The Book of Freaks

Jamie Iredell made my ears feel weird and sexy at around this time last year I was in Seattle for a weekend reading and saw that Blake Butler was reading at a cafe My lady and I went to check out the young stud I had read a bunch of BB s stuff and had emailed with him but had never met him in person One of his Atlanta friends was touring and reading with him This was Jamie Iredell He was touring for a book called Prose Poems A Novel a really great, loosely autobiographical book but he started ou [...]

The Book of Freaks is something I received a lot from within the covers of this book than I had bargained for What I found in these pages were old friends, neighbors, bums, immigrants, the faithful and the faithless, barflies, zimbabweans, and used car salesmen Iredell s words are colorfully wacky, but precisely so, and constitute super rich food for thought With each new page you start to realize that this isn t merely a joke book like you thought it might be Jamie Iredell, through all his abs [...]

I read this in bits and pieces like a dictionary where I wasn t looking up a word Iredell makes a book that isn t really novel, but a not really novel that is really a great book Sampsell is smart for hearing this manuscript read aloud at a reading, smarter even for publishing it, and Iredell is smartest of all for writing it.

Iredell s earlier collections have been fragmentary, full of moments and sketches that add up to powerful impressions of places and lives With Book of Freaks, the same fragmentation is at play but he s pulled back a bit, including the book itself in that gaze, not to mention the reader In fact, the biggest freak here may be the book itself, because of the sheer unlikeliness and artificiality of a linear life like those we ve learned to expect from fiction The questions Iredell raises about how d [...]

A sort of guide to the world we live and the neighbors we ignore, but also its own statement that we are all freaks.Mr Iredell smashes though each section, which is in order by the governing rules of the alphabet, laughing at the topics and showing words as putty He molds, he combines, he places text we love on the wall for a later play date.

Each section of the book is in alphabetical order with encyclopedic entries on a variety of subjects, but brilliantly the front and back matter of the book is alphabetized Title page filed under T, Acknowledgements under A, etc Nice work, Jamie.

Well done, Mr Iredell And I think I will be re reading this in some scattershot one at a time way Yerba Buenans Damn.

maybe

wasn t expecting much but lately, when it comes to reading, I d rather not read what often comes off as a writer s workshop collective exercise as my pal Jack so aptly put it.

vouchedbooks 2011 06 27 si

An absolutely bizarre and one of a kind book If it weren t so damn great, I d be jealous Hell, I m jealous anyway James Iredell is a strange kind of genius.