A COMMON PORNOGRAPHY  autorstwa Kevina Sampselloriginally (called THE SUITCASE)


O książce:
From a lit world sweetheart, this sensational memoir is told in vignettes that capture the history of a dysfunctional family.  When Kevin's estranged father died of an aneurysm, he returned home for the funeral and his mother revealed to him disturbing threads in their family history -- stories of incest, madness, betrayal, and death -- which retroactively colored Kevin's memories of his upbringing and youth.  He learned of his mother's first two husbands, the fathers of his three older, mythologized half-siblings, and the havoc they wreaked on his mother.  He learned of his own father's seething resentment of his step-children, which was expressed in physical, psychological, and sexual abuse.  And he learned more about his oldest step-sister, Elinda, who, as a young girl, was labeled "feebleminded" by a teacher.  When she became a teenager, she was sent to a psychiatric hospital at 95 pounds.  Two years later she returns home at 200 pounds, diabetic, having endured numerous shock treatments, and soon after is impregnated by her father.  Sampsell intertwines the tragic with the everyday, the dysfunctional with the funny, lending A COMMON PORNOGRAPHY its undeniable, unsensationalized reality. 

O autorze:
 Kevin Sampsell is the publisher of Future Tense Books.  His fiction has been published widely in literary journals and he writes regularly for The Believer, McSweeney's, Nerve, and Pindeldyboz.

Prasa o książce:

“For beauty, honesty, sheer weirdness, and a haunting evocation of place, Kevin Sampsell is my favorite Oregon writer.  Ken Kesey, Chuck Palahniuk--make some room on the shelf." — Sean Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of it All

“Embarrassing and honest, heartbreaking and hilarious. A COMMON PORNOGRAPHY is a great memoir from one of the Northwest’s best writers"— Willy Vlautin, author of Northline and The Motel Life

“Memory and truth are jagged things, and Kevin Sampsell’s memoir-in-vignettes expresses this forcefully. With grit and candor, he marches us through the heartbreak, horniness, and confusion of a west coast boy becoming a man."— Robin Romm, author of The Mercy Papers

“Kevin Sampsell’s stories are brief incantations, uppercuts to the gut, prose poems given over to the bloodiest realms of the self. It’s all here: the emotional squalor, the sweet bite of loneliness. Make no mistake: Sampsell can write like hell.”— Steve Almond, author of My Life in Heavy Metal

"......mostly the material perfectly fits the form, shards of memory fused into a compelling concretion of moments. A worthy addition to the work of such contemporary memoirists as Nick Flynn, Augusten Burroughs, Dave Eggers, and Stephen Elliott."  -- Booklist, January 1, 2010

“…its droll style and its archaeological attentiveness to the debris of American life – the remote controls, video recorders, tight ends, and one-hit wonders of yesteryear – combined with Sampsell’s talent for observing the ordinary, infuse the most ‘common’ incidents of growing up with wit and meaning.”  —Harper’s Magazine

“As chapters grow longer, the boy who once planned Bigfoot hunts in Walla Wall becomes a mature and determined man.  A COMMON PORNOGRAPHY is a breathtaking voyage down that uneven path.” —Portland Monthly

“As the kids say, Kevin Sampsell FTW.  A Common Pornography is flat-out awesome. Tightly composed, damn funny, unsettlingly candid. Fun as hell. Read it in a sitting.”    --HTML Giant