The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven

by Rick Moody

In 10 strikingly original stories and a prize-winning novella, Rick Moody paints a world of frustration, yearning, lies, decay, and obsession as he introduces a dissonant band of outsiders.
-- a frenzied undergraduate who confesses his delusions in a term paper
-- a hip young media personality whose film treatment reveals a pathological self-obsession
-- an investigator whose deposition reveals his own increasingly sordid attempts to spy on his wife
-- and more.

A stunning literary achievement, these daring, surprising, energetic stories -- masterpieces of language, structure, and momentum -- will entertain and astound from beginning to end.

"Consistently inventive...a wicked eye for detail". -- The New York Times Book Review

"Expressive brilliance...written in a brilliant nightmarish style". -- Los Angeles Times

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Americana, Literary Fiction, Collections, Literature

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Hiram Frederick Moody III is an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought him widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into the film The Ice Storm. Many of his works have been praised by fellow writers and critics alike.

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 5 out of 5]

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE



Holly came from Miami FLA
Hitchhiked her way across the USA
Plucked her eyebrows on the way,
shaved her legs and then he was a she.

Ecco di cosa parla questo libro: scritto venti e più anni dopo, ma ambientato negli anni dell'esplosione dell'AIDS, sembra l'adattamento letterario della celebre canzone di Lou Reed. Le storie, i personaggi, i nomi sono gli stessi.


Holly Woodlawn e Andy Warhol. Holly è morta nel 2015 a 69 anni.

Candy came from out on the island.
In the backroom, she was everybody's darling.
But she never lost her head,
even when she was giving head.

Ed è stupendo, come e più della canzone.

Little Joe never once gave it away.
Everybody had to pay and pay.
A hustle here and a hustle there.
New York city's the place where they said
Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side.


Candy Darling & Andy Warhol. Little Joe fu ispirato da Joe D’Alessandro, attore protagonista di alcuni film prodotti dalla Factory di Warhol.

Se la canzone si ascolta e riascolta, questo libro si legge e rilegge: io l'ho fatto nello stesso fine settimana, non sono riuscito a resistere.
Sin dalla prima parola ti porta dentro le sue storie, che si conoscono bene ormai, e infatti non c'è nulla di nuovo sotto il sole, ma ti cattura ugualmente, ti trascina e non ti molla più.
Perché Moody scrive più che bene, ci mette talento e cuore.
E t’innamori di questa umanità, non vuoi più perderla né lasciarla, tranne farne parte.

Sugar Plum Fairy came and hit the streets,
lookin' for soul food and a place to eat.
Went to the Apollo,
you should of seen them go go go.
Jackie is just speeding away.
Thought she was James Dean for a day.
Then I guess she had to crash.
Valium would have helped that pass.
Everybody says hey babe!
Take a walk on the wild side.
And the coloured girls go
doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo...


Foto di Silvia Camporesi.

Rick Moody ci porta in un lucente supermercato aperto 24 ore al giorno in quel di New York, la città dove anche la luna è un neon: i prodotti esposti scintillano e non hanno fine e sono una tentazione difficile da resistere, promessa di sensazioni forti - le luci blu o rosse, ma comunque lampeggianti, la pelle esposta, la curiosità, il desiderio, l'eccitazione, la voglia di assaggiare provare e infilare il dito nella leccornia proibita.
Solo che poi arriva 'sister heroin', arriva per curare l'anima, ma si porta via sia l'anima che il corpo, e allora davvero le storie diventano tutte uguali e spesso non hanno un finale da raccontare.

I maschi con le tette sono angeli, e quando ti spezzano il cuore ti avvicinano a Dio....i tossici e i masochisti e le puttane che hanno sprecato tutto nella vita sono la più lucente corona d'angeli nel cielo.


Anna Di Prospero: Gli eletti.

PS
Molto bella anche la postfazione di Tommaso Pincio, perfettamente ad hoc.

PPSS
La leggenda narra che Lou Reed si ispirò a un altro artista maledetto per il titolo della sua canzone, Nelson Algren che nel 1956 aveva scritto “A Walk on the Wild Side”.

PPPSSS
Il corsivo è un mio omaggio a Moody :)


Greta Gerwig in “Frances Ha” di Noah Baumbach, 2012.

[soulAdmitted · Rating 4 out of 5]

Con Moody sulla pre-apocalittica Ottava Strada, nel 1985. Come fosse la quintessenza della normalità delle cose, direbbe Pincio. Tommaso. In postfazione.

(Dopo aver lacrimato il lacrimabile, al cinema, su The End of the Tour. Il tutto potrebbe sembrare eccessivo, in due giorni. Ma alla fine ognuna affretta la caduta come le viene meglio).

"Il Rudere era come l'ospedale psichiatrico dove alcuni di loro avevano scontato una pena. Era un posto da ultima spiaggia con indicazioni per il posto da ultima spiaggia successivo; era il fondo del fondo, ma con una botola - così mi disse Jorge - e, dopo tutto, lui se ne intendeva di escatologia".

"Nella città del Rudere, hanno prodotto uno stock completo di esseri umani, disse Jorge, dopodiché hanno preso gli stampi e li hanno usati tutti altre due, tre, magari quattro volte, per risparmiare, e se sei fortunato il tuo doppione non lo incontri mai. Se sei fortunato".

[Dr Gym Van Coen]

james dean garage band is the standout

[Rand]

When I was young, I read too much too soon. This was probably one of them.

The inscription on the flap of the paperback copy of this (which I intend to hungrily peddle today to the local bookmongers before an evening spent in the kitchen of a restaurant whose name literally translates to The Feast) is lovingly addressed to me with the following explanation and holiday cheer: "Because you like Wallace, we thought you might like this book — it looked cool to us! Let us know how it is !" from 2000, the winter after I devoured Infinite Jest and before I legally became an adult. The year prior my brother and his wife had given me a first edition of IJ, which was last seen in Brighton.

Pretty sure that I stopped reading Moody somewhere in the middle multiple times, as this was the beginning of my middlings. Pretty sure that I told my sister-in-law that I had not yet completed all of the book, that I was not sure if I fully liked it—the sentences did not shine quite the same way as Wallace's did & the themes seemed to be chosen more for the sake of provocation than anything else, that, overall, the stories lacked heart. The sister=inlaw sighed and said she had reached a somewhat similar conclusion after viewing the then-recent adaptation of Moody's novel Garden State. I passed the joint and felt better about slipping the book down to the bottom of my pile.

Eventually I would finish the thing, skipping through much of the titular novella. Despite having acquired a few of Moody's other books and having slept through Garden State twice, I never spent much time returning to this book. Every once in a while I would flip through it, whenever the book and I would happen to intersect the ol' spacetimemori (happyami to see the variety of form here & hear the sameness of the sea which carries this zeitgeist stilllll).
(Not until NOW would I realise that I had viewed the adaptation of Ice Storm on VHS and been enthralled. Maybe I'll read that one next)
but mostly I shied away, content to forget the specifics in lieu of those whom Moody points toward.
Specifically, the most exciting piece in this collection, "Works Cited". For my money, the insertion of autobiographical notes to what is essentially a listing of that which did ricochet Rick into the critically acclaimed and commercially successful Moody circa 1996 weakens the overall project—its inclusion leaves the piece less complete than were it not there at all. Maybe. Perhaps his editor nagged at him to Create a Story to flesh out his hallowed shelf. Or maybe Moody preemptively added on the notes (not every item is graced with an explanation, as if some things are self-evident) himself as a preemptive measure. I do not know.

But in any case, the anecdote about Moody befriending Gaddis's son and Garden State being buried amongst the debris on Gaddis's desk is still cute.

[Brent Legault · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a very silly book made sillier still by its yearning to be taken seriously evident on every page. Another problem it has is its obsession with the technology and pop culture of its time, already 20 years old and embarrassing to behold, even by a reader like me who remembers some of it. I imagine a similar story, written in the late 1800's, about a young couple having a telephone installed in their brownstone apartment and the first call they make is to a bicycle shop which they find in a phone book which they read with the aid of an electric lamp.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Again, one of the masters of specificity...he's a more contemporary (and in my opinion) talented Cheever.

[Aja · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stylistically I love Rick Moody. I love his sentence structure, his word choice, his masterful comma usage, his constant italicizing. He breaks a lot of "rules" of writing (penning an 11-page story without using punctuation, writing a 4-page story that is one sentence long) and it is for this reason, and the occasional heart-stoppingly awesome passage that I keep returning to his work.

However.

This stylistic format is often a hinderance; too showy to create depth of character, too detached to show if Moody had any emotion for what he was writing. The stories in this book aren't nearly as moving or interesting as those in Demonology and move relatively slow. I didn't find much in this book that I really enjoyed. A few of the stories were thought-provoking but many were just pieces to showcase Moody's unusual writing style. I'd skip it if you aren't a fan.

[Carmen Cocar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review to follow soon.

[Geoff]

Feels like the work of a young writer. It’s Moody’s third published book but his first collection of short stories, so many of them were likely among his first published works.

Formally experimental (e.g., one story written without punctuation, another written as a footnoted bibliography, etc.). Lots of passages about young, troubled, drug-addled, sexually exploratory writers/musicians/filmmakers on the East Coast. Many weirdly niche nineties references that made the book feel both dated and meant for a specific audience. (I don’t think I’d thought about the band King Missile in a couple of decades, for example.)

I remember reading “The Preliminary Notes” and “The Grid” many years ago, liking them well enough, and then setting this aside for some reason. After rereading those and finishing the rest, “The Grid” might still be my favorite—essentially a several-pages-long ode to the magic of a late-night kiss on a stoop and all the other kisses happening around it across New York City.

Many of the other stories never sang to me, though. Too interested in capturing a certain amount of cleverness without the substance to back it up. I might make exceptions for portions of “The James Dean Garage Band” and the title novella, but those exceptions wouldn’t justify recommending the book in full.

[Giovanni Linke Casalucci · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un libro - ahinoi - ormai introvabile e che, a differenza di molta narrativa anni '90, non risulta datato né temporalmente connotato. Strano a dirsi, perché la New York di allora non è certo quella di oggi, eppure, l'umanità descritta da Moody, ha un'età indefinita, un sesso indefinito.
Forse si tratta davvero di angeli?

Angeli che usano il sesso (fatto male, disperatamente, senza davvero farlo) come un punto di partenza e la droga come capolinea (anche quando ci si illude di averla aggirata) ma che abbracciando la loro umanità - non soccombendo a essa - si sono garantiti un posto in cielo.

Su tutto, uno stile narrativo ineccepibile che non scade nel patetico, nell'ovvio, si concede anche di risultare quasi banale e dunque sembrare ancora più reale.
Come i suoi protagonisti, anche il narratore sceglie la cosa più ovvia da fare: raccontare. Che altro potrebbe mai fare?

La butto lì: credo che Ryan Murphy abbia recuperato questo libro da qualche scaffale per scrivere alcune delle sottotrame di POSE.

[Ralph Palm · Rating 3 out of 5]

I once heard the bit Hemingway supposedly wrote about Miller, something about writing about a blowjob as if he invented it. Moody doesn't remind me of Miller, but he reminds me of this line.

Anyway, Moody's noted sympathy for freaks, weirdos and other lost souls would ring truer if he didn't write as if he had discovered them. At every moment it reads as a Christopher Columbus style discovery. Kerouac's menagerie is left standing there holding their Roman candles with a look on their faces that says hey kid so what.

To be fair, this is hardly bad. To be accurate, there is better. If you like Moody, then try Denis Johnson.

Perhaps im being unfair. Maybe it's simply the fact of Moody's sincerity that evokes repetition, an echo of an echo of. We've heard it all before, but because it is for so long that we have been lost.

[Syafiqah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this book because of Legion, a Marvel series on Disney+ I believe. The main character's love interest had read this book after seeing it on the shelf. She identified with especially one part near the end of the book. Sometimes I feel out of place or as if my life has become one chaotic and unpredictable mess, but I remember stories from this book and think about how random our lives are. Anything could happen, and the smallest moments carry great meaning in them. This book celebrates life and all its uncomfortable aspects. Love it.

Had a tough time trying to understand some parts because I'm not American or an adult, but I think I may be able to understand it better when I grow older. Love to Rick Moody ❤️.

[Hex75 · Rating 4 out of 5]

un racconto lungo che è una fotografia di una fase di passaggio, quella in cui il lover east side di new york passò dall'essere una problematica zona creativa allo sfascio completo. si sente l'affetto che moody prova per quel mondo, per quello che è stato e per le persone che vi continuarono a vivere, si sente che l'empatia per i personaggi raccontati è forte, e si sente che quello che vuole far arrivare al lettore è il disperato bisogno di affetto -o anche di semplice contatto umano- che hanno. e si finisce il racconto con una gran nostalgia di quei personaggi e delle loro storie... p.s. molto bella anche la pstfazione di tommaso pincio.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rick Moody is a brilliant writer whose narrators speak in a contemporary vernacular as they conflate past, present and future into tales that read like monologues. He gives voice to the disenfranchised -- the drug and sex addicted, the neglected, the lost -- and, without redeeming them, makes the characters worthy of compassion and remembrance. But the reader pays a price for entering this world as the darkness leaves a mark even on those who view it from afar. My three stars are not for the qualities of the book but for my inability to touch these subjects for too long. I am left haunted.

[Enrico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Se lo scopo di questo libro è farci sprofondare nelle nefandezze e perversioni di una New York ormai (ahimè?) sparita, l'autore ha fatto centro. Un viaggio crudo e allo stesso tempo dolcissimo tra prostitute, drogati, locali sadomaso e promiscuità, raccontata con semplicità e a tratti come il flusso di coscienza di uno qualsiasi di questi strani personaggi della notte dalle mille luci di New York. Personaggi strani e che ripugnano, è vero, ma da cui non possiamo staccare gli occhi e non pensare che, forse, un giorno nella loro vita (solo uno?), con gli altri angeli della più lucente corona in cielo, sarebbe bello viverlo.

[Peter Long · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came here from Legion. I don’t know how many people did the same.
I should have looked at the other reviews before writing this, maybe I’m just repeating what they’ve said or maybe I’m way off
Rick Moody is like a BTEC Brett Easton Ellis in this collection. It transported me back to my teenage years in the 90s and there’s some cool experimental writing going on for sure. If I was a teenage girl when I read this it could have made my top 5 books. Not so much as a middle aged man. - when did I become middle aged? Maybe 44 is a bit optimistic for middle age anyway - you get the idea I hope.

That’s my opinion, go read some other reviews before you decide if you should pick this one up

[B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this collection a lot. I liked how each story was wildly different from each other, in style and substance. I especially liked The Preliminary Notes because it tricked me. I thought I was reading the author’s notes about the book but the first thing it said was, “I began recording my wife’s telephone calls without her knowledge…” And I had a very big WTF reaction and tried researching the author and trying to determine what kind of person he was. Then I kept reading the book. Thank you, I liked that.

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

These stories really hold up. The titular novella is very ambitious and admirable. The final story (or bibliography if you will) is very interesting and I've never seen that done in a book or collection. There's a lot that Moody gets just right. One of our best.

[Barbara Carder · Rating 1 out of 5]

stupid

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

All the reviews include a "But"! I sure don't know why. These stories are adventurous and well written. I'm glad I read them.

[Joshua · Rating 3 out of 5]

if that guy from the hold steady wrote short stories

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great stories, particularly The James Dean Garage Band. Couldn't quite connect with the main novella though.

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first encounter with Rick Moody’s fiction happened in 2017 when I took an Introduction to Fiction class and we were assigned his story “Boys,” a story about two boys growing up into men, and also a story in which the phrase ‘boys enter the house’ is repeated all throughout in varying ways.
I’ve grown more and more fond of “Boys,” but “Boys” is not included in The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven (if you’re interested see Moody’s collection Demonology). Rick Moody’s writing in The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven involves both humor and melancholy plus a level of rambling I’m not used to reading (granted, I have been exposed to William H. Gass’s The Tunnel). I'm talking about individual sentences, where I feel like other writers would have cut up with commas and periods, but Moody does not do this, and instead continues onward. I honestly feel like I have a new feather in my cap after completing Moody’s first collection of short fiction. The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven is a collection touching on unconventional sexual behavior, loneliness, depression, drugs, isolation, and death.
I once had an English Professor say to us “the problem with short stories is that people often read them too quickly.” I think he’s right, and that said, I think multiple readings of these stories would give me a greater appreciation of them. But, for now, I can only go off of the stories that I do remember pretty well on a first read. So, I am going to steer anybody who is reading in the direction of those stories in this review, but that doesn’t mean the other stories are duds.

The shortest piece in the collection is “Twister,” a peculiar yet moving story about a young man recounting a small tornado that arrived on his college campus. For some reason, the fact that the dad is eating a plate of macaroni and cheese during this story has always stuck with me. Although I’ve never personally read Moby Dick, in “Pip Adrift” Moody takes us into the eyes of Pip, a slave on a ship of racist white sailors, touching on themes of isolation and racism. “A Good Story” is an interesting portrait of the rite of passage (I suppose) that comes with having to put an animal (in this case a horse) to sleep. ”The Preliminary Notes” centers around a man listening to his wife’s telephone calls (he secretly recorded them) in the hope to understand what caused his marriage to crumble. Finally, his story “The Apocalypse Commentary of Bob Paisner” is partially fun because it’s got footnotes as it’s literally a paper being written by the fictional Bob Paisner. Now, I can see the argument that a writer like David Foster Wallace goes overboard with his footnotes (See “The Depressed Person”, a story I think is actually great even with the lengthy footnotes), but rest assured Moody does not use his footnotes to excess. In this story, a college student named Bob Paisner writes a paper connecting his life to the bible (often reaching, I think), talks about his difficulty with a woman he’s interested in, and writes one of my favorite closing lines ever: “This draft will have to do the trick, because the sun has risen over the burned-out frats on the quadrangle, Professor Soren, and I have to get this over to you, to the department office, in less than an hour. Sorry there’s no bibliography. That’s the least of my concerns. In this afterlife” (Yes, we as readers are indeed reading the paper that Bob gives to Professor Soren).

Somber, silly, serious, sexually subversive (maybe), The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven is an admirable debut collection that I intend to come back to at the very least to reread the stories I mentioned here.

[Paul Cockeram · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first time through this book was in graduate school before Rick Moody came to the university for a week. He conducted a workshop and gave a reading and never learned to fit in with the students or faculty. The remoteness of Idaho seemed continually to appall him, New York City being fresh in his mind--I suppose--and civilization being his default. Quickly enough the man himself crowded out all my impressions of his work, so when I picked up this collection it was like brand new, and some it was amazing.

The title novella is rich with dense language, and its graceful eye for low-lifers rivals Denis Johnson at his best. It reads like a memoir of Moody's young experiments with drugs, alcohol, and sex, showing us the way people fall into these things out of a genuine and familiar hunger rather than character flaw. My first time through, I didn't know people actually lived that way, but this time I saw past the salacious details to the beating hearts of Moody's characters, to their efforts at connection or relief from loneliness. It's a beautiful work.

Two weaker pieces are "The Apocalypse Commentary of Bob Paisner" and "Twister," both of which feel very private to the author. "Twister" seems like an attempt to reconcile deep feelings and complicated problems with Moody's father, while "Apocalypse Commentary" feels like a prolonged exercise in voice that never pays off. As is typical of the whole collection, both stories attempt to elevate the problems faced by young people beyond high drama, where they seem always to have lived, to mythology. Something about the project feels stuck in the nineties to me, an earnest attempt to break through one's own ironic detachment that exceeds the mark and ends up flirting with mawkishness.

The other stories are at least readable, and a few are quite good. Highlights include "The James Dean Garage Band," which brings its Hollywood star low in order to teach him about blue collar life and teach the narrator how an artist's evolution can bring alienation. "The Preliminary Notes" and "Pip Adrift" both explore different facets of mental illness, the former featuring a chilly sociopath and the latter Melville's character who loses his mind in the ocean.

Published in the mid nineties, the collection predicts the inclusiveness movements on behalf of sexuality and gender, giving profound depth and humanity to character types typically excluded from American literature. And the sentence-level writing almost always pulls of daredevil semantics with arresting juxtapositions. But too much of the time, I wondered why Moody didn't just write an essay instead of a story. The psychology of these stories had that deeply personal quality of memoir, without the honesty, without the sense that nothing was being hidden or held back. What remained was wit and cleverness, which is enough.

[Tiny Pants · Rating 1 out of 5]

No one's more shocked than me that I gave this one star -- I mean, I own nearly every book by the man, have read all the others too, and for many years would have described Moody as one of my favorite authors. Thinking harder though, I guess it's been a few years now since I would have made that claim. And while I am pretty positive I liked The Diviners, I am more than certain I hated this collection.

A few of the pieces ("The Preliminary Notes", "A Good Story") are quite familiar from college creative writing classes and anthologies; the rest were surprisingly unfamiliar. I could have sworn I had read this entire collection before (which was why I didn't own it -- I only purchased it recently because I found it very inexpensively priced at a weird book discounter in the nearby mall), but very little of the way in realized I had not. Ergo, I can't say with certainty I would have liked it when I was younger, but my guess is I would have.

Why would I say this? Well, mainly because ten (Jesus! Ten!) years ago I would have found going on at length about sex clubs, prolific drug abuse, mental institutions, and pre-Giuliani New York edgy, whereas now I find it at best boring. The title novella, which combines three of the four (sans institutions), made me feel physically ill toward the end and was genuinely difficult to read (shades of Lunar Park minus the supernatural element).

Even the better pieces (like the two mentioned above and "Primary Sources") are less truly good reads, and more simply interesting approaches to writing short fiction. I can see why one would assign them to a college creative writing class. And in their self-indulgence (e.g. boasts of former drug intake, confessions of tawdry love affairs) I can see why a college-aged person would enjoy them. Or at least not feel physically ill while reading.

[Stacey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite, but a good read before bed. The title story is clearly the best. I have to admit that I wanted to read this book because it was by the author that the movie "The Ice Storm" was based on. I was a little disappointed by his style. ESPECIALLY when I found out that he is responsible for Garden State. Maybe I'm prejudice because I hate Zach Braff, but I hated that movie, and hence, the author. Even though I know Hollywood turns good books to crap. Anyway, I'll have to wait and judge him when I read "The Ice Storm." He seems a little conceited in his tone. Like he "knows" he's good, but at the same time, he just doesn't deliver.

[john brydges · Rating 1 out of 5]

The heading of this post offers a little nudge in the way of "What I learned from this book." I can tell you I learned that this book was not worth the $8 used dollars I paid for this used book. I could've bought 8 donuts (the good kind), or I could've sat in a sticky nudey booth for 8 minutes. Instead, I read 1 okay story that went absolutely nowhere. Then it hit me. I don't give a shit about upper middle class white people in the northeast. Yeah, yeah, Ice Storm was good (we're talkin' the movie here), but other than that, his style of experimental writing didn't lend itself to anything, however I did lend this book to the garbage can, forever. Sorry garbage!

[Vito · Rating 4 out of 5]

Storie di eroina, storie di disagio, storie di morti. Lo sguardo di Moody sulla droga più diffusa negli anni '80 ci descrive gli individui annullati in massa, in una New York austera e gelida in cui tutti si assomigliano, perché tutti sono fantasmi, dove l'eroina, inevitabile, è entrata a far parte della normalità.
A concludere, una piccola perla: la postfazione di Tommaso Pincio, che offre al lettore una chiave di lettura del libro da parte di uno che è passato sia attraverso l'eroina, sia attraverso quella New York.

Sono tre storie semplici e preziose.

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strong prose that focuses on the connections, simple and complex, between all of us. Especially New Yorkers. My favorite piece, The Apocalypse Commentary of Bob Paisner, is a revelatory ramble in which title character interprets his misadventures with drugs and women through the use of select passages in the New Testament. As for the rest of the collection, I am a bit sick of hearing about how poetically destitute the East Village was in the 80s, but this take on the subject is surely one of the most beautiful and truthful out there.

[Simone Subliminalpop · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Ancora oggi sono convinto che certe cose ti capitano perché finiscono per sembrare le più ovvie che tu possa fare. E così penso al puro caso, alla natura delle coincidenze che ci uniscono alle cose e alle altre persone. Penso alle distanze, al tempo che non c’è più, ai luoghi che sono cambiati, alle persone che ho perduto e a quelle che non voglio perdere. E penso agli angeli di quel cielo e alla loro corona lucente. E penso che non c’è nulla che mi separi da tutto questo. Davvero nulla, a parte il caso” - dalla postfazione di Tommaso Pincio