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Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack

The GIRAFFES want YOU because YOU want the GIRAFFES!
Here are the reviews at amazon, thus far:


3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Singular, October 10, 2010
This review is from: Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack (Paperback)
Giraffes in Hiding is gourmet fare, full of strange new literary flavors, but, delicious. To fully enjoy it, you might want to travel a dimension or two beyond the surface plane...but, once you let yourself step into Ms. Novack's world, you'll be rewarded with rueful, hard-won wisdoms, cynical and hopeful meanderings, bright new metaphor and allusion.

In a way, this book seems multi-media, clearly it's influenced by the barrage of images and sound that are constants in 2010. The fresh takes on sibling rivalry and brutality, the impossibility and need of Love, the obstacle course of creativity, and more...make this an absorbing read. There are edgy fables and myths here, Ms. Novack writes prose poetry and is an Aesop of the 21st century.

This book demands an adventurous reader and is not for people seeking more traditional fiction.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Courvoisier and Caviar, November 14, 2010
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack (Paperback)
I NEVER want to finish this book! Reading Ms. Novack's work gives my life meaning - without a constant intake of her magic, I will jones somethin' awful. Carol Novack is a Master Juggler, of words, connotations, denotations, inspiration, perspiration. Even the title itself... giraffes can't hide, yet they do quite well, heads far above most other animals. This is a new genre, not a cross between stream of consciousness and free verse; comparing this in any way to any other genres is instantly ERROR CODE 404 - PAGE NOT FOUND.

Here, read this and tell me the style/content/choices are like anything you've EVER experienced before:

"That is what I recall, I said, trying once more to shake you out of the shadows of your sleep, still as old bones. Still I held a mirror to your mouth and saw only my own, grotesque gash, split by a hare. You stirred and parted your withering legs. Ah, how divine! I peered inside of you with the eye of my knitting needle, pushed the eye all the way up to the dead roots of your brittle white hair."

Now, before you go all William Burroughs toothsome and fierce, imagine that paragraph at the end of a 4-part onslaught of visions, half- and quarter-seen through a prism balanced on a rhino's horn. The paragraph reverberates, re-noun-erates, as the case may be, sounds, smells, images, tastes and textures from YOUR unconscious, whipped to a froth just from reading the story! Oh, you say, I must be overstating the case; surely I meant the author's unconscious. Oh Nay! She's like acid, whose micrograms have dissipated so thoroughly as to be invisible, leaving YOUR mind spinning off to inner space while hers just hip-skip-dances away, merrily singing sing-songs...

Are you catching just a glimmer of the miracle that is Ms. Carol Novack? Buy the book. You won't believe what happens to your own writing! Better than drugs, better than caviar and cognac.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Hey, Buy This Book!, January 18, 2011
This review is from: Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack (Paperback)
I recommend this book to anyone looking for fiction that challenges the traditional need for a plot, for a central character with defining features, for someone that tells you what to think or feel. Because all that, Carol Novack is NOT. Why go with tradition, where creativity can so easily languish? Various artists/illustrators spew forth into this world of colorful language and trails of thought -- PLUS the author includes LARGE words on each page that add a poetic dimension to the book design.

Also, check out Carol's online magazine, [...] ... While you're there, also see ARCHIVES link for issue 10 and click on the VISUAL POETRY GALLERY. I had the honor of editing that gallery, so thought I'd mention it within this review. Kudos to Carol Novack for reaching out to to promote other experimental writers with the MHR online magazine.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Dreaming Not Drowning, January 2, 2011
This review is from: Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack (Paperback)
Few books tell it as it really is: "People say lots of things. If you listen to them you'll stay under the table with the dogs." Carol Novack's "Giraffes in Hiding", subtitled her "mythical memoirs", flashes many lives in your face. Novack, the publisher of the respected literary online magazine Mad Hatters Review, is a keen word stylist. But no matter how wild her high hair flies, she keeps the reigns:

"This town's windows need insulation in the frigid seasons when the voices grow colder and louder. Nothing grows and the kitchen shelves are vacant. One can hear the real estate agents screaming in their white rooms. One can see their angry shadows through white curtains. Always white - that is what the denizens want: a neutered town in which you may disappear into your shadows. they say that colors invite arrest. They think they are invisible, the fools. Perhaps they are invisible and I am the fool."

Though "Giraffes in Hiding" is a collection, I almost read this in one sitting-and I do have a postmodern attention span, adequate to the creation and consumption of flash but not much else. Novack's language and her ear for the absurd tied me down and lifted me up at once as few books have done lately. "We need to dream before we drown", says the narrator in the short "Spawning babies". This book, read by everyone under Milk Wood, will inspire you and help you dream.

"Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack" is also exquisitely illustrated by fourteen different artists, making it an even better more beautiful buy for the holidays. Highly recommended!

(From my mini-review for Metazen, 12/2010)
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5.0 out of 5 stars Fresh and innovative, December 16, 2010
This review is from: Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack (Paperback)
Giraffe's in Hiding, a collection of literate prose that hinges on every line at becoming poetry, gives us a spectrum of feeling, an array of imagery, unlike anything else. Each page is its own form of acrobatics; the duel streams of images and writing combine to form a shifting extraction of life(?) in many pieces, many different gradients of experience. Very prominent, there is a sense of magic--of these subjects beginning to take new shapes. Babies fly, and children really do live within their own "secret countries"; emotions contort until they become physical and seem to override the narrative itself.

This is excellent work from a very fresh talent. It jumps off the page, in many different senses.
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Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack
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