By way of building a little buzz in advance of the publication of our brilliant and, shockingly, not-widely-read cult author David Ohle, a free ad-supported eBook:
Advance orders for The Pisstown Chaos were so low last year, I canceled the original May 2007 publication, and tried again, this time for July 2008. And to pull out more stops, this preview eBook.
Here's what folks had to say about his previous installment.
“...if—as was provocatively asserted in Don DeLillo's Mao II—the terrorist has hijacked the novelist's role within our culture, is it then somehow supercilious of me to report that Ohle has written a novel that will behead his readers? ... I’d like to propose that getting your head lopped off by Ohle's fiction is a strange and unforgettable experience....In The Age of Sinatra, Ohle has seemingly concocted some sort of covert Oulipian recipe regarding the fantastic versus realism....Think The Phantom Tollbooth in a Technicolor, head-on collision with the Book of Job....American readers should take note of this insurgent fiction writer, David Ohle, who flays the human condition to singular, hallucinatory effect.”—Village Voice, Best Books of 2004
“A friend from high school once called me in tears: He was trying to make a mobile out of dead bugs but was having trouble bringing them into balance. If he had succeeded, that mobile might resemble this book: delicate and grotesque, tragic and hilarious, precarious but perfectly balanced. . . . The Age of Sinatra, a litany of symptoms, is less like an ordinary novel than it is like a patient history. But those might be the stories we feel most keenly of all.” —Shelley Jackson, Bookforum
“Age of Sinatra is far more consumed with catastrophe than Motorman. The novel advances an anxious investigation into how changes to memories and bodies can affect the state of a mind or the mind of a state. Although much has changed from the age of Nixon to the age of Bush the Younger, Age of Sinatra demonstrates that Ohle continues to construct an intoxicatingly vivid and demented world that is both reflective and revolutionary.” —LA Weekly
“The Age of Sinatra ...stands on its own as a contemporary classic. A word of caution: This book is for very discerning readers only. An engrossing feat of visceral story telling, this dark obsidian humored masterpiece is that x-rated, A-plus and non-plus ultra Twilight Zone episode one fervently hopes will remain fiction." —Rapid River Magazine
“Ohle borrows from conventions of science fiction, mythology, absurdist theater, and political satire to create a destabilizing para-reality: a world to which we expect to be able to relate, only to find it constantly surprising us with characters and ideas that are both disorientingly foreign and piercingly familiar....Tell 10 different people to read this book, and all 10 will say it's about something different. But judging by the response to Ohle's first novel, there is one reaction they are likely to have in common: They'll want to read more.” —Texas Observer
“The legendary author of Motorman is back. In The Age of Sinatra, David Ohle is so attuned to reality that he has invented a brand new world to reflect it. Whereas what is generally called realistic fiction is busy cataloging what we wear and buy, Ohle is documenting our last secrets, and he’s doing it with droll hilarity, brilliance, and a genuinely original vision.” —Ben Marcus
