William H. Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968)

More and more, I'm thinking that Omensetter's Luck is a more important novel than its cultural cachet would suggest: it was published in 1966, so not at the foremost of the postmodern, but what it does--it seems to me--is to visibly bridge the divide between Faulkner and your more postmodern sensibility (I didn't name a postmodern author there because Gass' particular brand of postmodernism seems pretty sui generis).  I've never read anything like it before or since, and while obviously it has its partisans, I feel like it should also be a fairly standard college English text.  And I should read more Gass.  I think he's an important writer.

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Welp.

There is nothing good in the repeal of Roe.  That's for sure.  I shudder when I think of the pointless death and suffering and life-derailment that will come in tidal waves, and not exclusively to women either.  Oh it will.  The "justices" who voted for it should spend the rest of eternity floundering around in an ocean of boiling feces.  As should all their enablers.  Let's not be coy about this.

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Steve Katz, Creamy & Delicious (1970)

I read Katz' first novel The Exagggerations [sic] of Peter Prince some time ago, and enjoyed it in the way I enjoy a lot of these old works of avant-garde metafiction that, let's be honest, feel a little quaint these days.  But I never bothered to look any further with Katz.  I was peripherally aware of this book, and I think I could've read it if I'd wanted to; I don't think copies were prohibitively expensive, but, well, I didn't.  So this Tough Poets rereleased seemed like the opportunity.

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