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orb_muse's avatar

I feel like there's this industry trend of upmarket, "provocative" It Books that are given covers with a single bold color and a logo-style title, all as a kind of shortcut to "instant icon" status. (Similar to brat, Barbie, etc). It's a good branding exercise, but when so many books hype themselves up in that unspoken way, it's hard not to inevitably underwhelm consumers.

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Jessica's avatar

I read this for a liberal book club and one of the women hypothesized that the protagonist is dying after contracting blood poisoning from doing erotic yardplay and the entire back half of the book is his deathbed fantasia about having a famous mother who bequeathed him a queer artistic legacy. He desperately creates his own dying vision in which he finally achieves this stereotypical liberal success but none of it happened except him hitting himself in the foot with an axe and putting duct tape on top of it. It's a little like Phillip K Dick if you read it that way.

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