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How the whale got his throat, a tale about why whales dont eat people anymore. It contains a few rhymes schemes, but for the most part it's prose.

There's some words here!

To be totally fair, this isn't fully wordless. There have been two sentences so far :(

“ There I go, straying from the subject again. But getting old is like climbing up to a great height, and when you look down, all the paths intertwine. You can't go down one but that sooner or later it's connected to another.”

I'm a chapter in and although I like I let's make it known that white people writing books like this is extremely suspect and makes me uncomfortable. Immediately, themes of race and colorism abound. It feels gross and inappropriate, though, language and context aside, it's pleasantly written.

"The street is the most democratic museum there is"

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Second story was equally boring and anticlimactic, so maybe this is just the gist of the author's stories, which again don't seem much like stories but pages long of a setting.

The first short story, for its title especially (same title as the collection itself), was extremely boring, underwhelming, and virtually plotless. I mean cmon, a guy's nicknamed Fuckface and there's NO discernable reason? And on top of that, he's kind, considerate and in good shape (the only descriptions made of him in so many words)??? I feel scammed already.

“… Of course, now, I've come to believe that each and every life has the number of trials it is destined to have, and, if you take one away, another one fills its place. Your life is your response to these trials. No life is easy, and no life is hard; it’s just what adjectives you choose to use to describe it.”

“At night Joey would argue with his sister. He considered her an optimist; her fantasies were not dark and therefore not true, just fantasies.”

"...I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate."

"Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive."

"By constructing these kinds of narratives, he engages his audience in his protagonists' quests, and leads readers to pause and look, to pay attention to the homeless man sleeping in the street, the array of abandoned old doors, the cans filled with trash."

"Often lonely and in great need of attention and affection, Keats's characters are frequently depicted canvassing their familiar neighbor turf in search of something that might ring about a sense of renewal or someone who might display nurturing feelings towards them... {their} real or imaginary outings are often propelled by the necessity to find solace from oppressive feelings at home..."

Narrator Andrew Whitaker is a pitiful, sociopathic predator who preys on some and metaphorically falls over yelping as if newly wounded to avoid personal responsibility to others. Through a stream of letters, some written to various friends, others in response to those who’ve submitted to a literary magazine of which he is editor, his persona is slowly revealed. He’s reviling, I love it. A real pos.

I've seen Batman give cash twice now- a homeless woman in vol 1, and here for crashing into another woman's balcony and breaking her flower pots... interesting choices.

Excellent readalike to Confederacy of dunces

"You can tell it anyway you want... you can be I or he or she we or they or you, and you won't be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.

"I think it was always running, my old man's fear. Perpetual and wide spread.
Fear of being a bad father. Fear of being a bad husband. Fear of being arrested. Fear of being called skinny like when he was a kid. Fear of being poorer tomorrow that he was today. Fear of giving too much of his life to swing shift and not enough to his son. Fear of cops. Fear of lawyers. Fear of getting injured. Fear of dying..."