Pirate Talk or Mermalade

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From Publishers WeeklyTold entirely through dialogue, this quirky tale of period pirate wannabes makes a jeu d'esprit of the privateer life even as it baldly de-romanticizes it. Its protagonists, two unnamed brothers (one of whom might not be male), put out to sea from their Nantucket home in 1718 bedazzled by fantasies of gold doubloons and buccaneer booty. Over the next decade, capture by pirates, shipboard slaughter, maiming and dismemberment, slavery, sodomy, shipwreck on a desert island, and getting stranded in the Arctic all follow in due course. Svoboda (The Ask) plays these travails mostly for laughs, presenting them as ongoing pratfalls in the brothers' klutzy comedy of errors. Periodic visits from a mermaid (perhaps their half-sister) and a parrot who steals the scene every time he croaks "Hanged!" add to the fun. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the AuthorTerese Svoboda: The many faces of Svoboda's luminous writing include eleven books of poetry, fiction, translation and over 100 short stories. Trailer Girl and Other Stories, her third novel, was reissued in paper last fall. “Unnerve thyself: the violent and enthralling short stories in Trailer Girl detonate on contact,” writes Vanity Fair. Her memoir Black Glasses Like Clark Kent was termed "Astounding!" by the New York Post, selected as a Japan Times "Best of Asia 2008" book, and won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Praised as a "fabulous fabulist" by Publishers Weekly for her last novel, Tin God, Vogue lauded her first, Cannibal, as a female Heart of Darkness. Svoboda is also the recipient of the Bobst Prize (for Cannibal), the Iowa Prize for poetry and the O. Henry Award for the short story. Her work has been selected for the "Writer's Choice" column in the New York Times Book Review, a SPIN magazine book of the year, and one of the Voice Literary Supplement's ten best reads. Her opera WET premiered at L.A.'s Disney Hall in 2005. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, The New School, Bennington, Davidson, University of Hawaii, U. of Miami, Fairleigh Dickinson, Williams College, San Francisco State College and the College of William and Mary and is teaching fiction this spring at Columbia’s School of the Arts.