Yankee Pot Roast

LITERARY BEARBAITING

Announcing the Y.P.R. Book-of-the-Month Club



Welcome, dear readership, to the Y.P.R. Book-of-the-Month Club, wherein this humble journal will select a book each month (thus upholding the promise implied by the club’s namesake), and encourage good, old-timey satire based upon said book (thus negating any semblance to a real book club). At the end of the month, we’ll run the barrage of parodies, deleted chapters, foreign mistranslations, screenplay adaptations, off-topic reviews, random thoughts whilst reading, or whatever else you creative folks dream up, and pick a book for the following month.

In the interest of keeping things relevant and zeitgeisty, the inaugural B-o-t-M-C selection is Checkpoint, the political thriller by Nicholson Baker, in which this one guy wants to assassinate President Bush, and his friend doesn’t think that’s such a hot idea, and the two talk about it in a D.C. hotel room for 115 pages. Not even—more like 114½. You can zip through it in an hour, easy. The first sentence goes like this:
JAY: Testing, testing. Testing. Testing.
And it just keeps getting better.

Lame-ass creative springboards for the uninspired:
. . . But we expect you creative folks will likely come up with far better ideas.

Please wrap up and deliver your Checkpoint-derivative brilliance by September 30th.

Thanks. Happy reading.