Jubilee City reviews are up!

Joe Andoe's book has been out for over a week now, and the reviews are starting to roll in. Her are some of the reviews!



From Publisher's Weekly:

Jubilee City: A Memoir at Full Speed
Joe Andoe. Morrow, $22.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-06-124031-7

In this charming memoir, Andoe narrates his journey from his Tulsa childhood through redneck, hard-partying teen years to a highly successful career as a (hard-partying redneck) painter in New York City. While Andoe may not be a professional writer, his humor and offbeat artistic sensibility make up for any lack of prose-writing chops. Through discrete anecdotes that seldom run longer than two pages, Andoe assembles vivid portraits of his family and friends and of the various environments he inhabited-the working-class Tulsa neighborhoods of the 1960s, the high school and college drug culture at the end of the hippie era, and the New York art scene of the 1980s. Andoe rarely said "No" to drugs, and the marginal characters and dangerous encounters of the lowlife provide the book with a great deal of energy and pathos; at times his memoir reads like a more amateur version of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. Yet whenever the gonzo stories verge on tedium, Andoe modulates his tone and shows himself as the stay-at-home dad, the outdoorsman, the artist. While Andoe has an occasional tendency to settle scores (his ex-wife receives particularly brutal treatment) or trumpet his status as an outsider, for the most part his wide-eyed sense of wonder and keen observations make the everyday strange and fresh. (Aug.)

And a few from readers, directly from the source!

It starts out simple- like some Little Rascals' hold over- HILARIOUS.
But then all of a sudden the story takes a turn and the mood plummets; there's a true depth of feeling that Joe takes with this book because there are really funny and amusing ups but when he can hit those low gritty notes too- it makes you wonder if I should have been getting drunk and stoned and driving really fast down back roads to old strip mines and skinny dipping with drunk girls with sun bleached denim cut-offs and collecting on some of those 'life stories' ... rather than going to those writing workshops.

True feeling: look out for the story BABY NEEDS SHOES- and once you read past that chapter you'll see the book is like a really good Fellini film where your favorite characters are both honestly terrible and deceptively holy- they can be the worst people you could imagine and yet! they're so animated and they're so believable- everyone's really good and everyone's really hungry at the same time.

It's a really tight read and I finished it in one day.

-JH Truman from Elko, NV


JUBILEE CITY is one of the most moving and unusual memoirs I've ever read. It's snapshots from an artist's life that are often funny and heartbreaking all at once. They are always moving, and often universal experiences. Andoe has a fresh and unique way of expressing himself. I loved this book and found myself reading stories from it over and over again.

-Daisy Alexandra from New York City

Hell yeah Jow Andoe! I'll keep updating the reviews as they come in.

Are we cool?

"This is very cool" -Rebecca Curtis (regarding this blog)
Huzzah! She knows of us!
...but does she know why she knows of us?

Also, mark your calendars, cause Ms. Curtis will be reading at "Happy Ending" (no snickering) on Sept. 12. The place is a converted asian sex parlor or something, but now its a dark and swanky lounge where people can enjoy privacy, sweaty dance parties and... you know, listen to readings. I'm sure there is other stuff too, like fondling. The address is:
302 Broome St, new york, NY.
Mapquest it!

Andoe Book Signing

Our buddy Joe is going to be at the Barnes and Noble on 6 Ave and 22nd Street on August 1! Reading his stories have been crazy enough, so meeting this man face to face may actually blow your minds. I can't decide if I'm excited or terrified. Either way, it will be fun and interesting. There is absolutely no way of knowing what might happen. How often can you say that about a book signing?

Countdown to the Jubilee!

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Q&A with THE ZERO's Jess Walter

A little interview we stole from HarperCollins:

Q: What was the inspiration behind this book? Obviously, the terrorist attacks of September 11th, but did you have any personal connection to the terrible events of that day that informed this story?

JESS WALTER: I spent a few months in 2001 working in New York. Five days after the attacks I came back (I was there helping Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik polish his memoir.) During that week, I wandered around Ground Zero like a lot of other well-meaning people, trying to help. I wrote a version of the opening paragraph of the novel that first week.The book began to form in my mind when I returned home to Washington State in October and saw how, outside New York, these attacks were an abstraction, certainly terrifying, but not personal the way they were in New York and Washington, D.C. I grew more and more upset as I saw politicians and corporations use the attacks and our fears to further agendas or to make money (sometimes both).Worst of all, we were a party to this propaganda. As a culture we punished dissension and hid behind a kind of commercial nationalism (If we don’t drink Sprite the terrorists have won) as we drifted toward war. None of it made sense. Our stunted grief was like the dissociative reaction I describe in the book. I grew fascinated with our reaction to these events (think of it as a 9/12 novel). I recall vividly the moment the book began to form in my mind: I had just arrived home from New York and was driving in my car and saw a sign that read, “God Bless America. New Furniture Arriving Every Day.” I began The Zero that day.

Q: What do you think of the debate over whether it’s “too soon” to tell such stories—to write books and movies—about the terrorist attacks of 9/11?

JW: Five years after Pearl Harbor, America had defeated Nazism and Japanese imperialism. Five years after 9/11, two-thirds of Americans believe we’re in worse shape. We were attacked by lunatics hoping to ignite a war in the Middle East, and in response, we ignited a war in the Middle East. Maybe we NEED to write and talk and see movies about 9/11 and about Iraq and about WMD and about torture. Maybe we need to sacrifice and serve and suffer and grieve and rant and howl with inappropriate laughter. Maybe we need to wake up.The Zero is about the aftermath of an unnamed tragedy in an unnamed city, in part because I wanted to acknowledge the unspeakable tragedy of the real Ground Zero. And yet this is not a glancing portrait in which the events of 9/11 exist merely as a backdrop (“The cocktail parties were especially grim that season.”) It’s about how we allowed ourselves to be anesthetized by pop culture and the real estate boom and the recovery of our 401Ks and sleep walked through the last five years. I hope that, in its surreal, darkly funny way, the novel reflects our irrational reaction to events that will define our generation.

Q: What type of access or research into the experiences of police officers and officials at Ground Zero did you have? And what about with federal agencies such as the CIA and FBI? (The book is a pretty damning indictment of their “blind leading the blind” performance.)

JW: I had fly-on-the-wall access to an incredible swath of New York in those weeks afterward, listening in on meetings between city and federal officials, watching crews look for bodies, seeing cops mourn in bars, listening to victims’ families search for answers, and watching everyday people try to do something … anything. As for intelligence agencies and their turf wars, screw-ups and cover-ups, that’s been the history of American intelligence, up to and after 9/11 (something I saw researching my first book, Ruby Ridge). We’re not likely to find out what’s been done by these agencies for years but if history teaches us anything, it’s that we’ll find out that the tools used to battle terrorism have been misused elsewhere (electronic surveillance, anyone?) Remember, the FBI used many of the same methods against the KKK and Martin Luther King.But it’s important to remember this book is not reporting. It’s a satirical novel whose rules are its own. It’s not about our leaders or our government or the NSA or even the Department of Documentation. It’s about us.

Q: The idea of memory and how we choose to give context to our memories plays a huge role in this book. Why did you want Remy to suffer from the partial loss of his memory? Why is it that he can’t remember the parts of his life where he’s actually doing the dirty work of his job?

JW: Remy’s mysterious “condition” is a version of what I felt the last five years, lurching along, constantly wondering how events came to pass and worrying about what seemed to be happening on my behalf. He experiences gaps, and if he doesn’t remember “the dirty work,” it does pose an interesting question about his role in all this, whether he’s willfully forgetting the awful things he does. As I began to write a novel in which the protagonist skips from scene to scene—besides thinking it felt funny and fresh—I began to think of the remote-control nature of our attention span now. We watch one thing and then, when it bores us, we turn the channel, or we surf to another website. After 9/11, we watched terrorism on TV for a while, but then we turned to American Idol.

Q: Do you see Remy as an archetypal figure for all Americans in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks (a sort of present day Yossarian)? If so, why does Remy never recover from his ailments?

JW: For me, Remy is archetypal, although I’m not sure any one character can represent all Americans. But he definitely reflects what I felt in the last few years: a constant sense of “How did we get here?” I have to think others have felt that way, too. As for his recovery, as the novel progressed, I began to see that Remy had no good choices, that no matter what he did, events rolled inexorably downhill. This seems to be what we face, beginning with our decision over what to do in Iraq. And there will be more impossible choices like this. Can Remy recover? I guess that remains to be seen.

Q: There is an almost romantic appreciation for the mundane details of everyday life in this book – the world of “pink real estate agents,” the idea of the city that rises up every day to collect its garbage, transport its residents, etc. Do you think that the stuff of “normal life” is the key to our recovery or just an illusion that we create for ourselves?

JW: Both! There is certainly something romantic about the recovery of normalcy. We all woke up on September 12 and realized suddenly how good we had it two days earlier. Instant nostalgia. Part of that romance, for me, is with the city of New York itself, which has shown itself to be so amazingly resilient. The “normal life” has been our salvation but, as such, it is a beautiful illusion. Real estate—with its self-serving optimism—is a clean representation of the world in which we’ve taken refuge. This is why the real estate agent in The Zero uses the same language as George W. Bush. And why I wonder if our sense of security in the last couple of years isn’t just another bubble of irrational optimism.

Q: Throughout the book, the wreckage and debris piled up at “The Zero,” as well as the pervasive smell it gives off, gradually disappears and, with it, whatever remained of all those lives that were lost in the attacks. Do you think that, over the last five years, we have lost touch with the real human losses from that terrible day, now that the actual site has been wiped clean?

JW: I was stunned when I returned to Ground Zero a few years afterward. Of course it had to be cleaned up. But other than those people who lost someone they loved, I do think the rest of us lost touch with the human cost of that day, just as the families of soldiers lost in Iraq have to bear the brunt of that war while the rest of us have sacrificed almost nothing (again, unlike the World War II generation.) In the novel the cleanup represents that papering-over of our grief and responsibility. Remy’s vision is that we’ve turned this painful, visceral place into just another construction site, the future home of a business park. Five years later, it’s sad to see the squabbling over the site and proper balance between returning commerce to the area and establishing a memorial.

Q: Do you see this as a hopeful book?

JW: Oh, sure. What did Kafka say: There is infinite hope. But not for us.

Jubilee City Woody Guthrie and a look inside Joe Andoe's Head

Did anyone attend the Bob Dylan show at the Morgan Library last year? They had a lot of notebooks that belonged to him and his influences. Though the works of art that appear in Jubilee City are far more pleasing, the sketches in Joe Andoe's notebook look a lot like the cartoon filled lyric book of Woody Guthrie. A book of Woody's art was published in 2005 under the title, Woody Guthrie Artworks. I suppose the two have a bit in common, both leading the desultory life and soaking in America from the subterranean perspective.
There is a great divergence in their two stories though. Woody created folk classics full of American optimism like, "This Land is Your Land" and "Grand Coulee Dam". Joe's art has a bleak minimal feel to it. His graphics of cars, dogs, even landscapes seem distanced from any other existence than their own. What does this say about Joe Andoe's generation? Or how America has changed since the days of freight-train hopping guitar-wielding hoboes.... I'm not sure. But Joe succeeds in showing us his America, one we have never seen before, and likely will never see again. His sharp and fluid prose illuminates a life of frenzy, self-loathing, self-indulgence, and love... a snapshot of the cocktail behind a life of creativity.

An Interview with Joe Andoe

A Conversation with…
Joe Andoe, author of JUBILEE CITY

Q. Today you’re a respected and celebrated painter but not widely known as a writer. Why did you decide to branch out with JUBILEE CITY?

A. Well one night about 5 years ago I was chatting with somebody who told me that I had already told them the story I had just told them.
Ouch.
I hate that.
I hate it when anybody else does it but I hate the thought of me doing it
Sooooooooo much more.
That’s when I bought a little moleskin notebook and a brush pen and I went about writing down every story I ever told more than once so I would never have to tell them again.
They came fast and furious.
They would come anytime they wanted.
It was like shooting sitting ducks.
It was like a ticker tape I would have to write it down no matter where I was as it came out.
I usually would have to write so fast I wouldn’t be able to read it later.
By the way I found out recently the person who told me I had repeated myself was just pulling my leg.

Q. What exactly is JUBILEE CITY?

A. It’s my life story told with no fact checking, with no shame, just told the way I remember it and told the way it affected me.
I start from the beginning with a process that is much like the act of climbing a ladder as opposed to the act of thinking about climbing a ladder.
Seeing as I’m not a trained writer means I’m not a typist either and that means that when I sit down to type out a recollection I often type at the same speed the actual event happened and that’s much slower than if I just thought it.
So it gives me a chance to relive it and see things I haven’t seen since it happened.
It ends up that both the reader and I have a first-hand account.

Q. Your path to becoming a well-known artist and now first time author doesn’t seem like a traditional one. Can you briefly share how you got to where you are today?

A. The story goes like this: I was conceived by two newlywed 19-year-olds from Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1955 near the San Diego Naval Base where my father was in the Navy.
He joined the Navy because poverty was a real thing and the GI bill was their only hope.
I was conceived near the San Diego Naval Base soon before my father went to Japan for two years.
My father didn’t see me until he was discharged when I was almost 18 months old and my mother was a teller at a bank.
Home life was volatile so I stayed outside of the house as much as possible.
I started getting into trouble early.
I had the police called on me for the first time in kindergarten for destroying a neighbor’s brick incarcerator.
In each of my 12 years of school my parents had to come for a meeting to keep me in.
This trend of trouble cornuted for no reason. I went to earn my MFA degree at the University of Oklahoma.
And got married, moved to New York City and had a son and a daughter and started showing my paintings.
The book starts with some of my earliest memories and flows along from milestone to roadblock as I roam around trying to stay out of the house.
I had freedom that looks like neglect by today’s standards.
It looks like I was curious and it looks like that was what got me into so much trouble.
Trouble and curiosity that lasted in some form like drugs or something to a curiosity about this gift of art I had that carried me to New York and into the art world that sometimes clashes with everything I had learned until then.

Q. How have Oklahoma and now New York shaped your artistic sensibility? What is it about each place that resonates so much with you?

A. You don’t know sweet till you taste salty.

Q. Could you describe your process of painting and your process of writing?

A. I cook what I want to eat and the clothes I pick are what I want to wear and so the paintings I paint are of things I want to see and the story I write is the one I want to tell.



Q. One critic has called you a distinctly American artist of the baby boom generation. Do you agree with that? Why or why not?


A. To quote Popeye the Sailor,
“I yam what I yam—“
Or: I’m here when I was here.

Q. Your painting technique involves removing paint to reveal the image, which you describe as “wiping away flesh to reveal the spirit”. Did you take this same approach to your book?

A. The act of writing and painting are both sorta like damage control.
I put it up then I work on it so it stays up.

Q. Are there any tools available to a writer that serve a similar purpose to that of color in a painting? Which skills of yours as a painter translated best to the page?

A. Same as the question above. Or you cook it till it tastes right. I don’t mean to sound glib but I make it the way I like it, so the moral is if you don’t like your own work no one will.

Q. You say that ideally, a painting says more about the viewer than it does about the artist. Do you think the same is true of a memoir?

A. I don’t know if it is, but I feel the same as Norman Mailer did about directing a movie:
“It’s like making love to a three hundred pound woman—” because there is much more to grab on to.

Q. Your story—especially your adolescence—is littered with tales of rebellion, do you still feel rebellious? If so, how do you express it now?

A. I never felt rebellious I was just looking to have a good time. I thought of myself as kind of shy but when I wrote it out I was surprised what this kid got up to.
Besides Rebels wore grey.

Q: You obviously have a following in the art world. Who do you hope will read your memoir?

A. Escape artists, castaways, longshoremen.

Links to a bunch of stories from TWENTY GRAND!

big bear, california
the wolf at the door
twenty grand
the alpine slide
the witches

My three favorites among these are 1) the alpine slide 2)big bear, california and 3)the wolf at the door. If anyone wants to be thoroughly disturbed/confused/inspired by a short short story, I suggest the wolf at the door. Some real champ magical realism. Lord knows what it means, but I've got some crazy ideas aknockin' around that I'll write down at some point.

I liked this excerpt a lot, just in the way New York City as a character is portrayed... (and to just go along with what I wrote about The Zero before) :

" 'I went...for a walk. One night I couldn't sleep. I got up early, before dawn. Got dressed. And I went for a walk. It was spring. Air was fresh and clean. And it was amazing... the shopkeepers misting the flowers, kids delivering papers, and there was this couple standing on the stoop next to my building, holding hands, on this date that neither of them wanted to see end. And it hit me. This is a hard place. God, it's a hard place. But it wakes up every morning. No matter what you do to it the night before. It wakes up."
The old man backed away. He stepped up to throw, but turned and considered Remy's face, "When I saw those lunatics in the Middle East on TV...jumping up and down and celebrating because some nut jobs had murdered three thousand people, you know what I thought?"
Remy shook his head.
"I thought, Fuck you. We used to kill that many ourselves in a good year. This city, it doesn't care about you. Or me. Or them. Or Russell Givens. This city cares about garbage pickup. And trains. That's the secret... what the crazy assholes will never get. You can't tear this place apart. Not this city. We've been doing it ourselves for three hundred years. The goddamn thing always grows back.' "

Some More Reviews of TWENTY GRAND... from Legit Reviewers

LA TIMES

San Francisco Chronicle

The Village Voice

Some art from Joe Andoe which i thought was pretty cool:

THE RIGHT KIND OF RAW

I have to be honest. I did not love Jubilee City. I understand its “artistic merit” to a point. Yes, it is uniquely compiled; Andoe creates a sort of montage with these clipped snapshots of his drug-enhanced life. It is edgy, in a sense, though seemingly repetitive at times. I walked away however without having absorbed any real commentary; the end product, for me, was not entirely complete. I thought the gaps in the piece were disarming. I didn’t see the work relate to larger issues. For this reason, I wasn’t sure what the next conquest would be like.

The Zero, however, is one of the more brilliantly-written pieces I’ve read in a long time. Jess Walter is bold, and his lens on the post 9-11 world is dark, though humorous, and entirely honest. His narration is strong. The language is beautiful. The commentary is raw and satirical, without being too political. The entire structure of the piece works really well for the subject matter. The narrator Remy has a problem with his memory – after shooting himself in the head, his consciousness skips, lurching through time from one moment to the next. Walter accounts for this in the prose, and not only suspenseful, it is incredibly effective. I found it difficult to read in one sitting, simply because the text is so involved. But after finishing, it truly is one of the more rewarding books I’d read.

Walters’ portrayal of New York City is also remarkable. It captures the very essence of the city, in all its quirks and simple humanity. An honest scrutiny at how people tried desperately to cope without answers – Walters shies away from none of it. From the blurbs on the back, I’d have to agree with the Boston Globe: Jess Walters is “a literary talent at large.”

Like many of TWENTY GRAND’s female voices, the narrator in “The Alpine Slide” conceals her thoughts from parents and others. Readers, on the other hand, prove worthy of the storyteller’s unguarded observations and intimate desires. In her favorite books, the ones in which young Victorian women were forced by adverse circumstance to have sex with swarthy highway robbers who were twice their age and had impeccable manners and great taste in jewels, the narrator notices that each roguish robber-villain inevitably compels the captive to look into his face. His black eyes are smoldering like burning bread. His lips are so rough they are cracked into segments…/Two brief pages later, she’s pregnant and locked in a tower. /I prayed that something similar would happen to me.
Will this young amusement ride employee ever secure the x-rated Rapunzel-inspired fairy tale fate she envisions? In each of her stories, Curtis skillfully and silently cultivates an ominous cloud—until suddenly we are blindsided with a sense that everything is about to go horribly wrong. Or perhaps horribly right? At least, it depends on your fantasy…

Fight Night - Fitzgerald vs Curtis - Narrative Heavyweights and "The Alpine Slide" by Rebecca Curtis

Anyone who has read The Great Gatsby knows the potential of narrative distance. He/she is also probably sick of hearing about it in ninth grade English classes. But here's a little recap because I'm a nerd. Although the book is written through Nick's eyes, the book is about Gatsby, and the reader becomes mystified and fascinated with Gatsby as his relationship with Nick develops. It's strange how we can learn so much from a person by being appropriately distanced from him/her. Any dedicated stalker knows exactly what I'm talking about. But the narrative technique of framing a protagonist through a specific first-person character also begs the question of how that character's sensitivities and prejudices affect how the reader encounters the actual protagonist. The narrator may seem honest and unbiased. But how much of this is deception? How dirty is the vacuum cleaner filter of Nick's experience? I bet the number of papers written on this subject is in the millions. But its still interesting, and its still a badass narrative technique, and it still makes people write too-long blog posts.

What does any of this have to do with an awesome young fiction writer from New Hampshire? Read Rebecca Curtis' short story "The Alpine Slide" and you'll see. She pulls off narrative distance like a champ. Like she just finished a three day bender with Fitzgerald himself. It is easy to say that the narrator of the story, Bowman, is the main character of the story. But we are soon introduced to Jacques, the charming and mysterious entrepreneur from Canada who is trying to revive the false hope that is the Alpine Slide. Like Bowman, we become slightly obsessed with figuring out Jacques, and our courage to ask questions grows until a point at the end when all truth is revealed. Not much happens, but Curtis makes it mysterious and beautiful. Being able to turn the mundane into the sublime is what makes a truly good writer. And Curtis is a master. Call your bookies, folks, this round goes to Curtis by technical knockout.

Some Love for THE ZERO

One of the hardest thing for a story to do is hook the reader from the very beginning. There's no point in having action at the end of the book if the reader is gonna throw it out after the first chapter. Well, Jess Walter must've had a really good English teacher somewhere in his life. He (yea, it's a guy named Jess) starts out THE ZERO with the main character waking up from shooting himself in the head. With that kind of intro, it's pretty hard not to keep reading. After one page I was already sympathizing with the character and interested in what was going on in his head (ouch, sorry, that was unintentional). I'm guessing that's what Jess was goin for.