Tiki Central / Tiki Marketplace / the lost tiki palaces of detroit book
Post #467265 by zadsim on Tue, Jul 7, 2009 7:00 AM
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Tue, Jul 7, 2009 7:00 AM
THE LOST TIKI PALACES OF DETROIT In The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit Michael Zadoorian follows characters coming to terms with the past and the present in a forgotten city. Brightly ironic with a determinedly retro point of view, these stories are infused with themes significant to any connoisseur of old and forgotten pop cultures. The title story offers a mini-history of Detroit as told through the rise and fall of its Polynesian bars. Others include: A veterinary clinic worker travels to Mexico to stage a ritual for her lost animals; an elderly couple takes a final road trip to a mystery spot out west; a man spends his life waiting to inherit his parents’ kitschy 1960s furniture; a junk shop owner who must stop the stranger with a vendetta against him; an urban spelunker finds love and acceptance with a reader of his blog. Rich with detail and brimming with feeling, Zadoorian’s deceptively simple stories lead readers into the inner lives of those making the best of their flawed surroundings and their own imperfections. PRAISE FOR LTPOD: “What can one say of Zadoorian—chronicler of the lost, of junk and detritus, of the second-hand and hand-me-down. The abandoned. The soon-to-be-no-more. There is such poetry in these stories. Such wry wit and sadness. Such despair and, oddly, hope. In The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit, the city becomes a whole nation’s ruined Byzantium: destitute and still strangely desired. Lost. And found again.” “The stories in Michael Zadoorian’s new collection, The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit, represent the serrated leading edge of the Barthelmean aesthetic dictum of being on ‘the leading edge of the junk phenomenon.’ The prose here is a cacophonous chockablock collision with a no-nonsense nonsense knockout nominative wall of sound. This collection is stuffed with stuff.” “The stories in The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit give the reader such a deep and intimate vicarious journey, one would think that Zadoorian has had several past lives to draw on for material. As I read, I was always amazed to discover what lurked beneath them.” Michaelzadoorian.com |