Garden State

An amazing collection of short stories which take a fresh look at our media-dominated culture. Wherever John Hawkes and Angela Carter are now, I'm sure they're quite pleased with your work. I feel privileged having had you as a classmate in Angela Carter's speculative fiction writing seminar, even if you weren't as interested in science fiction as yours truly.

Rich Moody won a Pushcart award for this. Nominations for the award come from editors who would have liked to publish a book, but couldn't usually for commercial reasons. It's easy to see why publishing it at most commercial houses would have been difficult. Moody is a tough and challenging writer, but well worth the effort. It is not just New Jersey that he captures, but a very real group of young people and a very real time in America. I recommend all of his books, but have a special feeling for Garden State.

I have only recently discovered Rick Moody & in a short period have read almost all of his books - this is my favourite. The stories here are reasonably varied in content, & he has a lot of fun taking liberties with form & style & content (what a story should be). These are not necessarily just straight narratives, but play around with ideas of meaningful coincedence & circles of happenings. It's always good to see a writer unafraid of taking risks in order to get at some sort of truth - it's what great artistry is all about (I think anyway). I too, along with the other person who has written a review, like the stories 'Phrase Book' (the girl who took a massive hit of acid) and 'The Apocalypse of Bob Paisner' (a term paper in which a guy flunking out of school relates his life to the Bible). One thing about Moody, apart from everything else, is that his characters here are always wholly believeable. Even if the situations are sometimes extreme, the characters ring true - they are created with a great deal of empathy, & if the reaction to them isn't always empathetic, at least it's with understanding. This, to me, is the most important feature. The last story in the book is quite self-revelatory. It's a neat idea - Moody uses a selection of books from his bookshelf as a 'Bibliography' & footnotes occasional ones in order to explain certain parts of his life. I think it takes a person a lot of courage to expose themselves implicitly like this (but it sure beats a publishers blurb on the back cover). Rick Moody is a very good writer & you don't get too much better in contemporary writing than Ring of the Brightest Angels Around Heaven.

I read this book by chance as a project in school. I happened to see the cover of it and got interested, a very fortunate coincidence for me. The book contains a number of stories, and every one is individual. They capture you and immerse you into a big pot of feelings and thoughts, which is extremely hard to get away from. Every story is individual because they all have something special, like one in which a man connects all the happenings in his life to the apocalypse of the Bible, or the one in which an interview is taking place with a girl who took 70 hits of acid in one day and survived with a wacko mind. The stories are not grand or magnificent, but small and commonplace. I instantly fell in love with this book and this author and I can strongly recommend anyone interested in more or less alternative reading to read it.