Woman's World reviewed in Very Short List

Very Short List is a daily email recommending one excellent, but under-hyped, entertainment gem. Today’s VSL recommendation came from me. I wrote a short review of Woman's World, a novel by Graham Rawle.

In creating Woman’s World, collage artist Graham Rawle spent five years cutting 40,000 snippets of text and spot illustrations from 1960s women’s magazines and pasting them onto 437 sheets of paper. The result is a page-turning thriller that’s utterly original yet retains the sensibility of its source material. Even without Rawle’s amazing facsimile presentation, Woman’s World stands on its own as a delightfully dark suspense novel about a family with a horrible secret.

Link

• [Bookyloo]

  Holy crap, is boingboing monitoring my life?? I am reading this right now. Even if it wasn’t assembled out of sentences from British women’s magazines of the 1950′s it would still be brilliant, it’s the uncensored screenplay Hitchcock never got to write. The story is sort of a cross between “psycho” and “strangers on a train”.

  In some places you can tell by the typeface that he’s pulling whole paragraphs out of articles or “true romance” fiction stories almost intact. I would love to read the source material–there seem to be a few definite themes: descriptions of terrible car accidents, ads for pork sausage, and tips on how to avoid ruinous passions during courtship that can derail a woman’s chance for happy marriage.

  And somehow he manages to make a totally perverse cross-dresser murder-mystery out of it. So cool and fun. It’s all cut and pasted, down to the page numbers. I’m amazed that it only took him five years to assemble.

• [phreatic]

  I thought this was going to be about the magazine “woman’s world” which reviles me every time I am in the checkout line at the grocery store. I could review that in a very short list too:
  1. More tips on cleaning your house!
  2. Cooking for your family!
  3. Lose weight!

  Those are definitely the only 3 things ever on my mind!

  Sorry… that was pretty off topic.

• [michaelannb]

  Cool! Have to read/see this. College is for those of us who can’t draw a straight line and whose great artistic talent would otherwise go unrealized.