June Publications
Peter Stephan Jungk explores the dark side of Walt Disney's Technicolor life in The Perfect American, a fictionalized biography of the venerable cartoon magnate. Wilhelm Dantine, a German immigrant and cartoonist fired by Disney for protesting Walt's supposed refusal to open his Anaheim theme park to Nikita Khrushchev in 1959, stalks his aging former boss, trying to pierce his wholesome veneer. Disney emerges as a megalomaniac (he considers himself more famous than Jesus Christ) haunted by mortality and scornful of the world that worships him. Trans. from the German by Michael Hofmann. (Handsel Books/Other Press, $18 192p ISBN 1-59051-115-8)
A retired second-rate basketball player starts a travel service for the terminally ill in Tom LeClair's Passing On. Michael Keever, hero of LeClair's earlier novel Passing Off, is the head of Terminal Tours, which takes the old and infirm on their last earthly trips. But client mishaps, a lawsuit and Keever's increasing weariness with the near dead make him decide to give up the business—until an old friend, Alice, asks him to accompany her on a world tour of famous tombs before she succumbs to kidney cancer. LeClair's enigmatic, amusing prose is engrossing, though the novel's stunted ending leaves readers stranded. (greekworks.com, $23 158p ISBN 0-9747660-1-1)
A string of rotten office jobs, unsympathetic superiors and leering co-workers drives unemployed actor Alice Finnegan wild in Temporary Insanity, a romance by Leslie Carroll, herself a temp worker and thespian. Alice—a single 30-something who lives with her retired showgirl grandmother—finally gets her big break when she auditions for a part in a play eerily reminiscent of her Irish immigrant family's own travails. Carroll's dramatic flair and peppy, earnest account of all-too-real office scenarios distinguish this spirited chick-lit offering. (Avon, $13.95 paper 336p ISBN 0-06-056337-0)
A real-life German cabaret singer and film starlet is the title character in Jean-Jacques Schuhl's Ingrid Caven, a semifictional 2000 Prix Goncourt winner about the vagaries of 1970s European counterculture. Caven, former wife of German filmmaker Rainer Fassbinder and live-in partner to the self-styled "Parisian dandy" Schuhl, floats in stream-of-consciousness reveries, many enhanced with too much cocaine and LSD. She remembers dutifully singing "Silent Night" to Hitler's troops one snowy Christmas night and roaming New York City entranced as an adult. Schuhl's staccato yet contemplative prose (trans. from the French by Michael Pye) illuminates celebrity excesses against a decadent and violent world backdrop. (City Lights, $12.95 paper 254p ISBN 0-87286-427-8)
