Bøger af Robert Lopez

Completing his celebrated novels-in-stories triptych, begun with Good People and A Better Class of People, Robert Lopez delivers the third installment, The Best People, which follows a man who made the mistake of being born and is trying to make the best of that mistake.In an uncanny world where linear time is nonexistent and everyone he meets is either Esperanza, Sofia, or Manny, the unnamed narrator wrestles with his past lives, his abusive upbringing, his sexual proclivities, his obsession with cleanliness, and how to stop the world from breaking in.With his signature unconventional storytelling and beguiling prose, Robert Lopez delivers a no-holds-barred, whiplash-fast polyphonic novel for the ages.

"Robert Lopez's grandfather Sixto was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, in 1904, immigrating to the United States in the 1920s, where he lived in a racially proportioned apartment complex in East New York, Brooklyn, until his death in 1987. The family's efforts to assimilate within their new homeland led to the near complete erasure of their heritage, culture, and language within two generations. Through family recollection, the constant banter volleyed across nets within Brookly's diverse tennis community, as well as an imagined fabulist history drawn from Sixto's remembered traits, Robert Lopez paints a haunting, compassionate, and tremendously moving portrait of family that attempts to bridge the past to the present, and re-claim a heritage threatened by assimilation and erasure."--

Robert Lopez has collected 29 short stories running from the very short on up to efforts that might be considered standard story length, plus a novella in shorts to close out the book. Like his previous works, Asunder is a study in the usage of language. Lopez carefully considers each word before leaving it on the page, and it shows.

Kamby Bolongo Mean River, Robert Lopez's hypnotic second novel, is the story of a young man whofinds himself confined and under observation, the subject of seemingly pointless tests. His only link to the outside world is a telephone that will not dial out. During the occasional calls he receives, usually wrong numbers, the narrator remembers his former life growing up in Injury, Alaska with his Mother, an often unemployed single parent, and his older brother, Charlie, a sometime boxer, sometime actor. Throughout the course of this extraordinary novel, the unwilling captive draws his life-story in stickfigures on the walls. From the difficulty of his birth, to his sickly childhood, to adventures with his brother, the narrator depicts his crazy life, which is at once fascinating and heartbreaking. The one memory that haunts him is that of watching a movie about slaves on television and how that one slave, the one for whom Kamby Bolongo Mean River meant freedom, would never relinquish the idea of returning home. Darkly hilarious with a crushing emotional impact, Kamby Bolongo Mean River is a brilliant study of familial bonds and trauma, isolation and captivity, hope and hopelessness. ';Kamby Bolongo Mean River is an original and fearless fiction. It bears genetic traces of Beckett and Stein, but Robert Lopez's powerful cadences and bleak, joyful wit are all his own.'Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land ';In Kamby Bolongo Mean River damage and delusion walk hand in hand, and everything we think we know is gradually called into question. Reading like a cross between Samuel Beckett's ';The Calmative' and Gordon Lish's Dear Mr. Capote, Robert Lopez's new novel gets under your skin and latches on.'Brian Evenson, author of The Open Curtain

A brilliant novel-in-stories from award-winning author Robert LopezIn an uncanny, distorted version of New York City, a man rides the subway through the chaos of an ordinary commute. He may have a gun in his pocket. He may be looking for someone¿a woman named Esperanza.Between stops, we shuttle back and forth through time and see a man who stands in traffic, the same man seizing and shuddering on a sidewalk, an institution where the man is housed with other undesirables (or troublemakers?), a neighborhood where all the residents have forgotten their names. Over everything looms the specter of a nameless menace, a pervasive sense that something¿more than just a ride¿is coming to an end. With Robert Lopez¿s signature innovation, A Better Class of People delivers a network of stories interconnected and careening like subway tunnels through the realities of modern America: immigration, gun violence, police brutality, sexual harassment, climate change, and the point of fracture at which we find ourselves, where reality and perception are indistinguishable.

Lopez has the ability to give the reader whiplash with his unconventional and bewitching stories. Los Angeles TimesRobert Lopez is the master of deadpan dread, of the elliptical koan, of the sudden turn of language that reveals life to be so wonderfully absurd. Always with Lopez, the voice is all hisenchanting, surprising, at times devastating. JESS WALTER, author of Beautiful RuinsRobert Lopezs strange, incantatory, visionary stories reveal the mysteries behind the ordinary world. You lift your head from this book and its as if a third eye has been opened. DAN CHAON, author of Await Your Reply and Stay AwakeNothing is funnier than unhappiness, claims Samuel Beckett. To this, we add: nothing is funnier than unhappiness with a heavy dose of amorality, as we learn from Robert Lopezs unforgettable Good People. In these twenty stories, a motley cast of obsessive, self-deluded outsiders narrate their darker moments, which include kidnapping, voyeurism, and psychic masochism. As their struggles give way to the black humor of lifes unreason, the bleak merges with the oddly poetic, in a style as lean and resolute as Carver or Hemingway.Treading the fine line between confession and self-justification, the absurd violence of threatened masculinity, and the perverse joy of neurosis, Lopezs stories reveal the compulsive suffering at the precarious core of our universal humanity.Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, and the story collection Asunder. He lives in Brooklyn.