The Silent End by Samuel Sattin is so totally available like right now.

So totally right now and so much more here.

This Book Will Change Your Life - Zinsky the Obscure by the Ilan Mochari.

Should we begin by talking bias and subjectivity? Influences? Or fathers? Should we riff on the awesomely Jewey tones and textures of Zinsky the Obscure by the Ilan Mochari, easily the most Jewey thing we've read since the equally Jewey League of Somebodies by the Samuel Sattin? And what is Jewey anyway, much less the Zinsky himself? A mix of humor and suffering, sardonic wit, self-deprecation, striving, and needy desperation? Mothers and masturbation? Roth meets Dickens meets Lenny Bruce? It is all of that. It is also talking Bruce and Saul Bellow and Meyer Lansky with our father, and the pride he took when talking about Jews. The first, the best, the toughest, the smartest, and in the case of Lansky, the rarest of mob guys: a mobster who actually retired before dying of old age. Old age! Only a Jew. And so it is with Mochari and Sattin, and Roth before them. They are writers of not so great men, who still believe they can be great, and maybe even are, despite the suffering, the mothers, the fathers, the abuse, and the sense that they are being persecuted. Because who's to say they aren't? Or haven't been? Don't all Jews know from persecution? So yes, we are biased, and raised to embrace, if not consume the Zinsky in all his funny, sad, abusive, intelligent, fucked-upedness, but that shouldn't obscure what Mochari has done in creating the sweeping story of one man's life, if not in full, than at least the beginning of a life that might still get better, if only incrementally, and at best by achieving some hard-earned contentment.

"Orphans grabs you by the neck from page one and refuses to let go." This Orphans Book Blurb Will Change Your Life, Part Four. Samuel Sattin.

"Tanzer imagines an America in decline, a generation weaned on a recession that never ended, and a world being abandoned for off planet plunder. But even more striking is the quiet tale of a man and his family. A strange bouquet of sadness and psychodrama, The Orphans grabs you by the neck from page one and refuses to let go."
—Samuel Sattin, author League of Somebodies

This Book Will Change Your Life - League of Somebodies by the Samuel Sattin.

On a weekend where heroes seem to be so widely unavailable, it is something to read  League of Somebodies by Samuel Sattin as not just the story of a superhero, and all that entails, moments of valor and challenge, fathers and sons, far-off worlds, and origin stories, but as a story where said superhero is in essence created from scratch, and what that means in a world so otherwise devoid of heroes. Do we need them? Do they make a difference? And in the end, do we ourselves have to be our own superheroes, ready to leap tall buildings when and where possible, striving for justice, and fighting those things that lurk in the darkness, mutating, evolving, and forcing us to question our base assumptions about men, women, and what evil looks like? Not that Sattin is asking us to do all that. He is creating something from nothing in a striking, Jewey, Kavalier and Clay-like swing for the fences swirl of togas, spandex, lions, and family. Which is probably enough to ask. The development of a full world like ones we know from the world of comic books, and yet have still never quite encountered prior to entering these pages. Ultimately, literature can be a blueprint and an escape, sometimes inspirational, and capable of changing lives. But they don't necessarily change the world. Only we can do that, even if we're not entirely sure how to do so.   

League of Somebodies by Samuel Sattin from Dark Coast Press today yes.

So do hit that now thank you please great awesome indeed it will change your life done.

Sattin Sparks Tyler Keating and Cobalt Issue 7 Spring 2013 Oh My!

Really. They're all there. And so much more. So do hit it. It just might change your life.