ie They are  NOT coming from overseas !!

LOVE, DISHONOR,  MARRY,  DIE, CHERISH, PERISH

- By David Rakoff -

Illustrations by Seth

ISBN: 9780385535212

Publisher: DoubleDay - a division of Random House, New York, USA 

Published: 2013

Binding: French Flaps CARDcover   113 pages  

Condition: UNread & displayed condition! HERE in MELBOURNE! A retired display copy as illustrated!

Edition:  FIRST EDITION: 1st printing  

TIGHT,  SCARCE   HARDCOVER  ~  IN  MELBOURNE  ... 

WHY do ebayers buy from US?

Because you KNOW what you're getting. My close up photos are of the actual item!!

Remains UNread - it was the display copy instore . It is Tight -  neat, no inscriptions or marks within. Appears as in my photos - this is the exact copy!!  A nicely preserved copy - superb!

Minimal, if any, discernible shelf wear, the interior is tight and spotlessly clean with 113 pages plus endpapers. THIS copy is the Stated FIRST EDITION: 1st printing from 2013 - the USA publishing by DoubleDay - a division of Random House, New York. 

There are many wonderful color illustrations by Seth.

SCARCE title - this is an  UNread copy!!

In original pictorial french flaps CARDcover binding, in publisher's covers which are in excellent condition.

(Stored with 2021!)

Measures approx.  8¾  x 6¾  inches or 23  x  17cms

SYNOPSIS ....

From the incomparable David Rakoff, a poignant, beautiful, witty, and wise novel in verse whose scope spans the twentieth century Through his books and his radio essays for NPR's This American Life, David Rakoff has built a deserved reputation as one of the finest and funniest essayists of our time. Written with humor, sympathy, and tenderness, this intricately woven novel proves him to be the master of an altogether different art form. LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE, CHERISH, PERISH leaps cities and decades as Rakoff sings the song of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal. The characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or cruelty. A daughter of Irish slaughterhouse workers in early-twentieth-century Chicago faces a desperate choice; a hobo offers an unexpected refuge on the rails during the Great Depression; a vivacious aunt provides her clever nephew a path out of the crushed dream of postwar Southern California; an office girl endures the casually vicious sexism of 1950s Manhattan; the young man from Southern California revels in the electrifying sexual and artistic openness of 1960s San Francisco, then later tends to dying friends and lovers as the AIDS pandemic devastates the community he cherishes; a love triangle reveals the empty materialism of the Reagan years; a marriage crumbles under the distinction between self-actualization and humanity; as the new century opens, a man who has lost his way finds a measure of peace in a photograph he discovers in an old box an image of pure and simple joy that unites the themes of this brilliantly conceived work. Rakoff's insistence on beauty and the necessity of kindness in a selfish world raises the novel far above mere satire. A critic once called Rakoff magnificent, a word that perfectly describes this wonderful novel in verse.

About the Author

David Rakoff was the New York Times bestselling author of the books Fraud, Don't Get Too Comfortable, and Half Empty. A two-time recipient of the Lambda Literary Award and winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, he was a regular contributor to This American Life. He died in August 2012 at the age of forty-seven, shortly after finishing this book.

Poignant Entertaining read!

Reviews

Industry reviews

Rakoff, the best-selling author of Half Empty (2010), brings his thoughtful and tender perspective on life to this wonderfully funny yet heartbreakingly sad novel-in-verse. Throughout this rhyming novel, he crosses decades, telling the great American story through memorable characters loosely linked by acts of kindness or callousness. For example, a young runaway unfairly banished from her home finds unlikely comfort with a vagabond. Each chapter serves up a slice of life’s victories, discoveries, cruelties, and casualties, such as when a young man discovers sexual freedom in 1960s San Francisco only to later tend to friends ravaged by AIDS. This novel begs to be read aloud in the mode of Rakoff’s frequent and popular radio appearances on NPR’s This American Life. Although, sadly, we won’t be hearing new works from Rakoff, who died in August 2012, fans of the award-winning author will embrace with particular appreciation this final lesson on how to accept life’s blessings and blows.  - Booklist Review Annie Suhy

"The literary rhythm captures the steady momentum of American progress....poignant....beautiful and melancholy....with a final image that made my eyes well up....funny and heartbreaking and, like Rakoff himself, not easy to forget" - Entertainment Weekly

"Ingenius, delicately haunting.....probing, poignant, and wickedly funny....illuminate[s] the many stages of life" - O Magazine

"It's terrific: a sweeping narrative of the 20th century that encompasses personal tragedy, family secrets and broad social movements while going down as easy as a bite of crème brûleé" - Gregory Cowles, The New York Times Book Review 

"Reading the new novel in verse by David Rakoff, you can hear his voice again, wordy, so witty, a little worried, and always wise.....His mordant humor, his compassionate vision, his moral questioning, his sharp honesty, they're all intimately wedded to the meter and the zestful diction of the book.....But the new direction he takes in "Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish" brings out the best in him, too, as he fits his voice into a tighter form without ever becoming a slave to that form. He is as vital, as blackly comic, as bursting forth with detail, as vernacular, and as poignant in metered verse as he is in his effortlessly long prose sentences. Each couplet here equally serves the structural rules, the story, and Rakoff's matchless sensibility....The narrative is ambitious and has sweep...Agile, vivid, and entertaining" - Boston Globe

"Even at six vivid verbs, the title doesn't do justice to the breadth of this short, acrid, elusive, entrancing book."  - Bloomberg

Inspired...accessible, delightful....powerful.... alluringly designed by Chip Kidd and illustrated by the cartoonist Seth, is filled with the sly, sharp social commentary that made Rakoff such a favorite....What shines through in this novel, even more than in his nonfiction, is a piercing, wistful appreciation for life, love and art....deserves to become a classic.....a rare bird: moving, amusing, lilting, crushing. - Heller McAlpin, NPR

"I just marveled at his words....What he's created in this book is Seussian" - Ira Glass, in an interview with O Magazine 

"Beautiful and heartbreaking....delightful.... hilarious and lewd and shot through with a longing for life" - New York Times 

"A novel in rhyming couplets narrated in iambic tetrameter? Why not?... Along the way, you can have a lot of fun, no matter how serious the subject -- family, sometimes alienating, sometimes consoling -- because of the rhymes. Rakoff makes such pairings as virago and Chicago, ceases and paresis, skittish and Yiddish, antelope and envelope, horas and Torahs, Alzheimer's and climbers, for 100 cleverly rendered and entertaining pages." - Alan Cheuse, NPR.org

[A] tour de force novel-in-verse....It is hard not to feel celebratory over its heart-singing smarts, its existence as a fist raised against a life ending. What melancholia is there is confined to its characters -- it's a triumphant, moving work of true craft and wit. - Austin American-Statesman

Truly singular....There is so much bound up in the novel's singsong verse: stories about AIDS and Alzheimer's, altruism, art, lives linked together by buried incidents that spring up again to bear unexpected fruit. - Ira Glass, The Atlantic

"Rakoff marries deft, humane observation with jauntily tripping verse structure -- in places, you'll find yourself thinking of Dr. Seuss -- to create a series of jewel-toned interlocking miniatures." - NPR.org

"[A] marvelously barbed novel in verse." - Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair's "Hot Type"

Mesmerizing....Combines his wit and his gravity....Astounding - Publishers Weekly

A fitting memorial to a humorist whose embrace of life encompassed its dark side....[the book] retains a spirit of sweetness and light, even as mortality and inhumanity provide a subtext.....Strong work. It deepens the impact that this was the last book completed by the author. - Kirkus Reviews

Reviews

This is a wonderfully unique book….. A poem-novel. Admittedly, the rhyming couplet is not the most elevated form of poetry. It has an inescapable relationship to the limerick. But Rakoff manages to use it in a way that transcends the limitation of that scheme. He embraces the innate "low" humor of the rhyming couplet to provide a sense of humor to the saddest of stories. It is without a doubt a heartfelt expression of his own spirit, finding the humor in tragedy.

He manages quite inventive and unexpected rhymes, and while there is an occasional awkwardness in the meter, it is rare, and for the most part, so smooth you barely notice the cadence. He wisely and frequently breaks the repetitive meter found in stereotypical rhyming couplets to produce something of great sophistication.

A beautiful heartache of a book. ….. Full disclosure, I was lucky enough to be one of David's many friends. 

His wit, his kindness, and his gimlet eye are all much in evidence in this book. The book, which spans barely a hundred pages and nearly a hundred years, tells the story of immigrants, nouveau riche, artists, real estate vultures...all, in the end, riven by illness, restored by art. I wish it were longer. I wish David were here.

PERFECTION  ….  A novel told in verse? This type of thing usually makes me want to claw my eyes out. I'm a serious sceptic: is this a gimmick? -pretentious? -a plea for attention? Normally, I'd say yes, but Rakoff is amazingly magical here. The story of several folks who are loosely connected, these short pieces have the feeling of pulling back a curtain in order to sneak a peek into someone else's (sometimes intensely) private moments.

The verse form itself requires an unyielding, unforgiving adherence to language, structure and syntax, which Rakoff skates through with remarkable insight (and a sly nod to Jerome Kern here and there!). It is both hilarious and heartbreaking, and unbelievably -- to this curmudgeon -- this tiny book is perfection.

I'm still in awe of Rakoff's accomplishment. ..... I'm heartbroken that there won't be any more from this talented writer, as he died of cancer after finishing this book. He tells a story over the course of several decades; each can stand alone, but characters are linked. The story opens with Margaret and ends with someone else. I wish there had been a stronger connection. A few rhymes don't quite work, but the scope is impressive and all are lovely. Who can say they successfully started a chapter by rhyming Manhattan and satin?

Here's one part that I really liked, about a woman pouring coffee:

"She pours out a cup, adds a stream of cold milk
And smiles as it swirls just like taffeta silk."

The language and tone even change with the times, and the constant theme of art and how it elevates the human spirit is a universal one.

I'll be reading this over and over again.

Marvellous Reading!

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