The Roaches Have No King (High Risk Books)

Daniel Evan Weiss

ISBN 10: 1852423269 / ISBN 13: 9781852423261

Published by High Risk Books, 1994

About this Item

First Edition, First Printing. Not price-clipped. Published by High Risk Books, 1994. Octavo. Paperback. Book is very good with light toning. 100% positive feedback. 30 day money back guarantee. NEXT DAY SHIPPING! Excellent customer service. Please email with any questions. All books packed carefully and ship with free delivery confirmation/tracking. All books come with free bookmarks. Ships from Sag Harbor, New York.

Seller Inventory # 326689

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Roaches Have No King (High Risk Books)
• Publisher: High Risk Books
• Publication Date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1852423269
• ISBN 13: 9781852423261
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

When Ira Fishblatt's tidy girlfriend, Ruth, moves in, the roaches decide to take action to drive her out by encouraging a romance between Ira and his pretty neighbor, Elizabeth

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.