≫ Download Unlucky Lucky Days American Readers Series No 9 Daniel Grandbois 9781934414101 Books

Unlucky Lucky Days American Readers Series No 9 Daniel Grandbois 9781934414101 Books

Download As PDF : Unlucky Lucky Days American Readers Series No 9 Daniel Grandbois 9781934414101 Books

Unlucky Lucky Days American Readers Series No 9 Daniel Grandbois 9781934414101 Books

I'm sure this will be great for someone, but it's not my cup of tea. I'm not a big fan of absurdity and surrealism.


Tags : Unlucky Lucky Days (American Readers Series No. 9) [Daniel Grandbois] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Book by Grandbois, Daniel,Daniel Grandbois,Unlucky Lucky Days (American Readers Series No. 9),BOA Editions Ltd.,1934414107,Literary,FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS Life Stages General,FICTION Literary,FICTION Satire,FICTION Short Stories (single author),Fiction,Fiction - General

Unlucky Lucky Days American Readers Series No 9 Daniel Grandbois 9781934414101 Books Reviews

" Unlucky Lucky Days" is a book of 73 succulent stories. Every word resonates with an allegorical style that opens the doors to an unusual universe of objects and characters-- "The Chair," "The Fish," "The Log," "The Yarn," "New Heaven," "The Urge," "The Left Hand." These stories are astonishing and surreal, satirical and philosophical, and written with great humor.

A third of the stories center on humans, but you will meet many other strange creatures here as well, like The Three Cranes--Fly No Oval, Hear No Oval, and Walk No Oval--and the beautiful but doomed giraffe, curiously named Happy Birthday Grandma.

From "The Hair" "When the wind was just right, the hair made throatlike tunnels of itself and imitated birdscalls. `WHIP-poor-WILL... WHIP-poor-WILL,' chirped the hair at twilight, sometimes four hundred times without stopping."

"Unlucky Lucky Days" is an absolute treasure! One of my favorite tales is "Greener Pastures," in which a giant man-eating frog, who dreams of becoming an architect, shapes his dung heaps into replicas of the churches he has devoured so that when he leaves "once more for greener pastures, the people [are] stuck there, praying for their own.".
With this collection, Daniel Grandbois shows himself to be the heir apparent to Russell Edson, premier American prose poem surrealist. Many of the surreal non-sequiturs Edson's so fond of are in evidence here--not, of course, the same material, but the same kind of startling jump cuts that Edson is so well known for.

Of course Grandbois has his own style, and it is quirky and scintillating. But it is strikingly evident that he has read a lot of Edson, which is certainly not a bad thing at all. A prose poem that can somehow combine ice cream and spider legs is one example. Here again, of course, it's hard to know if these should be called prose poems or flash fictions. I tend to think of Edson more as a poet, so likewise Grandbois.

Of course on the other hand, there are the two brilliant collections of pieces by W.S. Merwin, Houses and Travellers, and The Miner's Pale Children--and these to me read more like flash fictions (most of them). But back to Grandbois--for a stimulating reading experience that parcels out surprising juxtapositions of surreal events and objects in small doses, you can't do much better than Unlucky Lucky Days. Put this next to Russel Edson's The Clam Theater and The Reason Why the Closet Man is Never Sad.

That's what I would do, anyway....
UNLUCKY LUCKY DAYS, a debut assortment, is fabulist flash-fic of the highest order. Nothing in the book runs so long as three full pages, & in general the work eludes the social & economic demarcations of what we like call "realism." Instead it offers disturbing yet charming shards of unbridled imagination. In a typical metamorphosis, a brass lion's-head knocker takes leave of its doorway, setting off to play middle-school pranks. All told, the collection divvies 73 surreal miniatures among seven sections labeled, as if Grandbois were a good Judeo-Christian, "Sunday" through "Saturday." Yet the sensibility comes across as pagan; spirits reanimate the world's common clay. He can be gloomy, suggesting for instance the nightmare morning of 9/11, or he can be healing, turning the Inferno into a Tunnel of Love. Indeed, inspired reversals at the last minute distinguish nearly all these abrupt dream-loops, now childlike, now chilling. These DAYS can create a climactic rush via a well-worked lack of commas & they can arrive at ironies that supply rightness and closure. At their best, they push cross-cutting valences to peak intensity, then leave us gasping. Now, on occasion, there emerges a world we recognize. "Hat and Rack" might have to do with sexual secrecy (the final word is "closet"), and "The Sea Squirt" might make an environmental argument. But even when the stories lack such grounding, the writer negotiates the shoals of cuteness -- the obvious danger here -- masterfully. He may work with signifying wads of gum or, repeatedly, with articulate spiders, yet he nearly always strikes a balance between the ticklish and the haunting. Those wads of gum mutate into the Weird Sisters of Macbeth (indeed, this text is rife with others, everyone from Borges to Bob Dylan) & in the end they achieve the timelessness of geometry.
Daniel has a keen sense of the bizarre, often overlooked aspects of life. His stories of stains and hairs are told from a perspective few, if any have the pleasure of seeking and the uniqueness factor is high! Not all will understand his art but anyone who is needing a trip down an unconventional road, try Unlucky Lucky Days.
I'm sure this will be great for someone, but it's not my cup of tea. I'm not a big fan of absurdity and surrealism.