Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon: Brief Review and Giveaway

I probably never would have picked up Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule had it not won the National Book Award, but, thankfully, it did. My brief review is below, but more to the point, I'm pleased to have a copy to give to an interested reader. If you'd like to be entered in the drawing, please send an email with the subject line LORD OF MISRULE to readingape AT gmail DOT com. Entries will accepted until Friday March 11th at 11:59 pm EST. 

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There's something about the coexistence of sadness and romance in horse-racing that's hard to pin down; while its halcyon days are long past, horse-racing retains some of the pageantry and mystery that once made it the sport of kings (now the sport of conglomerates and sheiks). 

The recognition and maintenance of this duality is to my mind the central achievement of Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule. Her characters are down and desperate, but not despairing. Hope is kindled by the prospect of a big win, but the hope is on the level of a trailer home to call your own. Few of the characters seem to have any designs on leaving the track and even fewer of the horses possess anything like quality. Even the plot of the novel seems aimless and beside the point; scene and sentiment are as important as success. 

Ultimately it is Gordon's linguistic verdancy that imbues the near-squalor of low-stakes horse-racing with something like nobility. Her casual, unremarked on deployment of a by-gone lexicon resuscitates, however briefly, the possibility of the perfect horse and the transcendent race.

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Paul Auster | Sunset Park | Audiobook Giveaway

So I've had this audiobook version of Paul Auster's Sunset Park sitting here just waiting to be given away, but I wanted to make sure I at least liked the book a little. And, a couple of hundred pages into it, I do. So, if you are interested, leave a comment below. I'll pick the winner out of a hat (the name, not the actual person) and contact them about mailing information. This is limited to folks living in the US or Canada. Sorry about that, rest of the world (well, that and all the pollution and stuff). I'll take entrants until Friday, December 3rd at 11:59 pm EST.

Hope everyone out there had a Happy Thanksgiving and is settling in for a pleasant winter of reading.

                                     Cheers, the Ape

UPDATE: Well, the gods of randomness have spoken and congratulations Savannah! Thanks all for entering.

Book Blogger Appreciation Week Giveaway

So, the Ape will be posting a few things in conjunction with Book Blogger Appreciation Week. First up, a two-volume Jeanette Winterson giveaway.

Winterson won the Whitbread Award for first fiction for Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a funny, sad, thinly-disguised account of her childhood and coming of age in a evangelical family in Northern England. So that's the first title.

The second is Winterson's The Stone Gods, a satrical novel about three people chosen to colonize a second earth but, due to a technical malfunction, end up returning to the past. The New York Times called the novel "Scary, beautiful, witty, and wistful by turn, dipping into the known past as it explores potential futures.

So if you'd like to be entered in the giveaway, please send us an email (readingape AT gmail DOT com) with your mailing address by Friday, September 17 (Sadly, we can only offer this to people in the US and Canada). We'll put the names in the hat to decide the winner.

You can check out a complete list of Book Blogger Appreciation Week giveaways here.