ISBN: 0874160731 9780874160734

Category: Fiction / General

Page count: 64

In this collection of short stories, the creators of Love shots perform their jaded ventriloquy on a new assortment of American losers, and a few from other continents as well. From Death Row in the Mississippi Delta to New York's backstage groupie scene, the imagery shunts from eye-level subjective focus to the remorseless leer of the hidden camera. The lighting rips brusquely with each vignette, enveloping us in the indoor cloudiness of cheap hotel rooms, Africa's immemorial starlight, the incandescent ghetto. Illuminated by the glare is a portrait gallery of the used, the useless, the unchosen, the stooge, as the authors split the spectrum of human desolation. Often we find ourselves eavesdropping at the endpoint of some inevitability too dreary to be called fate: the moment our subject «catches on.» The spare text of inner emptiness contrasts painfully with the overwhelming visuals, resulting in a sort of high-decibel understatement that is the Loustal/Paringaux genius.