Bøger af Mark Lamb

In Heart On A Sleeve, Austin-based writer Mark Lamb continues his dive into the sordid, sensitive, and sometimes hopeful deep end of everyday social and family life. A master of riveting psycho-dramatic portrayal, Lamb focuses his clear-eyed social dissections on the ways families injure their members internally, especially those whose sensitivities make emotional wounds difficult or impossible to heal. Lamb's first (2013) collection of short stories, Do As I Say And Not As I Do, was a brilliant debut, with a distinctive, sui generis authorial style which impressed itself upon Kirkus Reviews, who described the book as: "A collection of seven curiously crafted tales of malevolence and melancholia... Lamb's imagination runs dark, and his stories of haunted lives, repressed memories and sordid pasts creep into the psyche like spiders." Well, it's safe to say that the spiders keep on crawling in Heart On A Sleeve. By offering us a haunting, five-stage novella tracing the multi-generational transmission of alienation, Lamb again permeates the reader's psyche with his shadowy but familiar worlds. Lamb's inherent word-economy, winnowed plotlines, and tight narratives create a happy paradox: a book with a long time-span that is nonetheless a quick read and ripe with both explicit and hidden layers of possibility and implication. It's the sort of book one re-reads in short order, to soak up more of the tenuous ambience, simmering conflicts, historical oddities, and other little details of lives that carry big but hazily visible stakes. Readers experience a pathological yet common family dynamic as it germinates, then metastasizes, over several generations. Lamb somehow musters our primal identifications with even the most deplorable or off-road of human variety. He knows instinctively that "normal" is a myth, and that all closets are choking full of skeletons. He makes us empathize with some pretty cruddy people, all right, maybe to remind us that but for the grace of God...and, in this, Lamb consistently emphasizes in his work how much a product of our circumstances and of dumb luck we all are. With Heart On A Sleeve, Mark Lamb has also developed a unique format. Each of the chapters can actually stand alone nicely as a short story. Read front-to-back, it is a novella, a short novel that carries an inherent organizational logic and temporal and thematic unfolding. The "feel" of it is noir - Nelson Algren. There is some seedy stuff going on. But there also is dignity in the most unlikely corners. Lamb takes us at times to the edge of magical realism in some stories; and yet, his narrative is matter-of-factly empirical, a "just the facts ma'am" presentation of life in its weirder moments. Who doesn't think they're nuts, see things, hear voices sometimes, believe in ghosts or elves or angels, experience déjà vu; who doesn't have carnal ideas about the people in their lives, or want the world to just go away? Perfectly ugly, in a beautiful way, because it's how things are. By loosely connecting his generations of struggling people in a family along an axis of cascading ennui, Lamb leaves plenty to our imaginations, and this makes for a compelling mental dialectic with a provocative writer. What he doesn't say seems to loom larger than what he does say. Indeed, Lamb has begun his writing career with a perhaps unintended, yet very wise and writerly stratagem: he always leaves you wanting more.

The seven stories in this collected volume of short fiction, Do As I Say and Not As I Do, reflect author Mark Lamb's experiences as a parent. The trials and tribulations of being responsible for children impacts all parents deeply, and Lamb has let his formidable imagination run with this theme. The verities of human commitment and development go to some strange, beautiful, and disturbing places in these stories. Lamb's narrative voice is distinct, simultaneously detached and vaguely sympathetic, non-judgmental, but not quite comforting. He has arrived at this, his first volume, with an identifiable style. What irony that is found here is flat, then twisted through a kaleidoscope, making it invisible or merely suggested. There is a Southern Gothic seasoning, somewhere in the tonal and topical region where Poe's less macabre vignettes and Capote's Music for Chameleons might intermix. But his characters are all too real: Lamb shows us the good, the bad, the ugly, and the perverse, and doesn't flinch from representing the messy, at times grotesque, shortcomings of people as they really live. The settings for the stories cover a broad range: Science fiction ("You Must Remember This"); the dangerous early American frontier ("Pigeon Roost"); unsettling psychosexual set pieces ("Station Approach," "Grand Guignol," "Mr. Wiggin's Jar"); the everyday, humdrum worlds of confused relationships and motives that most of us inhabit, however tentatively ("The Gosling Patch," "Mixed State"). There is an ambience - it is not magic realism, more like rational surrealism - suffusing all of Lamb's stories, even those grounded in the empirical here-and-now. A certain spooky, ambient unity thus pervades the collection, handled by a writer who knows exactly what he wants to accomplish. "Station Approach" and "You Must Remember This" are destined to be considered American short story classics. Lamb's love of both classic and contemporary cinema suffuses his work with vivid scenes and layers of dramatic implication. He occasionally shines an Hitchcockian sentiment - humor so dry it cracks into dust, suspense and twists to confound our linear expectations - onto the dramatic proceedings. The tautness of the stories, intentional flattening of character, and the condensed, potent atmospherics are really but one step short of screenplays. Readers will, of course, discover their own interpretive themes and historical and stylistic comparisons when confronted with the seven masterful stories in Mark Lamb's Do As I Say and Not As I Do. One thing is for sure: They will never forget them.

BRAVE Books partnered with Sheriff Mark Lamb to write The Adventures of Seymour Clues & Mr. Mouse, a conservative, Christian children's book that teaches kids to seek for the truth.

Are you frustrated with the chaos that is happening in America and all over the world? Are you looking for a more clear path to your real purpose in life and the courage to make the necessary changes? Using his favorite poem by Rudyard Kipling entitled "IF", Sheriff Lamb outlines some of the most wise counsel of our modern times. Telling the stories of inspirational and lesser known characters of the American Revolution and founding fathers, as well as personal experiences, Sheriff Lamb shares what inspires him to fight for our freedom in America every day. Tying together his stories with the poem, the reader will be astounded, inspired, and emboldened to reach deep inside themselves to apply the principles outlined in American Sheriff: Rules to Live By. Read about the amazing and inspirational founding fathers and what they stood for including: *Courage*Perseverance*Faith>The heroes of the American Revolution embodied the principles taught in the poem "IF" and are seamlessly woven together. They will teach, motivate, and encourage us all to find the qualities we already possess to be the best person, parent, and citizen we can be.