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Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino: Stories | Julian Herbert
7 posts | 1 read | 1 to read
Virtuosic stories by one of “the more interesting and ambitious prose stylists of our time” (Los Angeles Times) In this madcap, insatiably inventive, bravura story collection, Julián Herbert brings to vivid life people who struggle to retain a measure of sanity in an insane world. Here we become acquainted with a vengeful “personal memories coach” who tries to get even with his delinquent clients; a former journalist with a cocaine habit who travels through northern Mexico impersonating a famous author of Westerns; the ghost of Juan Rulfo; a man who discovers music in his teeth; and, in the deliriously pulpy title story, a drug lord who looks just like Quentin Tarantino, who kidnaps a mopey film critic to discuss Tarantino’s films while he sends his goons to find and kill the doppelgänger that has colonized his consciousness. Herbert’s astute observations about human nature in extremis feel like the reader’s own revelations. The antic and often dire stories in Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino depict the violence and corruption that plague Mexico today, but they are also deeply ruminative and layered explorations of the narrative impulse and the ethics of art making. Herbert asks: Where are the lines between fiction, memory, and reality? What is the relationship between power, corruption, and survival? How much violence can a person (and a country) take? The stories in this explosive collection showcase the fevered imagination of a significant contemporary writer.
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Bertha_Mason

"In the moonlight, the outlines of the buildings made stepped patterns in space, and piles of broken glass sparkled on nearby rooftops; I remember that because I thought it was somehow like seeing the sound of crickets."
-"Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino"

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Bertha_Mason

"Now that I come to think of it, cinema must be the art form that has the most in common with being confined in an ant colony thirty feet belowground."
-"Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino"

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Bertha_Mason

"Whenever I mention this, the public accuses me of suffering from Stockholm syndrome. I don‘t find that judgment unfair: after all, it‘s a rare privilege to be kidnapped by the evil twin of your favorite movie director."
-"Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino"

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Bertha_Mason

"Opposite us were two vacant seats. Or almost vacant: across the narrow space between them lay—very demure, proper, and pretty—a croissant with a single bite taken out of it. At a glance, it looked like a splendid pile of pale shit."
-"The Dog's Head"

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Bertha_Mason

"Abstinence is like a dome of excess where all the fantasies of resentful desire end up."
-"NEETs"

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Bertha_Mason

"By day, the landscape bordering the highway is like jeweled folds: green and blue mountains, white dunes, mounds of exposed virgin rock that made you think of giant hands emerging from the land of the dead to punch the sun."
-"M.L. Estefanía"

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Bertha_Mason

"Then later, when I got home, I‘d masturbate, evoking the catch in her husky voice until I finally felt a dull thump in my coccyx. Ejaculating before you can actually ejaculate is one of the most brutal experiences I know."
-"The Ballad of Mother Teresa of Calcutta"