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Burning Babies
Ignore these searing, naked tales of a lost America at your own risk. These are the brutal images of Her discarded children - the marginalized lives they lead and the desperate adults they become. They are a warning, a protest, a scream from the darkness by one of the country's boldest, most original young writers - Youngstown, Ohio's Noah Cicero.
Michael Allen, Grumpy Old Bookman: "The subject matter is dark and might be depressing but for the author's sense of humour. Which is dry, droll, and succeeded in making me laugh. A lot more than many books do."
Harvey Pekar, author of American Splendor and The Quitter: "This is a very good, homemade book about White Trash America. It's full of angry, humorous and intelligent insights. I read it in one sitting."
Reader of Depressing Books: "Here's why I liked your novel Burning Babies. Because the voice. Because of who you are, I guess. If I like someone's voice, then I'll read anything they write, because I trust them. Subject matter doesn't matter to me. I like your voice because you do not explain things that are obvious."
About the Author
Noah Cicero was born in 1980 in Youngstown, Ohio, where he still lives. His first book, The Human War, was published in 2003 by Fugue State Press.
Michael Allen, Grumpy Old Bookman: "The subject matter is dark and might be depressing but for the author's sense of humour. Which is dry, droll, and succeeded in making me laugh. A lot more than many books do."
Harvey Pekar, author of American Splendor and The Quitter: "This is a very good, homemade book about White Trash America. It's full of angry, humorous and intelligent insights. I read it in one sitting."
Reader of Depressing Books: "Here's why I liked your novel Burning Babies. Because the voice. Because of who you are, I guess. If I like someone's voice, then I'll read anything they write, because I trust them. Subject matter doesn't matter to me. I like your voice because you do not explain things that are obvious."
About the Author
Noah Cicero was born in 1980 in Youngstown, Ohio, where he still lives. His first book, The Human War, was published in 2003 by Fugue State Press.
160 pages, Paperback
Published December 12, 2005
1 person is currently reading
116 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
October 3, 2007
Noah Cicero will cut your cut balls off and face fuck you
Want to read
October 3, 2007I would like to read this book.
Publish it.
I will be forced to kick a small mexican child in the soft head every day until this book is published.
not because I dislike mexicans or children or small mexican children
because I live in Southern California and there is a healthy supply of mexican children where I live.
Please save the children.
Publish it.
I will be forced to kick a small mexican child in the soft head every day until this book is published.
not because I dislike mexicans or children or small mexican children
because I live in Southern California and there is a healthy supply of mexican children where I live.
Please save the children.
March 4, 2008
Burning Babies is a Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in how it's been held back, but don't think it's got the same acceptability through pleasantries of niceness that Wilco has. Burning Babies is harsh, but it's grittier than Noah's previous collection (The Condemned). The Condemned was a wonderful read, but there seemed to be this underlining desire for an acceptance within the tales, with Burning Babies there is no desire for any hope to be at the end. This is a book of wallowing in a rusted cemetery city life, much of which has the same backdrop I had growing up in Youngstown, Ohio. This book is about merely existing.
After all the issues of a publisher putting the release on hold for whatever reason publishers have, Noah Cicero has put out a part of Burning Babies onto a print-on-demand site.The book is printed in a form larger than writing paper, and because of that there is no way to read the book in public without feeling like a madman simply due to the size of it. You can't just sit in a coffee shop and tilt your chair back and enjoy. If you do that people will come up and ask if you are reading a script, or possibly a published police report of a killer never caught. Burning Babies is meant to be consumed; the best way I found was the lurch over it, as it lays on a table and just go into the world of its stories.
In the last day I have read the final story more times that I can remember. To call the final story a "fuck you" would be an understatement. The final story is simply a statement from Noah Cicero that he is not settling, espically when it comes to pleasing the assholes that somehow live in this world unharmed. All I can say is I can't wait for the full book to one day be released.
my review was originally posted at: http://outthrowingroses.blogspot.com/...
After all the issues of a publisher putting the release on hold for whatever reason publishers have, Noah Cicero has put out a part of Burning Babies onto a print-on-demand site.The book is printed in a form larger than writing paper, and because of that there is no way to read the book in public without feeling like a madman simply due to the size of it. You can't just sit in a coffee shop and tilt your chair back and enjoy. If you do that people will come up and ask if you are reading a script, or possibly a published police report of a killer never caught. Burning Babies is meant to be consumed; the best way I found was the lurch over it, as it lays on a table and just go into the world of its stories.
In the last day I have read the final story more times that I can remember. To call the final story a "fuck you" would be an understatement. The final story is simply a statement from Noah Cicero that he is not settling, espically when it comes to pleasing the assholes that somehow live in this world unharmed. All I can say is I can't wait for the full book to one day be released.
my review was originally posted at: http://outthrowingroses.blogspot.com/...
Want to read
October 3, 2007i want to read this book. as such, it has been shelved on the "to-read" shelf. hopefully, this will help noah get things published. that would be nice. wouldn't it? i think so. you should too. think it. come on. think it.
Read
October 3, 2007please publish this book.
i need to hold it in my heads and drop it in my brain
i need to hold it in my heads and drop it in my brain
November 19, 2015
I also would like to read this book. Publish!!!!!
Noah's blog is a source of constant entertainment and wonder too. No, I overstated that, it's very good and funny, I'm not marketing it. It's good.
Noah's blog is a source of constant entertainment and wonder too. No, I overstated that, it's very good and funny, I'm not marketing it. It's good.
Read
October 7, 2007please publish this book, i read some excerpts online and i really really want to own it and read it and carry it around with me
October 8, 2007
Someday this book will be released and I will have a copy. Someone should publish this.
October 5, 2011
Noah Cicero, Burning Babies (A-Head Publishing, 2003)
I first heard about this book back in 2005. It first popped up on a blog I am quite fond of called Grumpy Old Bookman; soon after, Tao Lin started championing Cicero's work (in 2006, he called Burning Babies “a beautifully-written novel”). And then...nothing. The book didn't actually show up anywhere until 2008. Cicero, from his own blog, in February 2007: “Once upon a time, there was a book called Burning Babies by Noah Cicero, that was going to come out, but the book did not come out.//He got reviews for this book that did not exist.//People said positive things concerning the non-existent book....” I'm still trying to figure out whether he's just noting the facts or making digs at the bloggers who talked the book up, not that it really matters. Burning Babies does exist. I own a copy of it. And now I have read it.
It's fucking terrible.
Imagine a bastard child of all the worst traints, and none of the best, of Allen Ginsberg and Todd Moore (Carlos Castaneda may have also been involved, in some kind of unholy threesome), a child whose...mother?...drank prodigiously and steadily throughout pregnancy and may have smoked some sort of meth/crack freebase as well, a child as relentlessly, horrifically abused as all those kids who it actually turned out weren't as relentlessly, horrifically abused as we were told they were (JT Leroy, Dave Pelzer, Augusten Burroughs...), a child who lacks any sort of formal education in the English language whatsoever, has never read a novel and thus had no chance to have picked up even the basics of plot, characterization, or theme. That child is Monco, the narrator of this plotless morass of language that may be an attempt at a novel, may be some sort of loosely-linked story cycle (the product description at Amazon points to this interpretation, though loosely), may even be some sort of tremendouly incompetent attempt at poetry; the only way I could give the book more than zero stars, though, was to block that possiblity out of my head entirely. (Note written after the review was finished: it still didn't work.)
The book is written—perhaps consciously, but whether it was the author's intent to come off this way or not, the effect is the same—in an aggressively anti-literate style. Other reviewers who are not as familiar with the world of vanity publishing as I am may not be as familiar with this style of writing as I am, but rest assured, there is nothing “bold” or “new” or “avant-garde” or (fill in the superlative of your choice) about it. Pick up half a dozen random novels, the more grammatically awkward the titles the better, from self-, vanity-, or POD-publishing houses (Dorrance, XLibris, PublishAmerica, AuthorHouse, CreateSpace...) and I'd almost guarantee you will find at least one written in exactly this style. (Pro tip: choose books written by authors with outlandish pseudonyms.) Well, let me revise this paragraph a tad: the word “style” has implications I don't mean to impart. There is a style to this book in the way there is a style to the scattering of mutilated bodies after a particularly nasty train derailment. There is no artfulness to be found here, any more than there is artfulness in the ravings of the unmedicated schizophrenic haranguing you from the streecorner. Come to think of it, I'd rather listen to the schizophrenic. I had originally given this half a star because, despite hating myself every time I turned a page, I finished the book rather than abandoning (or burning) it. But the more I think about it, the more I realize it doesn't deserve even that. To quote a wiser (and much more succinct) colleague of mine (reviewing a different book), “I kept thinking 'Why am I reading this?', but that put all the responsibility on me. Why is this a book?” (zero)
I first heard about this book back in 2005. It first popped up on a blog I am quite fond of called Grumpy Old Bookman; soon after, Tao Lin started championing Cicero's work (in 2006, he called Burning Babies “a beautifully-written novel”). And then...nothing. The book didn't actually show up anywhere until 2008. Cicero, from his own blog, in February 2007: “Once upon a time, there was a book called Burning Babies by Noah Cicero, that was going to come out, but the book did not come out.//He got reviews for this book that did not exist.//People said positive things concerning the non-existent book....” I'm still trying to figure out whether he's just noting the facts or making digs at the bloggers who talked the book up, not that it really matters. Burning Babies does exist. I own a copy of it. And now I have read it.
It's fucking terrible.
Imagine a bastard child of all the worst traints, and none of the best, of Allen Ginsberg and Todd Moore (Carlos Castaneda may have also been involved, in some kind of unholy threesome), a child whose...mother?...drank prodigiously and steadily throughout pregnancy and may have smoked some sort of meth/crack freebase as well, a child as relentlessly, horrifically abused as all those kids who it actually turned out weren't as relentlessly, horrifically abused as we were told they were (JT Leroy, Dave Pelzer, Augusten Burroughs...), a child who lacks any sort of formal education in the English language whatsoever, has never read a novel and thus had no chance to have picked up even the basics of plot, characterization, or theme. That child is Monco, the narrator of this plotless morass of language that may be an attempt at a novel, may be some sort of loosely-linked story cycle (the product description at Amazon points to this interpretation, though loosely), may even be some sort of tremendouly incompetent attempt at poetry; the only way I could give the book more than zero stars, though, was to block that possiblity out of my head entirely. (Note written after the review was finished: it still didn't work.)
The book is written—perhaps consciously, but whether it was the author's intent to come off this way or not, the effect is the same—in an aggressively anti-literate style. Other reviewers who are not as familiar with the world of vanity publishing as I am may not be as familiar with this style of writing as I am, but rest assured, there is nothing “bold” or “new” or “avant-garde” or (fill in the superlative of your choice) about it. Pick up half a dozen random novels, the more grammatically awkward the titles the better, from self-, vanity-, or POD-publishing houses (Dorrance, XLibris, PublishAmerica, AuthorHouse, CreateSpace...) and I'd almost guarantee you will find at least one written in exactly this style. (Pro tip: choose books written by authors with outlandish pseudonyms.) Well, let me revise this paragraph a tad: the word “style” has implications I don't mean to impart. There is a style to this book in the way there is a style to the scattering of mutilated bodies after a particularly nasty train derailment. There is no artfulness to be found here, any more than there is artfulness in the ravings of the unmedicated schizophrenic haranguing you from the streecorner. Come to think of it, I'd rather listen to the schizophrenic. I had originally given this half a star because, despite hating myself every time I turned a page, I finished the book rather than abandoning (or burning) it. But the more I think about it, the more I realize it doesn't deserve even that. To quote a wiser (and much more succinct) colleague of mine (reviewing a different book), “I kept thinking 'Why am I reading this?', but that put all the responsibility on me. Why is this a book?” (zero)
December 15, 2013
I was beaten brutally by my father several times, and I don't think I ever did anything that bad.
His anger was at the world.
At other people.
At his employers.
They had stolen his life.
His time.
His work.
All stolen.
I didn't know what his anger was derived from when I was twelve, but in my twenty-forth year of human existence I'm starting to learn.
---
I was confused a lot as a child.
My parents always said I grow up to work.
Have health insurance and children.
But work doesn't bring happiness.
Just broken backs.
Anger.
The need for drugs.
Booze.
And arguments.
My father broke lamps, phones, plates, ant TVs when he got angry.
His anger was at the world.
At other people.
At his employers.
They had stolen his life.
His time.
His work.
All stolen.
I didn't know what his anger was derived from when I was twelve, but in my twenty-forth year of human existence I'm starting to learn.
---
I was confused a lot as a child.
My parents always said I grow up to work.
Have health insurance and children.
But work doesn't bring happiness.
Just broken backs.
Anger.
The need for drugs.
Booze.
And arguments.
My father broke lamps, phones, plates, ant TVs when he got angry.
February 24, 2010
Cicero effectively and with a certain raw crudeness befitting the bleak brutality of the lives depicted conveys the psychology of white trash culture. Unfortunately, the text is undermined to a certain extent by the very large number of typos. Frequently whole words are left out leaving the reader to try to decipher what's missing. While annoying, the impact of the author's powerful vision of a world gone mad is not blunted.
April 28, 2011
"American pathetic." This book will be forgotten. It will be forgotten quickly. Noah Cicero will be forgotten . . . We haven't got any choice but to be okay with that.
You should read this book if you will also be forgotten quickly.
You should read this book if you will also be forgotten quickly.
June 23, 2016
Noah Cicero's works make me feel okay about being nothing more than a worthless piece of trash from the middle-of-nowhere Kentucky with a miserable past and no hope for a better future. They shouldn't. But they do anyway.
July 2, 2013
You should read this book. If you read anything by Noah Cicero, make sure this is it.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews