Salon recommends

A collection of sideshow spectacles, a gritty tale of the boxing gym scene and more.

Published December 3, 2001 8:40PM (EST)

What we're reading, what we're liking

Jay's Journal of Anomalies by Ricky Jay
A certain breed of pompous intellectual would have us believe that before the advent of television people occupied their minds with reading books, but if this collection of the 16 issues of Ricky Jay's legendary quarterly is anything to judge by, the truth is not so lofty. Instead, the bored populace squandered their pennies on a variety of dubious spectacles: learned dogs (who could multiply numbers and tell time), lilliputian "Aztec" children (actually microencephalic mulattos), self-crucifiers, ceiling dancers, flea circuses and such "newly discovered" animals as the fearsome "bonassus" (a buffalo, despite claims to the contrary). Much of the pleasure to be found in this browsable volume comes from the grandiose rhetoric promoting such performers as "L'Inimitable Dick," a small black poodle dressed in gauze skirts that could be made to "waft gracefully" by wires, who danced on his hind legs while colored lights played over the gauze. Jay documents all of this with an elaborate, ironic elegance that adds tremendously to the fun.

-- Laura Miller

Fat City by Leonard Gardner
This novel follows a pair of young men frustrated by the weight and desires of maturity through central California's basement boxing gyms in search of something to make their lives matter. Ultimately they are caught in the drain of a small town, idling among down-and-out field hands drinking their way to oblivion. It's the same realm brought to life by other "blue collar" writers, such as Steinbeck, but Gardner brings to his characters a crushing empathy and writes with such unobtrusive precision that it occasionally takes your breath away.

-- Max Garrone

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