Literary/I Want My Dvds

Lunar Park

By Bret Easton Ellis

Knopf

It’s been too long since Bret Easton Ellis wrote a book this good. Lunar Park is a total return to form. It might be better than the Rules of Attraction. It isn’t as good as Less than Zero or American Psycho, but that’s kind of OK because it functions as a continuation of both those books. The main character here is Ellis himself, cast as a washed-up novelist being haunted by addiction, writer’s block, horniness, and the ghosts of two of his most well-known characters—yuppie murderer Patrick Bateman and over-it L.A. teen Clay. And when I say haunted by them, I mean haunted like a ghost story. Oh, and also Ellis’s dad come back from the dead. I could get nerdy and talk about how this all plays with the line between fiction, memoir, and horror, or I could just say buy the book. Buy the book.

JANE BLIPS

Roseanne

The Complete Series

Anchor Bay

Maybe you need to have an inner riot grrl to fully appreciate this show, but fuck it. Roseanne ruled. It was a good reflection of the working class without being precious, it was actually funny, and John Goodman is the boomer-age dad we all should have had.

JUNE SPRIG

North Drive Press

Edited by Matt Keegan

Ah, a refreshing cool breeze in the fetid stinkhouse known as publishing. This zine, if you can call such a luxury object a zine, utterly blows out of the water all the vanity mags, posters, and farts that bury us at the office.

North Drive Press, which is a stack of ephemera by various artists packed in a cardboard box, is like looking inside a great curator’s brain and pulling out little files and going, “Hey what’s this,” and then he tells you all about it, but he tells you in these sheaths of loose interviews done, like all the rest of NDP, in stunningly simple and elegant design.

JESSE PEARSON