Cows

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Artists who have tried such experiments have found they need to work hard to aestheticize the difficult images: Andres Serrano’s beautiful, nearly abstract morgue photographs are an example, and so are some of Joel-Peter Witkin’s elaborately staged, faux-antique photographs of people with various medical conditions. Stokoe is an able craftsman, which makes the content all the more horrifying as he blasts through boundaries and finds increasingly twisted ways of making readers squirm.

Daisy (a left-leaning cow) : I believe it neatly encapsulates the human male infantile mindset, the fear and loathing of the mother, the horror of the female power of birth, of creation if you will, and the homo-erotic desire to be a man amongst men and to take charge of your manly destiny, all of which it appears has to be achieved by killing the mother figures. Whomever came up with the expression “Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” should just ought rethink that statement after reading this book which smashes all boundaries of good taste, and just may make you become a vegetarian. Cripps who has this insatiable sexual fatherly taste towards Steven and gives us soooo many words of wisdom.Having to keep the cover hidden on the train in case anyone spotted it and had any idea what it was I was reading was difficult at times. And from that, he desperately wishes to find a way to achieve it and leave the horror that is his current existence behind. The herd hears, they gorge on the sacrament of human meat and realize that “They were changed and they were happy with the change…. To me, Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory fell flat because the protagonist’s sadism was justified with childhood trauma, one of the cheapest tricks in the book. Despite the aesthetics of discontinuity, collage, and bricolage instituted by postmodernism, we still find that very strong images don’t work as fine art unless they are elaborately altered and contextualized.

Once he is the one committing the atrocities instead of having them done to him, the gruesome scenes acquire a new timbre; they are stepping stones no more, but milestones in his evolution. Matthew Stokoe is a novelist whose work has been translated into French, Spanish, Russian and German. The only redeeming thing about this book is that it's short, so you don't waste a huge amount of your life screaming, "This is so stupid!Still others ranked this one star or five depending on their emotional state upon writing their review. First it utterly destroy your stomach into a heaving mess then you will go into a psychedelic trip of insanity.

enormously disturbing and transcendently clever, Cows, a literally eviscerating portrait of life among the British lower classes, is revered internationally as one of the most daring English-language novels of the past few decades. I hope to have duped a few of the weak-stomached into reading, say, Peter Sotos or Pan Pantziarka, because they deserve being read). Artists who have tried such experiments have sometimes found they need to work hard to aestheticize the difficult images: Andres Serrano’s beautiful, nearly abstract morgue photographs are an example, and so are some of Joel-Peter Witkin’s elaborately staged, faux-antique photographs of people with various medical conditions. I’m still giving this 3 stars though, because although I personally couldn’t complete it, I could understand and appreciate what it was trying to do.I can understand readers giving the book one star based on gut reaction or effect or just plain dislike.

or "Not for the squeamish," or just simply "Nope," this little dandy generated some long discourse and even some legitimate essays that probably earned someone a decent grade for a university class. Stokoe has covered them in a layer of mud that won’t wash off and each character struggles to act ‘normally’ while battling this unseen poison that has infected them. It’s awkwardly constructed; its inner monologues and dialogues are seldom persuasive; it doesn’t respond to the last fifty years of fiction except in glancing allusions to some other extremist authors; and its writing is often mechanical.Cows too makes most mass market horror look like a crewelwork convention at the convent and this is good; we need more extremely weird novels to kick back at this age of relatively safe, capitalist eye of the needle through which anything artsy is pushed. Matthew Stokoe gives you exactly what you get, and doesn't insult you by giving anything less or more than the trip itself, and I love that.