin. I occasionally felt like these stories lacked a certain ineffable emotional something, but with the exception of what also happened to be the three very shortest ones ("The Extra Mile," "Relating" and "How To Play The Guy") they all were ultimately a joy to read. I think he's much better at sticking to more straightforward narrative arcs and skewing them with strangeness around the edges than doing these sort of Experimental™ bits, a category which the three aforementioned, relatively lackluster stories fall under.
"Frankenwittgenstein"
Strong opening story. Familial drama about a father trying to invent a Barbie doll that digests and excretes food and is envisioned to help girls avoid developing eating disorders. Things go awry.
[The town in the family lives in―Waukegan―is where my weird little liberal arts college was for 3 out of my 4 years there before it relocated to Chicago. I don't really know why I get a thrill out of seeing these places mentioned in books, but I do. The same phenomenon took place with The Pale King, as I've mentioned in the past. The other town mentioned―Grayslake―is where the community college I went to for a year and a half is located. It was also the main town I drove an ice cream truck around for a summer when I was 18. Good times. I have no pride in either of those towns, but I do have experience with them, so I get a dumb little charge to see them mentioned in a good book.]
"Considering the Bittersweet End of Susan Falls"
A legless and preternaturally brilliant Susan fixates on getting into her classmate Carla's snowpants, dreams about flying, sorta kinda puzzles over how she lost her legs.
Abstract, logic-centric theories about the Biblical God and Adam bargaining and engaging in cost benefit analysis. Faux-opium. A new take on fried eggs that will possibly change the culinary world.
"The Extra Mile"
A very short one in which some retired-to-Florida, Jewish-stereotypes-incarnate play cards in a pool and engage in an absurdist "Who's On First?"/Waiting For Godot routine about cunnilingus―and more?
"Finch"
This was where I first laughed out loud. The others all had humorous elements for sure, but not LULZ per se. The first really notable shift in tone is here as well. The narratorial voice slouches down pretty perfectly (accurately and fabricatedly) into place with the POV of an awkward, naïve, calorie-counting, self-loathing high school kid. The scenes with him and his parents around the dinner table cracked me the fuck up. His father's constant, ridiculous "Because we're Democrats!" stuff, well, just needs to be read to be chuckled at.
Some of it reminded me of the kinds of kids in childhood who couldn't help but spin the most ridiculous yarns as fact. I remember rarely calling them out on their lies because they were so entertaining. Something kind of sad about that level of obvious deceit being carried on at length, digging deeper and deeper into ridiculous webs of lies. The story captures this phenomenon pretty well in the character of Franco.
Grilled cheese sandwiches. Verbal fisticuffs. Fist fisticuffs. Kill-trained dog. Huffing: "It's not really drugs. It's an inhalant." A ghost? Some racial stuff. A sprinkling of political satire. A hitman. A pilot. Chicago.
"Relating"
A brief series of distinct flash fictions, somewhat uneven in quality, which―as a group―made me think of this pithy summation:
"The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all." ―Kurt Gödel
"Jane Tell"
A great story for anyone who's ever found themselves magnetically pulled, against all better instincts, towards batshit insane partners in romance and disfunction. The kind that might say something in all earnesty and out of nowhere (after meeting you mere minutes ago) like "I want you to pick me up by the ankles and swing me face-first into the side of that dumpster." Funny, yes. Absurdly funny. But I also felt like some girls I've dated have probably said or done something on the same get-your-head-checked level as this, and so it brought up some fairly rough feelings about my unfortunate inability to avoid being attracted to damaged, chaotic, disfunctional ladyfriends. It also simultaneously validated those feelings, and made them something to temporarily laugh at, etc. Relevant callback to "The Extra Mile":
Denny's. Manipulative crying. Cruelty. Drug swapping. Drug using. Drug busting. Anger management. Therapist bashing. B.F. Skinner's Behaviorism. Driving. Denny's again. Fighting. Fucking. Panic attacks. Parenting. Childhooding. Masochism. Sadism. Love. "Love." Blood. Blindness. Mercy? Further Chicagoland references: Highland Park and Deerfield.
I think I would've liked to see this story stretched into the length of a novel or at least novella. Favorite of the bunch. Most emotionally poignant. Loved the interactions with the anger management group, the philosophical substrates, the humor, the darkness―all of it.
[Addendum: I noticed a reference to a character (Dr. Linus Manx) from one of the more humorous flash fiction pieces of "Relating" called The End of Friendships. Made me wonder if there were/would be other interconnected details between the stories...]
"RSVP"
Brutal and heart-rending opening salvo. Veered into something a little less visceral and more goofy, but still stuck with the 'people can't connect for shit' theme to great effect.
The world's greatest love letter. Tragic missed connections. Origami. An unorthodox masturbation technique. Inventing a religion.
"Scientific American"
A married couple deals with a mysterious and irrepressible crack in their bedroom wall that leaks a likewise mysterious/irrepressible gel. Pregnacy. Paranoia. Depression? Pet dog. Coma.
A gripping and breathless soliloquy is unleashed when the man talks very earnestly to his dog while driving. It's rather beautiful.
"How To Play The Guy"
Well, I'm pretty surethis story the first three pages is among the funniest instruction manuals I've ever read. The tone somewhat reminded me of certain moments of the pre-Flame Alphabet Ben Marcus I've read, except it seemed to go nowhere fast. I really don't see the point of this one at all. The schtick held my attention and exuded promise for the first three pages and then became blunted and repetitive. Worst of the relatively lackluster three. Should be excised. The first three pages could be fine as an idiosyncratic intermission between two standout stories, but the remaining few pages seem pretty warrantless.
"Hot Pink"
Titular. Cover image source. Redeems the relative slump that was the story right before it. Strong finish. Circle of Life.
Hot Pink by Adam Levin, In Self-Referential Summation Via Its Own Story "Scientific American" ― Page One-Hundred Sixty-Six
I get much more of a George Saunders vibe from Levin than a DFW vibe, and perhaps this is because I discovered that Saunders was Levin's mentor at Syracuse. Either way, I'm choosing to foresake all basically useless and ultimately dull hemming and hawing and over-analysing that could take place and am just accepting my judgment (at least at present and on the review screen). Also, I think comparing Saunders to DFW is pretty inaccurate as well. In fact, I don't really agree with any comparisons to DFW that I can think of. I think people that are influenced by him that are worth anything (Levin being one) are going to be self-conscious enough to avoid directly aping him in any overtly detectable way. That being said, Levin has occasional verbose eruptions of the humorous hyper-analysis of banality that characterize DFW's writing as well, but mainly I think he gets the comparison because he wrote a thick and apparently equal parts fun and smart book, i.e., The Instructions (which I shamefully still haven't read, though it's sat on my shelves since the day it was published). I really hate author comparisons sometimes, even though I'm guilty of them myself. Waah waah waaah.
I really like Adam Levin. I occasionally felt like these stories lacked a certain ineffable emotional something, but with the exception of what also happened to be the three very shortest ones ("The Extra Mile," "Relating" and "How To Play The Guy") they all were ultimately a joy to read. I think he's much better at sticking to more straightforward narrative arcs and skewing them with strangeness around the edges than doing these sort of Experimental™ bits, a category which the three aforementioned, relatively lackluster stories fall under.
"Frankenwittgenstein"
Strong opening story. Familial drama about a father trying to invent a Barbie doll that digests and excretes food and is envisioned to help girls avoid developing eating disorders. Things go awry.
[The town in the family lives in―Waukegan―is where my weird little liberal arts college was for 3 out of my 4 years there before it relocated to Chicago. I don't really know why I get a thrill out of seeing these places mentioned in books, but I do. The same phenomenon took place with The Pale King, as I've mentioned in the past. The other town mentioned―Grayslake―is where the community college I went to for a year and a half is located. It was also the main town I drove an ice cream truck around for a summer when I was 18. Good times. I have no pride in either of those towns, but I do have experience with them, so I get a dumb little charge to see them mentioned in a good book.]
"Considering the Bittersweet End of Susan Falls"
A legless and preternaturally brilliant Susan fixates on getting into her classmate Carla's snowpants, dreams about flying, sorta kinda puzzles over how she lost her legs.
Abstract, logic-centric theories about the Biblical God and Adam bargaining and engaging in cost benefit analysis. Faux-opium. A new take on fried eggs that will possibly change the culinary world.
"The Extra Mile"
A very short one in which some retired-to-Florida, Jewish-stereotypes-incarnate play cards in a pool and engage in an absurdist "Who's On First?"/Waiting For Godot routine about cunnilingus―and more?
"Finch"
This was where I first laughed out loud. The others all had humorous elements for sure, but not LULZ per se. The first really notable shift in tone is here as well. The narratorial voice slouches down pretty perfectly (accurately and fabricatedly) into place with the POV of an awkward, naïve, calorie-counting, self-loathing high school kid. The scenes with him and his parents around the dinner table cracked me the fuck up. His father's constant, ridiculous "Because we're Democrats!" stuff, well, just needs to be read to be chuckled at.
Some of it reminded me of the kinds of kids in childhood who couldn't help but spin the most ridiculous yarns as fact. I remember rarely calling them out on their lies because they were so entertaining. Something kind of sad about that level of obvious deceit being carried on at length, digging deeper and deeper into ridiculous webs of lies. The story captures this phenomenon pretty well in the character of Franco.
Grilled cheese sandwiches. Verbal fisticuffs. Fist fisticuffs. Kill-trained dog. Huffing: "It's not really drugs. It's an inhalant." A ghost? Some racial stuff. A sprinkling of political satire. A hitman. A pilot. Chicago.
"Relating"
A brief series of distinct flash fictions, somewhat uneven in quality, which―as a group―made me think of this pithy summation:
"The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all." ―Kurt Gödel
"Jane Tell"
A great story for anyone who's ever found themselves magnetically pulled, against all better instincts, towards batshit insane partners in romance and disfunction. The kind that might say something in all earnesty and out of nowhere (after meeting you mere minutes ago) like "I want you to pick me up by the ankles and swing me face-first into the side of that dumpster." Funny, yes. Absurdly funny. But I also felt like some girls I've dated have probably said or done something on the same get-your-head-checked level as this, and so it brought up some fairly rough feelings about my unfortunate inability to avoid being attracted to damaged, chaotic, disfunctional ladyfriends. It also simultaneously validated those feelings, and made them something to temporarily laugh at, etc. Relevant callback to "The Extra Mile":
"[Y]ou either laugh a lot and feel a little bad, or laugh a little and feel a lot bad."
Denny's. Manipulative crying. Cruelty. Drug swapping. Drug using. Drug busting. Anger management. Therapist bashing. B.F. Skinner's Behaviorism. Driving. Denny's again. Fighting. Fucking. Panic attacks. Parenting. Childhooding. Masochism. Sadism. Love. "Love." Blood. Blindness. Mercy? Further Chicagoland references: Highland Park and Deerfield.
I think I would've liked to see this story stretched into the length of a novel or at least novella. Favorite of the bunch. Most emotionally poignant. Loved the interactions with the anger management group, the philosophical substrates, the humor, the darkness―all of it.
[Addendum: I noticed a reference to a character (Dr. Linus Manx) from one of the more humorous flash fiction pieces of "Relating" called The End of Friendships. Made me wonder if there were/would be other interconnected details between the stories...]
"RSVP"
Brutal and heart-rending opening salvo. Veered into something a little less visceral and more goofy, but still stuck with the 'people can't connect for shit' theme to great effect.
The world's greatest love letter. Tragic missed connections. Origami. An unorthodox masturbation technique. Inventing a religion.
"Scientific American"
A married couple deals with a mysterious and irrepressible crack in their bedroom wall that leaks a likewise mysterious/irrepressible gel. Pregnacy. Paranoia. Depression? Pet dog. Coma.
A gripping and breathless soliloquy is unleashed when the man talks very earnestly to his dog while driving. It's rather beautiful.
"How To Play The Guy"
Well, I'm pretty sure
"Hot Pink"
Titular. Cover image source. Redeems the relative slump that was the story right before it. Strong finish. Circle of Life.
Hot Pink by Adam Levin, In Self-Referential Summation Via Its Own Story "Scientific American" ― Page One-Hundred Sixty-Six
"What are you doing?" she said.
"I'm burying this mess."
"Why?" she said.
"It seems like the right thing to do," he said.
"I think it's strange."
"I know," he said. "But I don't mind."
January 5, 2012
Even though this is coming out in 2012, it still made my CCLaP best-of-2011 list, because I am awesome (and a proofreader) and I got to read it early.
I'm not really going to tell you much about it because I don't want to blow up McSweeney's spot, but look: Did you like The Instructions ? Did you think it was probably the greatest sprawling modern epic novel of 2010, if not the greatest sprawling modern epic novel ever? Then you will love the short stories in Hot Pink. Maybe not quite as much, but plenty. Because in case you doubted (you didn't, though, did you?), these stories are fiercely good. Obvs they don't have the same breadth and depth of The Instructions, but there are shivery little echoes throughout, especially in fathers who call their sons "boychick" or kiss their wives in particularly clever ways, and in characters who think and think and think and think and fucking think and inside-out and everywhichway analyze the most intimate of gestures or the grandest ideas about the world. Also some of these stories are extremely DFW-y, which is fine by me, and some of them are gut-punchingly sad, which is less so, but what can you do? Life is sad sometimes, and sometimes you have to write about it.
I'm not really going to tell you much about it because I don't want to blow up McSweeney's spot, but look: Did you like The Instructions ? Did you think it was probably the greatest sprawling modern epic novel of 2010, if not the greatest sprawling modern epic novel ever? Then you will love the short stories in Hot Pink. Maybe not quite as much, but plenty. Because in case you doubted (you didn't, though, did you?), these stories are fiercely good. Obvs they don't have the same breadth and depth of The Instructions, but there are shivery little echoes throughout, especially in fathers who call their sons "boychick" or kiss their wives in particularly clever ways, and in characters who think and think and think and think and fucking think and inside-out and everywhichway analyze the most intimate of gestures or the grandest ideas about the world. Also some of these stories are extremely DFW-y, which is fine by me, and some of them are gut-punchingly sad, which is less so, but what can you do? Life is sad sometimes, and sometimes you have to write about it.
Read
April 7, 2023Video on Adam Levin's work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvAgG...
March 27, 2012
A sharp collection of spicy experimental stories.
Certainly, the star of this collection is the candy-colored language. Hot Pink is filled with unexpected angles, jarring juxtapositions, and electrically charged word snaps. In other words … Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
I don’t even know what that has to do with this. Nothing, damnit.
I will admit that it took me a while to get into this. The non-realistic narratives threw me off at first, but once I got into the flow of it, the stories really grew on me. They are narratives, for the most part, so this isn't the kind of experimental writing that is difficult to follow. However, they are, largely, with some exceptions, non-realistic. Events are absurd. Characters abstracted. Walls are broken. For example, in several stories, characters will break out into extended monologues of unbelievable length and unrealistic language. Dialogue is sometimes too clever to be natural, creating characters that feel more like props than full-blooded beings. But these attributes seemed clearly intentional and controlled. Rather than the classic post-modern gambit where the author addresses the audience directly (hi reader, it’s me … the author. Katzman. How’s it going? Good, good. Glad to see you’re still reading this review. Thought I lost you there for a minute to reruns of Manimal on Nick at Night. Well, back to my review), it’s more of a clever nod-and-a-wink to the reader. A recognition that you’re smart enough, you’ll recognize that he’s speaking to you directly through this character, although obliquely. He’s not telling you his point of view necessarily, but he may he presenting a point of view as an idea for your reaction. How do you feel about that, reader?
It is nearly impossible to identify a through-line for diverse short stories, but I felt there was connective tissue beyond the style. If I had to put my finger on a theme that came up for me repeatedly it was miscommunication. Miscommunication, misunderstanding, and lack of comprehension or empathy. Some valid commentary on society.
I’ll call Levin a modern day Kurt Vonnegut, albeit one significantly more cynical. Push your experimental buttons and give this a whirl.
Certainly, the star of this collection is the candy-colored language. Hot Pink is filled with unexpected angles, jarring juxtapositions, and electrically charged word snaps. In other words … Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
I don’t even know what that has to do with this. Nothing, damnit.
I will admit that it took me a while to get into this. The non-realistic narratives threw me off at first, but once I got into the flow of it, the stories really grew on me. They are narratives, for the most part, so this isn't the kind of experimental writing that is difficult to follow. However, they are, largely, with some exceptions, non-realistic. Events are absurd. Characters abstracted. Walls are broken. For example, in several stories, characters will break out into extended monologues of unbelievable length and unrealistic language. Dialogue is sometimes too clever to be natural, creating characters that feel more like props than full-blooded beings. But these attributes seemed clearly intentional and controlled. Rather than the classic post-modern gambit where the author addresses the audience directly (hi reader, it’s me … the author. Katzman. How’s it going? Good, good. Glad to see you’re still reading this review. Thought I lost you there for a minute to reruns of Manimal on Nick at Night. Well, back to my review), it’s more of a clever nod-and-a-wink to the reader. A recognition that you’re smart enough, you’ll recognize that he’s speaking to you directly through this character, although obliquely. He’s not telling you his point of view necessarily, but he may he presenting a point of view as an idea for your reaction. How do you feel about that, reader?
It is nearly impossible to identify a through-line for diverse short stories, but I felt there was connective tissue beyond the style. If I had to put my finger on a theme that came up for me repeatedly it was miscommunication. Miscommunication, misunderstanding, and lack of comprehension or empathy. Some valid commentary on society.
I’ll call Levin a modern day Kurt Vonnegut, albeit one significantly more cynical. Push your experimental buttons and give this a whirl.
September 6, 2022
4.75 Stars - Adam Levin is quite simply, a marvel of
Modern literature. His majestically, hypnotically neurotic & gracefully formed sentences flow through my inner narration like the spring water of Fiji through a celebrity’s pursed lips!
Hot Pink, a collection of short stories is written in a similar vein to Levin’s recent masterpiece, ’Bubblegum’ most of all the first story about a boy & his father who builds parts for advanced blow-up dolls. Each story is in itself a snap-portrait of what god storytelling should be, but seldom is.. A journey, in which each and every sentence can stand on its own as an enjoyable engrossing piece of literature, a true art form.
If you haven’t yet dived into either of Levin’s mammoth-sized novels due to the very same said mammoth size, Hot Pink is your gateway into the weird & delightfully wonderful world of Adam Levin, a rare talent whom I can only imagine is just getting started.
Recently rereading this epic collection, I’ve discovered an even greater understanding of the un-understandable mind of Adam Levin. An author for authors, an author who’ll eventually be regarded as a literary giant of epic disorder and neurotic madness — we can only hope this work is one of a wide collection that spans decades to come. For if we do. The world will be a much better and smarter. More fun place as a result!
Modern literature. His majestically, hypnotically neurotic & gracefully formed sentences flow through my inner narration like the spring water of Fiji through a celebrity’s pursed lips!
Hot Pink, a collection of short stories is written in a similar vein to Levin’s recent masterpiece, ’Bubblegum’ most of all the first story about a boy & his father who builds parts for advanced blow-up dolls. Each story is in itself a snap-portrait of what god storytelling should be, but seldom is.. A journey, in which each and every sentence can stand on its own as an enjoyable engrossing piece of literature, a true art form.
If you haven’t yet dived into either of Levin’s mammoth-sized novels due to the very same said mammoth size, Hot Pink is your gateway into the weird & delightfully wonderful world of Adam Levin, a rare talent whom I can only imagine is just getting started.
Recently rereading this epic collection, I’ve discovered an even greater understanding of the un-understandable mind of Adam Levin. An author for authors, an author who’ll eventually be regarded as a literary giant of epic disorder and neurotic madness — we can only hope this work is one of a wide collection that spans decades to come. For if we do. The world will be a much better and smarter. More fun place as a result!
September 23, 2012
Hot Pink Pussy
1/2 oz Firewater® cinnamon schnapps
1 oz Tequila Rose® strawberry cream liqueur
Chill ingredients before using. Pour Tequila Rose into shot glass and float Firewater schnapps on top.
1/2 oz Firewater® cinnamon schnapps
1 oz Tequila Rose® strawberry cream liqueur
Chill ingredients before using. Pour Tequila Rose into shot glass and float Firewater schnapps on top.
June 6, 2017
Video recensione: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQpkS...
Ne parlo al minuto 11:50
Ne parlo al minuto 11:50
August 2, 2023
Planning a confrontation out and it not going to plan. Following along with a plan of a confrontation and realizing it isn't following through the way you expected. Getting a bunch of different alternatives to the plan if the plan goes south. Hiding the intent of the plan. Planning based off of misunderstanding. Plan fails. New plan.
May 17, 2012
This is yet another contemporary author who schtick I simply don't get. It's completely possible that my disengagement from popular culture and/or pastimes has made me somewhat of an idiot savant, only conversant in the one or two topics that I'm well informed on and interested in, so if this book is saying something about the youth of today, I may have missed the boat or am simply not cool enough to be in the know.
I guess I was hoping, quite naively, for a jokey, humorous, ironic tone, kind of like the McSweeny's website —was the book supposed to be serious? I still haven't figured that part out, but I suppose I was expecting more humor, less "Fight Club" inspired, absurdist plot twists mixed with unlikable characters. Am I the only one who hated the guy in "Scientific American" for feeding his dog the gel oozing out of his wall and then immediately feeling guilty about it?
Ummm...so, yeah, lots of the stories felt disjointed to me like the author over relied on quirky subject matter—for example, a masochistic girl who loves to be socked in the face by complete strangers—at the expense of plot or storyline.
Three stars for the first two stories.
I guess I was hoping, quite naively, for a jokey, humorous, ironic tone, kind of like the McSweeny's website —was the book supposed to be serious? I still haven't figured that part out, but I suppose I was expecting more humor, less "Fight Club" inspired, absurdist plot twists mixed with unlikable characters. Am I the only one who hated the guy in "Scientific American" for feeding his dog the gel oozing out of his wall and then immediately feeling guilty about it?
Ummm...so, yeah, lots of the stories felt disjointed to me like the author over relied on quirky subject matter—for example, a masochistic girl who loves to be socked in the face by complete strangers—at the expense of plot or storyline.
Three stars for the first two stories.
May 2, 2012
Adam Levin continues to be amazing. I loved his first novel, The Instructions, and this collection of stories is a worthy successor. Levin's writing has a certain very enjoyable atmosphere that is like nothing I've ever seen anywhere else, and that is very difficult for me to describe (meaning that it's impossible for me to write anything resembling a satisfying review of a Levin book). Something to do with the particularity and peculiarity of moment-to-moment thoughts.
If you're curious about Levin, this collection is a good introduction. The Instructions is very good but very long, and it reveals its virtues at its own slow, idiosyncratic pace. Hot Pink doesn't have the same scope or intensity, but it has the same basic (delicious, description-defying) flavor and comes in bite-size chunks.
Also, the story "How To Play The Guy" is the funniest thing I have read in months, though I'm still not sure why I find it so funny.
If you're curious about Levin, this collection is a good introduction. The Instructions is very good but very long, and it reveals its virtues at its own slow, idiosyncratic pace. Hot Pink doesn't have the same scope or intensity, but it has the same basic (delicious, description-defying) flavor and comes in bite-size chunks.
Also, the story "How To Play The Guy" is the funniest thing I have read in months, though I'm still not sure why I find it so funny.
May 27, 2012
The literary world is staring at Adam Levin. How could they not? His first novel, massive and reportedly brilliant in both concept and language (The Instructions, 2010) was met with immediate acclaim and comparisons to the late David Foster Wallace. Mercifully, Levin’s follow up, Hot Pink, is a wonderfully manageable, wildly creative and deeply insightful collection of short stories. Love is a theme (though an extremely unreliable ally) for Levin’s characters as they march through personal changes, fate and life’s pure weirdness, all the while trying to stay upright and attempting to anchor to something – anything – that might prevent them from drifting away. Oh, and his wordsmithing? You’ll set this book down more than once, smiling and shaking your head – clever. Very clever. http://ecosalon.com/short-stories/
November 20, 2011
I haven't read Levin's The Instructions yet but it's on my bookshelf and after reading through a galley of his first story collection, Hot Pink, I'm eager to dive into His Big Book. Though the influence of George Saunders comes through from time to time, Levin's stories are something else entirely. Violence is commonplace. Love is sincere but confusing and misguided. And of course they're all funny.
March 12, 2012
Levin's fiction pulsates like flexing muscles. There is a brutal edge to a lot of his writing, though there can also be delicate emotion, that seems to perfectly voice the time in which we are currently living. Sometimes bizarre, these stories are always interesting and prove for me beyond any doubt that Levin's unique voice in "The Instructions" was in no way a fluke but instead heralded the arrival of an important modern writer.
December 4, 2018
There were moments during my reading of these stories that I thought "This is brilliant" or "So funny" or "Inventive!" but they were just moments. And even though there were a lot of them, none of those moments were elevated into a satisfying whole. After reading each story, the things I liked felt sort of pointless. I don't think I could tell you what a single story was about. There were a couple I'd recommend reading, but I don't remember which ones they were.
December 27, 2012
Adam Levin is offbeat, smart, and genuinely funny. He pays attention to people in the margins, and he's as adept in the short story form as in his mammoth novel The Instructions.
Two of the stories in the collection, "Relations" and "How to Play The Guy" felt a little too detached and conceptual for my taste, but it was all interesting, rewarding reading.
Two of the stories in the collection, "Relations" and "How to Play The Guy" felt a little too detached and conceptual for my taste, but it was all interesting, rewarding reading.
June 5, 2023
Fun lil gaffer. Pressed on time these days and figured I’d go with Levin’s small bolus dose of short stories rather than his thousand page bangers. Some stand-outs for sure, but overall, it seemed that the threshold for submission here wasn’t that superlative. Some zany shit, but not the joyous whimsy I was looking for.
August 23, 2023
An absolutely insane, crazy book. Jane Tell, Hot Pink, and How to Play the Guy were my favorite stories.
June 2, 2019
Adam Levin is impossible to review. Loved his first novel The Instructions, but that's probably too long for most people. So I would recommend this as a good intro to his peculiar atmosphere building chops.
February 13, 2026
Whole thing is great across the board but Jane Tell is one of the best short stories I've ever read and I think everyone should read it
May 20, 2012
The various universes encountered in Adam Levin's short story collection are all driven by love. Sadly, in most cases, the love proves to be destructive for the parties involved, opening up wounds both physical and metaphysical. We open with a father's desire to create the perfect doll - one that actually replicates eating - and the alteration of his family life as the big companies force him to tweak the design over and over in "Frankenwittgenstein." Susan Falls has lost her legs due to a traffic accident at a young age, and finds herself falling for a female collegiate classmate during "Considering the Bittersweet End of Susan Falls." Widowed old men discuss going "The Extra Mile," in more ways than one, for their departed spouses in the shortest tale of the grouping; young Cliff, aspiring to greatness in school, befriends a paint-huffing street tough with a penchant for grilled cheese and attack dogs during the "Finch" segment. The "Relating" story is actually made up of even shorter stories that include: A mixed message native/seamen battle, a false start that creates two conversations, a boy getting and losing a dog named Billy, a professor resigning over allegations of improper sexual conduct with a gerbil, two neighbors dissolving a freindship following their children's night out, a boy who thinks of his street cred when dating a larger girl, and a wanna-be urchin encounters important men. The jewel of the tome is "Jane Tell," which follows Ben's edgy relationship with Jane - who gets off on being hurt by others - during the span of their self-destructive spiral. Donald's origami love note gets lost in the shuffle of "RSVP," leading to a series of deaths. An oozing wall gets into the head of a husband trying to make things perfect for his pregnant wife during the "Scientific American" segment; "How to Play The Guy" offers up rules on a strange game of revenge and relationships for all the Stive/Rick/Jenny/Geoff players involved. Finally, the titular story "Hot Pink" creeps into the party lifestyle of two young streetwise gentlemen and the sisters they seek to date. The collection itself flows all over the place, with only the thread of human interaction as the string to tie these stories together. Personally, the out-there tragedies actually seem the most real and influential - perhaps hitting closer to home than I would like.
December 19, 2012
The first thing you have to understand is that Adam Levin's short-story collection Hot Pink is nothing like his massive—and impressive—novel from 2010, The Instructions. If that sort of sustained impact is what you're looking for, you won't find it here; the stories in Hot Pink are for the most part relatively straightforward slices of (admittedly rather bizarre) life. There's just not as much room to stretch out here as there was in Levin's blockbuster novel.
I didn't always like these pieces, either; the characters in "Jane Tell," for example, all seemed both unlikeable and incomprehensible to me. But from "Frankenwittgenstein" and its coils of corporate compromise to the angry young thugs of "Hot Pink," Levin's tales are nothing if not vivid.
The most inventive and emotionally effective story in this collection, at least for me, was "Considering the Bittersweet End of Susan Falls"—not that it reached exactly the point I thought I wanted it to reach, but it reached the point it needed to, while structurally subverting the short story format in several ways along the way. You could learn a lot from observing how this one's put together, quite apart from the narrative itself.
It's a bit too early, I think, to declare Levin one of the finest literary minds of the 21st Century... but I do think that, by and large, Hot Pink effectively showcases Levin's dynamic range.
I didn't always like these pieces, either; the characters in "Jane Tell," for example, all seemed both unlikeable and incomprehensible to me. But from "Frankenwittgenstein" and its coils of corporate compromise to the angry young thugs of "Hot Pink," Levin's tales are nothing if not vivid.
The most inventive and emotionally effective story in this collection, at least for me, was "Considering the Bittersweet End of Susan Falls"—not that it reached exactly the point I thought I wanted it to reach, but it reached the point it needed to, while structurally subverting the short story format in several ways along the way. You could learn a lot from observing how this one's put together, quite apart from the narrative itself.
It's a bit too early, I think, to declare Levin one of the finest literary minds of the 21st Century... but I do think that, by and large, Hot Pink effectively showcases Levin's dynamic range.
January 22, 2025
There's something about the way Adam Levin plays with your expectations of innocence. For all the shocking, fucked-up shit they engage in, his characters are psychologically vulnerable and sheltered. In a way, each of the stories in Hot Pink is a study of human interaction as performance; this is how we act when we think others are looking. Hell, this is how we act when no one is looking, when the only person we're trying to fool is the self. The climax of each story tends to be the moment when this act, this self-delusion, finally falls away, but not completely, because it's the act that teaches the lesson and the lesson is learned in the moment the act is recognized. It's not about overcoming artifice, it's about understanding it.
Levin's characters are all incomplete in an adolescent way (even when they're older). They are questing characters. They are searching and the method of their search is to pretend to be this thing that they think they are supposed to be (The story "How to Play The Guy" is basically the instruction manual on how to engage in this social pretending).
Levin's novel, The Instructions, was, at over a thousand pages, the best three books I read last year, and Hot Pink is a satisfying follow-up. I will say, at the risk of pigeonholing the author, that I like his writing best when the narrative voice is closest to that of Gurion, the ten-year-old genius narrator of The Instructions. It's nice, though, to see the full versatility of Levin's writing, and to see his trademark themes of violence and innocence play out in other voices.
Levin's characters are all incomplete in an adolescent way (even when they're older). They are questing characters. They are searching and the method of their search is to pretend to be this thing that they think they are supposed to be (The story "How to Play The Guy" is basically the instruction manual on how to engage in this social pretending).
Levin's novel, The Instructions, was, at over a thousand pages, the best three books I read last year, and Hot Pink is a satisfying follow-up. I will say, at the risk of pigeonholing the author, that I like his writing best when the narrative voice is closest to that of Gurion, the ten-year-old genius narrator of The Instructions. It's nice, though, to see the full versatility of Levin's writing, and to see his trademark themes of violence and innocence play out in other voices.
July 16, 2012
It's a wonderful thing to discover a new favorite writer, especially a (relatively) young one from whom I expect many great books over the coming years. I already knew I loved Levin's writing a few pages into The Instructions (and then 100 pages in, and then 400 pages in, and then 1000 pages in . . .). The stories in Hot Pink merely solidify that status. My only complaint is that, being exactly Mr. Levin's target demo, I am a subscriber to McSweeney's, and have thus read a number of these stories previously - although some perhaps in a slightly different form, which is leading me to contemplate looking up the previous versions and see if they're actually different or if I'm just misremembering them. But this is all because, as I mentioned, I am now apparently an Adam Levin superfan, and it's all his fault.
May 1, 2012
it’s crazy how distinct adam levin’s style is after having published only one book before this. if you read the instructions and then just happened to stumble across one of these stories, it would take you about five pages to figure out who wrote it. his writing is almost like the literary version of a 3d movie: the words feel like they're jumping off of the page. i guess the book could best be described as a collection of really fu#*ed up love stories. i’d been waiting on this to come out for a long time and it was well worth the wait. i enjoyed these about as much as i could ever enjoy a short story collection, and i drew it out for as long as i could, but what i really want is another gargantuan, life-changing novel from this guy and i hope it doesn’t take another ten years to get it!
October 16, 2014
I just really love Adam Levin. Even though I didn't necessarily adore the story of every story in this collection, I still loved the delivery so much that I'd rank Hot Pink in my top few short story collections. Mr. Levin's style seems so new and original to me, with just the right amount of experiment and pretension to make me feel smart. And (dare I say it?) something about this book reminded me a bit of DFW. And it made me want to read The Instructions again.
(Major thanks to my cousin Rachel for passing this along to me like a year ago! I can't believe it took me so long to get to it.)
(Major thanks to my cousin Rachel for passing this along to me like a year ago! I can't believe it took me so long to get to it.)
January 28, 2013
This was good and I definitely still like Adam Levin and will slavishly follow him through the McSweeney's aisle of the store in my brain, but I felt like I read all the best bits already throughout the different internet establishments (or issues of MSs) lucky enough to get an 'excerpt' of Hot Pink. What was left was not bad but not great and eh but I read the whole thing.
Recommended for specific fans of Levin or people who do not know internet.
Recommended for specific fans of Levin or people who do not know internet.
April 19, 2012
Levin's rhetorical, rabbinical style carries this darker and less polished collection. Had I read this first, I would not have predicted The Instructions. I am looking forward to what is next.
August 23, 2016
Written by my former professor who displayed a passion for contemporary short fiction. Experimental writing style, some streams of consciousness and tableau. Animalistic themes pertaining to human nature. Reflective of Chicago culture. Reminiscent of Miranda July meets Kurt Vonnegut with a hint of George Saunders.
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