Sea Monkeys
A Memory Book
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Bowling lessons with a hunchback. A bizarre first-grade teacher who hallucinates in class. A tragically innocent family blind-sided by flower power, and the salvation of soul music at a radio station straight out of a Quentin Tarantino version of The Twilight Zone. These are just a few of the luminous characters and conjurings Kris Saknussemm delivers in his kaleidoscopic Sea Monkeys—the story of his growing up in the counterculture San Francisco Bay Area and central California in the 1960s.
Known for his genre-bending works Zanesville and Private Midnight, Saknussemm now gives us a highly original take on the nonfiction memoir, in which he shatters the stained glass windows of his father's church and mixes the pieces with ghost cartoons, the Cronkite contradictions of Civil Rights demonstrations, and ads for laxatives during a strange hiatus in American sanity when Sly Stone and Perry Como could both be in the Top 10. Honest, funny, and at times heartbreaking, Sea Monkeys is the no-holds-barred tale of one of our most exciting contemporary authors’ own coming of age, and the perfect follow-up to Saknussemm’s Zanesville, which Booklist hailed as “one of the most creative, edgy, and entertaining novels spawned in a decade.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This memoir by novelist Saknussemm (Zanesville) of life in late 1960s California much of which has already appeared in more than a dozen literary journals is for the most part surprisingly pedestrian, enlivened only by certain chapters that are crafted like great short stories. While Zanesville was a hologram-filled black comedy, the author's memoir is a fairly straightforward look back at points in his life including schools, teachers, friends, and early loves. While his social observations are often banal ("The Cold War and the Dick Clark disease of television go claw in glove"), his psychological insights are sharp, especially in a short account of his being raped at age nine. And a much longer piece, "Mr. Very Late Night," about being the only white D.J working the graveyard shift at a black radio station, is a superb piece of writing about how he turned his music program into a call-in show that touched "a congregation of strangers," putting his finger "straight on a vibrating harmonic nerve of the red taillight central coast California vampire redemption hour."
