Hipster Olympics

Well, I guess I don't qualify, I failed the two-fingers test.

What's Shelf Monkey really like?

My apologies for not updating this blog as often as I should (let's face it, I'm simply not interesting enough to fill a daily blog). I'll try to be more proactive (big news coming soon on this front), but for right now, I thought I'd do a quick read-through of all my reviews, and present a list of all the novels and authors that Shelf Monkey has been compared to:

Fahrenheit 451 (well, duh!)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Carrie
Lord of the Flies
The Monkey Wrench Gang
Revenge of the Nerds
Douglas Adams
Max Barry
Chuck Palahniuk
Dave Eggers
Rex Murphy (seriously!)

Pretty good company, all that.

Shelf Monkey - Toronto Star review

The terrific author Michel Basilières (Black Bird) has penned a fairly great* review of Shelf Monkey in the August 5 edition of The Toronto Star.

"Corey Redekop's first novel, Shelf Monkey, takes aim at the entire world of books and readers, and manages to hit quite a few targets...

"As a former shelf monkey myself, in exactly the kind of "hypermegabookstore" that Redekop sets his story, I can confirm that his protagonists are embarrassingly real, if exaggerated for the sake of his madcap story. In my experience, book clerks are every bit as overly well read as Redekop's characters, but only sometimes – well, maybe half the time – are they as socially misfit. This is the realm of the book nerd. These people laugh at jokes about ISBN numbers and adopt pseudonyms taken from their favourite novels...

"The book is faintly reminiscent of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest via Fahrenheit 451, but that's only picking out a couple of Redekop's many deliberate borrowings. This he does quite well. If you, too, have read far too many novels or spent any time as a shelf monkey, or like your fiction light and fast, you'll probably enjoy this one, as I did."

Read the rest of the review here.

*I say "fairly great" because of a few too many spoilers for my liking, and one misspelling of my name.

Shelf Monkey - The Skullring Interview

Matt Staggs of the frighteningly-monikered yet terribly friendly weblog skullring.org recently published a lengthy interview with yours truly.

Read the sterling conversation here.

Shelf Monkey - Prairie Books Now interview

Paula Kirman of the free literary publication Prairie Books Now recently did an email interview with me, and published it in this season's release.


Click on the interview to the left for the full story.



And dig the nifty advert underneath.