Wake for the Angels

by Mary Woronov

The short stories illustrating Mary's paintings about living in LA for the last fifteen years ranging from childhood memories to punk rock to house wife to party bimbo and fear of the future are dark,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1885203004
• ISBN13: 9781885203007
• Release Date: September 1994
• Publisher: Journey Editions (VT)
• Length: 205 Pages
• Weight: 2.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 9.3" x 11.3"

Customer Reviews

One of a Kind

Woronov is a brilliant fiction writer and memoirist as well as being a living legend in hip circles and a talented actress whose performance in SCENES FROM THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN BEVERLY HILLS is as good as anything Meryl Streep ever managed to put together--so nuanced, so heartbreaking, so sexual. As a painter, she has her ups and downs, and this huge collection of her work shows her at her very best and her very worst--and the two aren't that far apart, for what seems initially childish or cliched in her work sometimes reveals itself, as you turn the pages, to show signs of divine fire. In her work LA is the ultimate product of the "Ashcan School," and her figures writhe in the bonfire of existential misery and obsession. WAKE FOR THE ANGELS divides her corpus into thematic groups, and then she writes stories for each painting--sometimes turning a particular body of work into a graphic novel, kind of, with faces and bodies switching off and dictating the action or mood of the tale they inspire. Woronov's men and women and children all yearn to be good and to find a single bit of fun in the lousy prison sentence they tell us is human life, and they bang against each other like stick figures hoping to draw sparks. It's a strange, sometimes poisonous amalgam of artwork and fiction, but most of the time, to my surprise, it works like nothing else I've ever read. She is sort of a blend between Hubert Selby Junior of LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN, and the Jane Bowles who wrote "A Stick of Green Candy." The book is exquisitely produced with some fold out pages that do the work a reverent justice, as her harsh, hypnotic brush conjures up human life like the cats of Rousseau prowling kinglike through jungle vines and brambles. Every time you think you have her number, she surprises you by turning around the digits.