"Beautiful, melancholic and eerily quiet every time the thunder finishes rolling." After the Flood. Dead End Follies. Appreciations. Endless.

Totally. And massively too. Excerpt? Word.

"The Chicago-based author's quiet brand of domestic tragedy, often best portrayed in his collections of short stories, treats you like fine wine: it gets better as you both get older, and After the Flood might be his finest yet." 

"A swift and elegiac little story about loving things you can't have anymore." Orphans gets Dead End Follies'd. And likes it. A lot.

It really does. And it really is a wonderful, and wonderfully appreciated, review. So, drinks, many, on us, whenever we finally meet Benoit. Cool? Cool. Excerpt. Yes.

"Our world is changing before our very eyes. The lives we've been taught to live are becoming obsolete. What we were taught was right is becoming wrong. What's what ORPHANS is about: our surrender of control over change. The world we created that has left us behind. ORPHANS is about the future, but the issues it raises are pertinent today. Ben Tanzer wrote a novel that is efficient and graceful, yet it is throbbing with political implications I'm not sure it quite understands. That, my friends, is a prime exemple of the alchemy that creates great literature. It is both deliberate and incidental."

"Tanzer's artistic sensitivity is attuned to the subtlest shifts within." So Different Now is selected as Dead End Follies Best Short Story Collection of 2012.

Really. And awesomely cool that. Big thanks to Dead End Follies and the Benoit Lelievre for the year-end love and ongoing support.

"Tanzer is playing in Haruki Murakami's territory of crafting stories to describe the most complex, wordless emotions in the most graceful way possible." So Different Now gets Dead End Follies'd for "The New York Stories Tour 2012." And likes it. A lot.

We said there would be more and we couldn't be more geeked about this most kind review from the Dead End Follies and Benoit Lelievre. Big thanks sir and drinks on us for sure when next we meet. Excerpt? Totally.

"SO DIFFERENT NOW left its imprint on me. Because that's what powerful stories do. They scar you and chip away at you, make you a different person." 

 

"The comparison might appear easy, borderline obvious to you, but I could definitively feel an influence of John Irving in Tanzer's prose." My Father's House gets Dead End Follies'd. And likes it. A lot.

Big thanks to the Dead End Follies and the Benoit Lelievre for some most kind, and moving, words about My Father's House. Drinks on us sir for sure wherever, and whenever, we next meet. And now for some excerpt. 

"It's deliberately structured to reward patience and I thought it was pretty clever. The evolution of the narrator's trail of thoughts doesn't appear evident if you read ten pages, but if you read forty or fifty, the transformation becomes noticeable. I appreciated this particularly because it's hard to render the concept of time passing in a book, while being fair to the reader. I thought Tanzer found a very creative way to do so. His chapters are short, but resonate with each other. It's textbook dialogism, I suppose but it's applied to such a minimalistic execution, it makes it beautiful and rewarding to read."

When literary worlds collide. Code for Failure meets the Dead End Follies.

The Ryan Bradley's Code for Failure gets some much kind attention from new acquaintance Benoit Lelievre's Dead End Follies lit blog.

"I was reminded of many artists I loved when reading CODE FOR FAILURE. Kevin Smith being the first. CLERKS was the first big time comedy about over-the-counter jobs. It reminded me of personal hero of mine Henry Rollins, who brings politics to the masses in an entertaining, digestible format. There were echoes of Raymond Carver also. It had everything to charm me. But what made it truly remarkable is that despite that his influences are clear, the ideas are his alone. He is a new voice, a new force to be reckoned with."

This Book - and Podcast - Will Change Your Life - Code for Failure by Ryan W. Bradley.

We suppose we could pretend we are unbiased when it comes to Code for Failure, Ryan W. Bradley or even the Ryan W. Bradley Fails The Internet blog tour which is being hosted by the endlessly terrific TNBBC's The Next Best Book Blog. But why bother, we love them all, we are fanboy and when these things crash together in a morass of literary awesomeness, we say beautiful, all of it, this is the goodness that serves as our fuel and the point of building this faux empire, being involved with things we love, reading, blogging, podcasting, authors, indy everything. So yes to all of it, yo, and no, we have not dropped our yo mode quite yet. Still, all of this said, Code for Failure is a wonderful thing, a meditation on the idea that even when you're mostly joyful, or even quasi-joyful, mistakes will be made, and failure will loom, until we believe happiness and success, however, we define these things, are really possible and available to us. And yes, maybe that means that Ryan W. Bradley is the punk Seuss, but then so be it, that's beautiful as well. Now, onto the business at hand, please do hit the podcast, please do enjoy some book blurb below, and because this an official book tour stop, please do plan to hit tomorrow's stop at Dead End Follies as well.

"As I consumed Code for Failure at first full of joy, then dread, then joy again, I couldn't help but think about the last time I tried to join the Century Club. To join you need to drink one shot of beer per minute for 100 minutes. At first there is humor and ease, the beer flows, you catch your breath, and dive back in. But then the minutes come at you faster and faster, things go wrong, beer is spilled, you lose your confidence, and a sense of anxiety begins to creep into the proceedings. At some point though you remember that this is supposed to be fun, that you can enjoy the moment and that you can stop being so wrapped-up in your fears and confusion. And that I think is Code for Failure, an exploration, even explanation, for how life can be so potentially full of pleasure and self-absorption, and how all is fine until mistakes are made, and mistakes will be made, and when they are, the hole will deepen, and you will not be sure that you can find your way out, until you do, because you will. And yes, I know I sound like I'm getting all Seuss and riffing on the punky, drunken, tattooed version of Oh, The Places You'll Go!, but that's okay, because that's what Ryan W. Bradley knows so well, and captures so vividly, life unfolding in real time, decisions made and not, love and loss, and the idea that failure is always looming until we are willing to believe in ourselves, take chances and remember that it's okay to be happy again."