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| Lounge Lizard (Paperback - New) |
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Full blurb:
Lounge Lizard, the much-anticipated sequel to Hating Olivia, has the humour of Bukowski (Women) with the unflinching honesty of Celine (Journey To The End of the Night). Ronald Reagan has just been elected president and Max Zajack can't make it out the door. Trying to recover from Olivia, Max hasn't had sex in years, suffers from writer's block and is mired in debt. But Max's luck changes and, as the corporate machine pulls him in, he begins meeting all kinds of women ready and willing to jump into bed with him. Money and sex are enough for any man...or are they?
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First page first lines:
There I was, on hands and knees, crawling over the filthy carpet hunting for a cigarette butt that hadn’t been smoked down to the nub.
By now I'm talking out loud to myself. It was three in the morning, and the last thing I felt like was putting my clothes on and running out to the 24-hour 7-Eleven for a fresh pack of Marlboros. I was up to nearly three packs a day as it was and woke up every morning with a vicious hacking cough. But what the hell. Guys like Picasso and Eubie Blake smoked all their lives and made it to a hundred years old or damned near – that's what I told myself. Maybe I'd get lucky like them.
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Category: Novel
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Author: Mark SaFranko
Zsolt Alapi in an interview for The Danforth Review asks Mark SaFranko: Both of your novels satirize the American Dream; specifically, Lounge Lizard is a vicious indictment of the Reagan years and the "ME" generation. Do you consider your writing to be, to some extent, social criticism?
SaFranko: I would say yes, insofar as you’re reading the inner life of an outsider, a malcontent who happens to be stuck inside a machine that’s antagonistic, or at least not sympathetic to, his deepest self. Max is a man out of step with the world. But at no time does anything political interest him, or me, in the least, which is not to say either of us is unaware of what’s going on in the world. So that’s a modifying element here. I suppose you could call it informal social criticism.
ZA: How would you want people to remember Mark SaFranko, the writer?
SaFranko: As multifaceted. I’m a playwright, a short story writer, an occasional poet and essayist as well as a novelist. I’m a songwriter and musician. I’ve worked as an actor. Sometimes I paint. I’ve always been fascinated by artists who have successfully crossed back and forth between disciplines: Noel Coward, Bob Dylan, Anthony Burgess, Da Vinci, Cocteau, Paul Bowles, Charlie Chaplin, etc. I’ve simply not been able to prevent myself from succumbing to the lure of the guitar, or the paint brush or whatever. Nevertheless, I get out of bed seven days a week and go straight to the typewriter, even when I have to report to a bad job. Writing is the core for me. But of course there’s this: once I’m dead, will I care how or if anyone remembers me? I don’t think that anyone, Shakespeare included, could take himself that seriously.
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Publisher: Murder Slim Press
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Reviews:
"Lounge Lizard works on many levels—as a modern, Alfie-style rumination on sex and what it means to be a man, as a dirty, Bukowski-esque romp—but ultimately its greatest strength is as a tale of what happened to those hedonistic, free spirits who ran up against the seismic culture shift that happened at the end of the 70's. - dogmatika.com
"This is a writer at the peak of his powers; the prose is as slick as a mother fucker, the breath-taking honesty and raw emotion, a sheer joy to read. Even the artwork is spot on, an iconic luminous yellow, which will stand out like a beacon of hope on any erudite reader’s bookshelf. With the publication of Lounge Lizard a ground-breaking moment in literature has occurred." - Joseph Ridgwell, The Guild of Outsider Writers.
"Echoes of Dan Fante's Bruno Dante permeate SaFranko's brilliant follow-up to Hating Olivia, which is as honest and readable as its predecessor. Each page reflects the personality of a writer who can see a poetic beauty in the most mundane of experiences - suggesting SaFranko can hold his own with Miller, Fante (John and Dan) and Bukowski." - James Doorne (Bizarre Magazine - Issue 133)
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| Book code: BTD003 |
| Price: GBP £ 9.95 |
| USD $ 16.50 |
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