As you probably know, raconteur and ace commenter Jay B. hobnobs with (and occasionally pinch-hits for) the cream of snark society — your Tboggs, your Edrosos. But even though he hangs with the habitués of the modern Algonquin Round Table, he’s not above visiting the Algonquin Kids Table, with our paper plates, folding chairs, and sippy cups of Hawaiian Punch, and very kindly invited me to a publishing event he helped put together in honor of the sublimely strange Awkward Two.
A book of weird, funny, and astonishingly short stories (the theme of the volume is “brevity”), Awkward Two is the second in the Awkward series from Awkward Press (the guy in charge of naming things at Awkward Press previously worked thinking up song and album titles for the group Talk Talk). I haven’t read the book yet, but I heard several authors read from it last night, and saw a number of micro-movies adapted from the stories, and I’m recommending it on that basis. It was richly wordy, subversively funny stuff that started off lightly, teasingly kissing your brain, then got overly aggressive and wouldn’t stop until it gave you a cerebral hickey. Which, frankly, is just my kinda thing.
Awkward is available from Amazon, but if you order through their website they’ll throw in a DVD of the short films. (Reportedly, the soon-to-be-available iPad version will come with the movies embedded in the text, but that strikes us as unholy sorcery.)
Somehow, I think the picture would be even funnier if he was holding a really huge condom. What in my life guarding days we called a Long Island Whitefish.
Left by Dr. BDH on September 29th, 2010