Book Description
The original hardcover Superbad from McSweeney's was a collection of two dozen pieces ranging from postmodern satire to more serious fiction. The lot of it has been remixed - much like popular music - and reprinted in trade paper. The result: a challenging novel with a clear set of themes and characters, tightly constructed and intricately interwoven. As Susan Minot writes, Greenman's mind is hard to pin down and can be likened to that of "a Russian short story writer, a slapstick gag writer, an art critic, a literary critic, a cultural commentator, a cowboy, a satirist, a scientist ... a surrealist, a nut and genius, a stand-up comedian, a child prodigy, a dreamer, and a poet."
Superworse: A Remix of Superbad: Stones and Pieces FROM THE PUBLISHER
Superbad: Stories and Pieces, published in hardcover in 2001 by McSweeney's, was composed of more than two dozen works of fiction in various genres ranging from serious short stories to postmodern satires to lyrical works located on the border between poetry and prose. As Susan Minot put it, it seems as if Greenman's mind contains "a Russian short story writer, a slapstick gag writer, an art critic, a literary critic, a cultural commentator, a cowboy, a satirist, a scientist, a postmodernist, an anti-postmodernist, a surrealist, a nut, and genius, a stand-up comedian, a child prodigy, a dreamer, and a poet." This new Soft Skull edition -- entitled Superworse: A Novel -- reconceives Superbad with an eye toward its overall architecture. Laurence Onge, the editor who wrote the introduction to Superbad, has taken a greater role in overseeing this revised edition, emphasizing the fact that the individual pieces in the collection are not simply sharing space but sharing themes, that they are intricately related to one another as movements in a symphony or gears in a clockwork. As Onge endeavors to prove, the book is very tightly constructed, with a mirror-image arrangement and many characters, not all human, threaded throughout. While Superbad was a humor collection in the finest McSweeney's tradition, Superworse is a novel in the spirit of Borges and Barthelme.
FROM THE CRITICS
Kirkus Reviews
A "remix" of some previously published stories and funny bits that amuses, and amuses some more. New Yorker editor and occasional fictionalist Greenman has many of the stylistic hallmarks of the McSweeney's crew-a hyper-reflexive sense of satirical humor, post-postmodern structure, and a sneaky knack for rendering the personal-and, fortunately, no delusions of being the messiah of literature. Not surprisingly, he has already published under the McSweeney's imprint, which is where, in hardcover, most of these pieces first appeared, under the title Superbad. It's not clear exactly how much this book differs from the last; the stories, largely, are similar, and again they feature the imaginary Laurence Onge, the putative mentor to Greenman ("I can only commit the crime of improvement"). What remains after the "remix" is a tasty selection of longer and shorter stories that are funnier than just about anything this side of Neal Pollack. Not surprisingly, it's the shorter ones that spring to mind afterward, since "long" usually meaning serious and therefore not funny. "Notes on Revising Last Night's Dream" is just a scribbled piece of nonsense, but it kicks nonetheless ("Knife next to breakfast plate need not bloom into flowers"), and "Marlon Brando's Dreaming" is four pages of disquietingly disgusting wonderfulness. Longer pieces indeed often fare less well, like the dreary, Russian-set "Snapshot," although the bleak "Theft of a Knife," about a hapless rich man on a 19th-century train who's relieved of everything he's got, has a morbid profundity about it that lingers. And it wouldn't do not to mention the genius "Blurbs," which constructs an entire story out of made-up book-critic blurbs,including even one from this publication. Something extraordinary. Agent: Daniel Greenberg/Levine Greenberg
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