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Ben Greenman is a New York Times-bestselling author who has written both fiction and nonfiction. He is the author of several acclaimed works of fiction, including the novel The Slippage and the short-story collections What He's Poised to Do and Superbad. He is the co-author of the bestselling Mo' Meta Blues with Questlove, the bestselling I Am Brian Wilson with Brian Wilson, Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You? with George Clinton, and more. His fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Paris Review, Zoetrope- All Story, McSweeney's, and elsewhere, and have been widely anthologized. His most recent book is Dig If You Will The Picture, a meditation on the life and career of Prince.
A remix of some previously published stories and funny bits that amuses, and amuses some more. New Yorker editor and occasional fictionalist Greenman has many of the stylistic hallmarks of the McSweeney's crew-a hyper-reflexive sense of satirical humor, post-postmodern structure, and a sneaky knack for rendering the personal-and, fortunately, no delusions of being the messiah of literature. Not surprisingly, he has already published under the McSweeney's imprint, which is where, in hardcover, most of these pieces first appeared, under the title Superbad. It's not clear exactly how much this book differs from the last; the stories, largely, are similar, and again they feature the imaginary Laurence Onge, the putative mentor to Greenman ( I can only commit the crime of improvement ). What remains after the remix is a tasty selection of longer and shorter stories that are funnier than just about anything this side of Neal Pollack. Not surprisingly, it's the shorter ones that spring to mind afterward, since long usually meaning serious and therefore not funny. Notes on Revising Last Night's Dream is just a scribbled piece of nonsense, but it kicks nonetheless ( Knife next to breakfast plate need not bloom into flowers ), and Marlon Brando's Dreaming is four pages of disquietingly disgusting wonderfulness. Longer pieces indeed often fare less well, like the dreary, Russian-set Snapshot, although the bleak Theft of a Knife, about a hapless rich man on a 19th-century train who's relieved of everything he's got, has a morbid profundity about it that lingers. And it wouldn't do not to mention the genius Blurbs, which constructs an entire story out of made-up book-critic blurbs, including even one from this publication. Something extraordinary. (Kirkus Reviews)
