Pym

oh god. i am almost ready to give up satire and humour entirely. i adore a good quip. i love a wag, i cheer a wit (and mat johnson fits these categories) but i don't seem to have the patience for the sustained point behind it all these days. happily, there was a lot of other filling in this little d......more

I thought that the first 100 pages or so of Pym were fantastic. The satire was imaginative; I felt like I was in on the joke. I, also, appreciated the irreverent, social commentary. Up until (view spoiler)[the crew got involved with the ice creatures, (hide spoiler)] I thought that this would be one of my best books of 2015. John......more

How can any novel manage to be so smart and so ridiculous at the same time? In this novel, Johnson tells a story even more incoherent and open-ended than his source of inspiration, Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. But within his chosen framework of comedic satire, Johnson also......more

There are just some books that have the power to take you out of the real world for a while so that all there is is the story in front of you, and Pym is one of those. This book fits the bill of that old phrase "a rollicking good yarn," while simultaneously offering its readers the author's ruminati......more

Whiteness [Review from 2011] Chris Jaynes has just been fired from his position as the token black professor at a prestigious liberal arts college. A few pages later, he has a barroom encounter with the suspiciously-named man brought in to replace him, "Mosaic Johnson, Hip-Hop Theorist," who shakes a......more