Welcome to Los Alamos, where the big-brained boys and girls are at it again. But atoms have become passé: now it’s the Higgs boson, which they are using to develop a clean, efficient weapon of mini-destruction, mysteriously dropping bodies and groups of bodies into junior black holes within a fifty mile radius. Moreover, they’re accomplishing this perfidy in comic rhyming quatrains. Can an intrepid group of six amateur do-gooders resolve the mystery and prevent the unleashing of this new WMD? With the help of several Doberman pinschers, a versificative Kentucky writer and his vivacious muse, Herr Morguemeister, and Verdi’s Otello, a resolution seems just possible.
A delightful “episolary interaction” between Alina Stefanescu and Joe Taylor discussing the book may be read here.
Notices
“Joe Taylor’s Pineapple is Chaucer for the Atomic Age: wise, bawdy, howlingly funny cultural/political commentary on the state of our state—and rhymed, of course! Aided by able muse Trixie, OBW (Our Beloved Writer) delivers a rollicking tale of mystery, mayhem, government shenanigans, lost daughters and ‘writer’s revenge’ under a blistering New Mexico sun in a Los Alamos you’ll ever after consider the real Los Alamos. What more could a reader ask of OBW and his ‘dratted characters’? Not a damn thing. Follow line 23, chapter eight instructions to the T: ‘Buy J Taylor’s books, they’ll improve your head.’”
—Kat Meads, author of For You, Madam Lenin and Ladies: First.
“Pineapple is a tour de force—marvelously witty, filled with characters a reader is unlikely to forget, hilarious rhymes and turns of plot that kept me laughing—sometimes hooting—as I turned the pages. A novel in verse is a tall order, and Joe Taylor fills it to the brim.”
—Susan Ludvigson, author of Sweet Confluence (New and Selected Poems) and Trinity.
Joe Taylor is the author of numerous novels and collections of short fiction. He has directed Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama for over 25 years, and, appropriately for a publisher of thoughful, innovative fiction, he and his wife Tricia house over a dozen stray dogs, who mostly do not savage him.