The Roaches Have No King - Softcover

Weiss, Daniel Evan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0980193567 ISBN 13: 9780980193565

Publisher: Pointed Prose Press, 2015

Synopsis

A colony of roaches lives in harmony with the human couple who share their apartment; when the tempestuous woman hurls meals against the wall, there is food for all. But one day she disappears. Her compulsively tidy successor has the kitchen redone; cracks and holes are sealed, food is stored out of reach. The roaches face starvation. One comes up with a diabolical plan: with the unwitting help of the local cocaine dealer, he will encourage a romance between the man and the pretty next-door neighbor, driving away the lady of the house and saving the colony. "Shades of Kafka, Swift, and Don Marquis. Daniel Evan Weiss has written an appealing, often mordant satire about the urban condition.... Have I neglected to mention that Daniel Evan Weiss's unusual novel is also dark and erotic in addition to being clever and charming... If you're a roach, this book is positively steamy!" The New York Times Book Review

About this title

About the Author

Daniel Evan Weiss is the author of the novels Hell on Wheels, Honk if You Love Aphrodite and The Swine's Wedding. His non-fiction includes The Great Divide and 100% American. He lives in New York City.

From Kirkus Reviews

A nasty, arch and occasionally funny novel about cockroaches- -first fiction from Weiss, author of nonfiction books 100% American and The Great Divide (not reviewed). In an unnamed city (seems like New York), Ira Fishblatt, a bleeding-heart liberal Legal Aid lawyer, is rejected by his live-in lover, The Gypsy. This is much to the dismay of the other inhabitants of Ira's place: hundreds of cockroaches with names like Bismarck, Rosa Luxemburg, and Julia Child (they were born in bookshelves), who enjoyed The Gypsy's messiness and food-throwing. After a brief despondent period, Ira meets the overweight, matronly Ruth Grubstein. Cosseted into the role of good Jewish boy, Ira goes to such lengths to please Ruth that he renovates the kitchen, forcing the kibitzing circle of Blattelae Germanicae out of their homes. The roaches, led by their ringleader Numbers, who's also the book's narrator, swear vengeance. They disrupt a dinner party of Ira and Ruth and their neighbors, the Wainscotts, by causing a blackout that, in a good bit of screwball writing, forces Ira and Elizabeth Wainscott into close quarters in the dark. But Plan A fails, and thus begins Numbers's long journey of the soul to find a more effective revenge on humankind. What follows are comically gruesome scenes described from Numbers's roachy point of view: from toilets, in Ira and Ruth's bed, in the hair of a coke dealer named Rufus, in the sewer system. Weiss's broad ethnic comedy--in dialogue between Jewish Ira, black Rufus, and old-money racist Wainscott--is bracing at first, then flattens. A well-modulated comic novel (one hesitates to say ``picaresque''), only for those with really, really wicked sensibilities. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pointed Prose Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0980193567
• ISBN 13: 9780980193565
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 258