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I waited literally forever for this to come out and it was well worth it. I've never read it, but I have it from hearsay that it is really good, well nigh great, so you know you can trust me on this. I think the author is an asshole, but I'm not going to say that. However the book is marvelous, full of self-reference almost to the point of absurdity, indeed it could have been subtitled "Pointing At Myself." Everybody should read this and I'm not just saying that. Oh, and I never exaggerate and I always lie.

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This was a lot of fun to read. Skipping around time and place in an insanely non-linear journey. Written with a joyfully crazed attitude I loved.

Lots of snakes and snake people... I think. ( )

I wasn't sure which I appreciated less—the insincere concern or the genuine indifference.

There was a certain apprehension in approaching this book. There is a politeness to goodreads (despite the intentions of its robber baron overlords) and I dreaded interrupting such civility. The author is a sociable figure, not mercenary. One who regularly succeeds in making me laugh. His presence doesn't appear to simply push his own work. That is refreshing. I was hoping I wouldn't find a drunken bizarre exercise in the grotesque. Editorial certainly contains those elements, but is so much more.

Gentle were the small night waves lapping warmly against its cold, monolithic form.

Creation is a starting point, the concept is explored in myriad guises and finds form in consumption and then evacuation. Editorial recalls the best of Bataille: grim and often hilarious

4.7 stars ( )

Sometimes it takes a madman to write about a mad world. Or a mad man. And Arthur Graham comes across as one pissed off mofo in Editorial. He does not suffer fools gladly. He’s angry at this stupid, ignorant messed up world filled with toxic poison, liars, and politicians. Excuse me, that was redundant.

Chaotic. Satiric. Bizarric. Editorial is barely contained; it’s bursting at the seams, running off the rails, a few crayons shy of sanity. You have to stick with it to the end to make sense of it. And by “sense,” I mean kinda. It’s a slippery eel of a book. Even when you start to get what might be going on, you lose it again. It fools you and taunts you.

This comes from Bizarro Press, and it does have that hard-to-quantify Bizarro quality to it, which I describe as a willful disregard for the polite niceties of mainstream sensibility. Given what little Bizarro I have read,* I think of it not so much as a specific style but an impression of an author breaking or tweaking taboos. The feeling that they are challenging that which is supposedly sacred, revered, or just plain family-friendly. I respect that as a goal even if I don’t seek out much Bizarro lit. Editorial strays from what I understand as the typical works of the genre in that most Bizarro is straight narrative. Albeit with talking testicles, an anus with teeth, or babies taking murder holidays in the Hamptons. While Editorial has that Bizarro vibe, it also has an experimental edge, that of an author who is breaking narrative conventions, too, and pushing the possibilities of writing.

[Interlude]
Both of my novels have been described by a couple of readers as Bizarro. I find this categorization peculiar. It seems to equate “weird” with “Bizarro.” By that token, Williams S. Burroughs would be called “Bizarro.” Categorizations are imperfect, let’s admit that. “Experimental” is an ambiguous term. But I wrote Death by Zamboni in 2000 long before Bizarro ever existed. And by the time I finished A Greater Monster, I had only just heard of the genre Bizarro and had never read a Bizarro story. I may have a weird imagination, but I think after reading a couple Bizarro novels, neither A Greater Monster nor Death by Zamboni feels anything like Bizarro fiction. For all its flaws, “experimental” is a better term to my mind, and I consider myself to be an experimental writer.

Perhaps even better than being bizarre, I found Editorial to be funny. One utterly ridiculous scene involving Charles Bukowski makes no sense at all (even the character in the story went “huh?”), and I burst out on the L reading it. Editorial deserves four stars just for making me feel foolish in public.

*I know, you’d think I’d have read more, right? But, no, this is only the third Bizarro novella or story I’ve ever read. ( )

Arthur Graham's Editorial has a lot going on but there comes an interesting moment when you get what Graham is trying to do and it is all worthwhile. Plus you get a look at a world wherein Donald Fagen was the 40th president of the USA. You can read my entire discussion here: http://ireadoddbooks.com/editorial-by-arthur-graham/

Review snippet:

Here’s a quick synopsis that I hope gives nothing away. This book is a series of stories and it is your job to put them all together. The book features an orphan who tells his life story. It also features a strange drifter who turns into a snake. There’s also a horrifying dystopia a thousand or so years into the future wherein global warming is no longer questioned as a valid reality and, most interesting to me, some meta wherein an editor interacts with a book, which may or may not be this novel.

I really didn’t like this book at first and almost set it down around page 40 because I seriously had no idea where it was going. But even in the initial seeming-chaos of the plot, Graham’s engaging writing style kept me going. I am also not generally the biggest metafiction fan because meta as a plot device has lately become tiresome. Writers need to have a good reason for using meta elements and need to be good enough at their craft to pull it off. Writers like David Foster Wallace (whom I find very nearly unreadable and I receive a lot of flak every time I reveal this opinion) and Charlie Kaufman have spawned a lot of imitators who mistake endless snarky self-reference for fine writing and invoke meta rather than write a good novel. I am happy to say that Graham’s meta – if it is meta – works. ( )