My Wife and My Dead Wife

by Michael Kun and David Bowles

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1931561699
• ISBN13: 9781931561693
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage Publishing
• Length: 355 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.3" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

A Funny Book With An Unusual Narrator

This is an excellent -- and funny -- book with an unusual narrator. He has a quirky voice and a quirky perspective on life, which you come to understand as you reach the 2/3 mark of the book. You will laugh out loud at the same time you feel a great deal of sympathy for the narrator. I look forward to the author's next book.

A Thought-Provoking Book

Hmm. I hadn't heard of this author before, but was taken by the Dr. Seussian-looking title lettering. I ended up being very pleasantly surprised. Putting aside the humor that everyone else has noted -- and, yes, it is laugh-out-loud funny -- the book is actually a meditation on the the truthfulness of fiction. Toward the end of the book, when you realize the narrator may not have told you the truth about his girlfriend as a way to make himself feel better, you find yourself having to reassess everything you've read. And you'll look differently at everything you read in the future. Based on this, I'm going to run out and pick up the author's other novels. His is a very unusual voice that deserves to be heard.

Novel about tailor had me in stitches

My Wife and My Dead Wife is unquestionably the greatest novel about a tailor in the English language. It is also the funniest, saddest and downright readable novel on any subject you are likely to read this summer. No surprise, coming from master comic Kun, whose Locklear Letters rang up a laugh a paragraph just one year ago. MWAMDW (not to be confused with WMD) surpasses the dazzling Locklear Letters on just about all counts. Sid Straw was obsessive, witty and a little exasperating. Hamilton Ashe (Hamilton Burger meets Arthur Ashe) is a riveting, complex voice, a tailor who crossstitches his humor with self-deprecation, befuddlement, an endless bombardment of rhetorical questions (this a subliminally interactive novel) and an ineluctable helplessness in the face of a love relationship. Kun brings an embarrassment of talents to this book, from a relentless comic shpritz to a nanospecificity on the art of sewing, from risible dialogue to riotous sex. These are all new elements in Kun's work, or at least more pronounced than before. But what makes this novel superior to Kun's, and just about everybody else's fiction, is the gathering darkness and depth of the last 40 pages or so, when one realizes that this bittersweet parable of Mars vs. Venus is really about redemption, about how one momentous event can shape one's life for decades. Ham Ashe is a hopeless romantic, but he is ultimately more hopeless than romantic. He is a wannabe savior who can, in the end, bring salavation only to torn cloth. How many novels can go from sidesplitting to heartbreaking in a fast-moving 350 pages? James Thurber never tried it,but if he had, he might have written something like My Wife and My Dead Wife. Thurber

READ THIS BOOK!!!

Once again, Mr. Kun provides us with a witty, insightful look into the mind of man and it proves to be a scary place. Like his last book, Locklear Letters, My Wife has its share of funny moments, but MWAMDY takes you on a deeper dive and refuses to let you up for air. From the first page to the last, this is a thoroughly enjoyable read.Let's hope Mr. Kun continues to dig into the batter's box and take his cuts so we can expect more hits like this one. He'll clearly end up well over the Mendoza line.

A Funny Narrator and A Story That Sneaks Up on You!

Like Kun's last book, the comic masterpiece The Locklear Letters, I read My Wife and My Dead Wife in a single sitting on the very day I received it. Two sentences in, his narrator (Hamilton Ashe) already had me hooked. I'm not kidding -- two sentences, and I already loved the narrator and wanted to hear everything he had to say! The narrator is funny, charming and self-deprecating. I knew he was going to lead me somewhere interesting, and sure enough he did. And when you finally get there, it packs an emotional whallop that can't be underestimated. If you are looking for the non-stop laughs of The Locklear Letters, go reread The Locklear Letters. If you are looking for a great book by a multi-talented writer, pick this up. Then try to put it down!