This short and piquant retelling of the Faust legend goes down a treat. Our hero is newspaperman Eustace Bogges, who handles the letters-to-the-editor feature of the fictional Washington Oracle. Overweight, prickly, vain, and intellectually astute, Booges is the sort of vivid character John Kennedy Toole might have given us if "A Confederacy of Dunces" had been set in D.C. rather than New Orleans.
Bogges’s complacency begins to unravel when he is haunted—first in reveries, then in reality—by psychiatrist Grippin Fall, who happens to be the Devil. From this latter-day Mephisto our hero learns the true story behind such momentous events as the emergence of humankind (Eve was an ape-woman who achieved self-awareness) and the invention of money (Croesus’s grandfather Sadyattes was responsible). The demonic compact Dr. Fall proposes is simple: “Listen to me, Mr. Bogges, and the world will listen to you.” And what principle does Bogges wish the world—or at least Donald Trump’s Washington—would take to heart? A kind of lapidary Eleventh Commandment that goes, “Mind your own business.”
Nossiter’s extravaganza is offered by Heresy Press, an independent publisher devoted to preserving and protecting fiction that grates on the nerves of sensitivity readers at mainstream houses. Consider the device on which the plot turns, Bogges’s fake letter to the Oracle from a fictive U.S. citizen raised in India. S.J. Chakravarti’s lament begins, “Sir, as a life long citizen for twenty years just now, I am telling you with too much sorrow that people are not minding their business. Drivers are not knowing my destination. Bankers are not knowing my check. Supermarkets are not selling food of first freshness and tastiness…”
While I applaud those tour-de-force sentences, some people will doubtless find Nossiter guilty of stereotyping, or even the dreaded “appropriation.” I would invite these scolds to consider a truth that the late, great film critic Pauline Kael articulated while celebrating the cinematic oeuvre of Jean Cocteau: “Art is the greatest game … There is only one rule, as we learned in Orphée: Astonish us!”
Devil Take It is a sharp, darkly comic satire set against the backdrop of Trump-era Washington, D.C.
In this clever and timely moral fable, Satan arrives on the scene disguised as Dr. Grippin Fall, a psychiatrist with a peculiar diagnosis for Eustace Bogges, the editor of the Washington Oracle’s letters page: mortality. As the Devil guides Bogges through a series of bizarre therapy sessions, he entices him with a doctrine of laughter and mirth inspired by the 16th-century writer François Rabelais. Meanwhile, Bogges, under a pseudonym, pens a letter to his own page suggesting that society would be better off…
If you’re a vintage Hollywood-comedy fan who aspires to be a Groucho-Harpo-Chico completist, Giraffes on Horseback Salad is the book for you. It might be called the best movie the Marx Brothers never made—“movie” in the sense of an elaborately captioned and intricately illustrated storyboard. Even by the standards of that freewheeling medium called the graphic novel, this is an audacious piece of work.
The genesis of Giraffes on Horseback Salad was complicated. Sometime in the mid-1930’s, the celebrated painter Salvador Dalí got it in his head to bring about a Marx Brothers film keyed to the reality-altering agenda of a mysterious Surrealist Woman. Evidently Dalí regarded the Marxes as kindred spirits, and because he was friends with Harpo, he imagined his treatment might get a fair hearing at MGM. Louis B. Mayer, who had no affection for Minnie’s zany sons, gave it the boot.
For generations the treatment was thought lost. With the help of the Centre Pompidou, the indefatigable Josh Frank tracked down Dalí’s original pages, handwritten in French, including vital marginalia. From this material Frank and his collaborators extrapolated a complete screenplay, including dialogue in which one can easily hear Groucho’s trademark inflections:
“Remember, Jimmy, love is the enemy of productivity, and if you can’t eat crackers in bed while conducting business, how will you have time to sleep on the crumbs?”
“Do you need a hand? I’d lend you mine, but they’re attached to my arms. I could lend you some spare arms, but they’re all back at my office filing their nails, in alphabetical order.”
“Caught you sleeping on the job, eh? I’m from the sheep’s union. One of the guys down at headquarters got a complaint that you lost count.”
“And where is the compassion—I say compassion—for the little people whose top hats are too big? I propose a bottom hat. That will solve the problem pronto.”
Surrealist icon Salvador Dali and iconoclast comedians The Marx Brothers planned a never-made film that merged their sensibilities in a sublime mashup of absurdity, surrealism, slapstick, and wit. But the original screenplay was lost until now. It sounds like fan fiction, but it s true: modern art icon Salvador Dali struck up a friendship with chaotic pantomimer Harpo Marx, which led to a proposed film, Giraffes on Horseback Salad. Rejected by MGM studios, the script was thought lost forever. But author Josh Frank found it, and with comedian and writer Tim Heidecker (Tim and Eric; Tim and Eric s Zone…
The award-winning and prolific Elizabeth Hand has given us, with the blessing of the Shirley Jackson estate, a sequel to The Haunting of Hill House. Hand acquits herself well, getting us back to Jackson’s spooky manse via an ingenious narrative hook. Struggling playwright Holly Sherwin has received a development grant for her work-in-progress, The Witching Hour, and now all she needs is an inspiringly outré venue in which to write a polished draft while hosting—and drawing additional energy from—a gang of theater-savvy friends slated to become the show’s original off-Broadway cast and crew. You can imagine what location Holly picks.
Shirley Jackson penned one of the most beautifully cadenced openings in American fiction, the passage that begins, “Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within,” and ends with the author averring, “silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.” It is a measure of Hand’s achievement that the opening beats of A Haunting on the Hill are equally hypnotic.
“Most houses sleep, and nearly all of them dream: of conflagrations and celebrations, births and buckled floors; of children’s footsteps and clapboards in need of repair, of ailing pets and peeling paint, wakes and weddings and windows that no longer keep out rain and snow but welcome them, furtively, when no one is home to notice … Hill House neither sleeps nor dreams. Shrouded within its overgrown lawns and sprawling woodlands, the long shadows of mountains and ancient oaks, Hill House watches. Hill House waits.”
THE FIRST AUTHORISED FOLLOW-UP NOVEL TO THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE
'A fitting - and frightening - homage to The Haunting of Hill House ' NEW YORK TIMES 'Full of totemic menace and a heart-in-mouth, can't-look-away frisson' BRIDGET COLLINS 'Beautifully creepy. Welcome back to Hill House' ALIX E. HARROW 'Like Hill House itself, this accomplished tribute stands alone: disturbing and unforgettable' GUARDIAN 'A Haunting on the Hill captures the essence of the original whilst offering something brand new' CARLY REAGON
**Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Harper's Bazaar**
When Sonya Orlova, a successful 1930s horror-film actress, crosses paths with a gorilla whose brain has been swapped for the frozen cerebrum of the late Charles Darwin, the two are inspired to write and produce a cycle of evolution-themed monster movies—with Sonya in her greatest role, Korgora the Ape Woman! As this offbeat and controversial Hollywood series finds a devoted cult audience, Sonia’s relationship with her strange simian collaborator acquires an intensity neither could have imagined at first. Then disaster strikes, as zealous opponents to Darwin’s ideas contrive to put the Ape Woman out of business.
