February 2012
3 posts
New Crime Column, With Plea For Assistance
Starting this weekend, my monthly-ish crime column, Crime Wave, will appear in The National Post’s print and online editions. I’ve contributed a lot to the Post’s books section in the past year and when Mark Medley approached late last year asking if I might be interested in rounding up Canadian crime titles on a regular basis, I think I said yes before I finished reading his...
Announcement(s)
I’ve been sitting on this for a while, but now that my signature’s on four copies of a contract it’s time to share the news with the world: I will be editing an anthology of domestic suspense stories, all reprints, for Penguin. The working title is THE DARK SIDE OF DINNER DISHES, LAUNDRY, AND CHILD CARE, and if all goes according to plan it should be on bookshelves and available...
Your Guide to Literary Tumblrs →
A fun list from The Millions that will be your TimeSuck of the Day. Off the top of my head, some notable omissions:
Emily Books
Lazy Book Reviews (moved away from the original mission, but Nicole is very funny and a pleasure to read)
The Bat Segundo Show (a supplementary Tumblr that highlights archival material)
Bookrageous (picks, highlights, and more from the bookish podcast)
Write...
January 2012
8 posts
“To be successful, you need to be able to take rejection. You have to be...”
– Sonny Mehta, from a 2004 PR Week article about @paulbogaards, who’s been the recipient of quite a lot of attention today.
ETA: What’s amazing is that everyone quoted in this piece who worked for or is published by Knopf is still working or is published by them. Holy continuity,...
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Me, Elsewhere
This weekend, my review of THE CODE by G.B. Joyce - better known to most Canadians, sports fans, and especially Canadian sports fans, as Gare Joyce, initializing his name for his very first mystery novel - appears in the National Post. (See also Mark Medley’s profile of the author.)
I also reviewed Sally Bedell Smith’s biography ELIZABETH THE QUEEN for Newsday. So far it looks like...
4 tags
The Tragic Postscript To Pauline Kael's Biography
As I’ve said several times here, Brian Kellow’s biography of the film critic Pauline Kael was one of my favorite books of 2011 (and inspired my essay on her fellow New Yorker critic Penelope Gilliatt.) But one of the things that I thought about almost as much as what really went on with Gilliatt was the relationship between Kael and her daughter Gina James, who never quite managed to...
Anonymous asked: How many books have you read so far this year? What do you think about e-readers?
On Penelope Gilliatt, The New Yorker's Other 1970s... →
Until I read Brian Kellow’s great biography of Pauline Kael late last year, I had little inkling of who Penelope Gilliatt was. After finishing the biography I knew I wanted to write about her because she came off rather badly: a drunk who needed minders to make sure she sat through the entirety of a movie? Kael’s complete critical opposite, disdained by fact-checkers in a cruel...
Set Faces to Stunned: William Shatner Is Coming... →
This news gives me license to share my favorite ever Shatner story, recounted to me when I was a child by my mother. When Shatner was burning up the theater world in the late 50s, a group of teens from Montreal’s Northmount High - my mom’s alma mater, in the town where Shatner was born and raised and where McGill University’s student union building unofficially bears his name -...
December 2011
8 posts
Keeping the Weight Off Is A Lot Harder Than Losing... →
11 years ago next month, just before my 22nd birthday, I went to the doctor for my semi-annual physical. Two pieces of news shook me to my bones: I weighed 230 pounds, the most I’d ever weighed in my life, and I had a benign medical condition that would make it difficult to have children down the line. “Can it be treated?” I asked. “There are drugs, but you’re better...
Anonymous asked: Your comment on Sue Graton "Because she manages to couch her ambition and improving scope in plain sight"? I don't quite get it -- and very much want to understand your point. Currently in the home stretch of V and loving it the best over many of the recent alphabets
Crime Novel Favorites of Mine in 2011, And...
By and large the year in crime was pretty good, though since it was the first time since 2004 where I did not have a regular column by the end of the year, my reading was not quite as organized as it had been in the past and was more wide-ranging across a number of genres. (Now I *really* tip my hat to Marilyn Stasio, who celebrated her 23rd anniversary at the NYT. She may even be the...
I am too lazy to link to my previous Tumblr post... →
North Korea in Literature
I’ve had something of a latent obsession with North Korea for a while and feel compelled, in light of the death of Kim Jong-Il, to assemble a list of novels and nonfiction works that help further understand this oppressive dictatorship that was often stranger than satire. There isn’t a lot; feel free to suggest other books that should be included.
Novels
Adam Johnson, THE ORPHAN...
Books I Loved That Were Not Published in 2011
I am getting around to one of those dreaded “Best of” Lists - more on that eventually - but in the meantime, a different sort of list:
Stanley Ellin, THE EIGHTH CIRCLE (1958) — I pretty much flipped for this book, calling it the best private detective novel I’ve ever read. Eight months later I stand by that decision. Ellin’s work, especially his short stories (and you should...
Apple, Publishing Houses Face Antitrust Probe →
I spoke about various ongoing antitrust investigations into agency model pricing on All Things Considered earlier today. Since it was a short segment, there was a ton of stuff that didn’t make it into the broadcast (not to mention, as I said to the producers and to Lynn Neary off-tape, this topic leads to so many different other Amazon and publishing-related issues that have dominated the...
November 2011
5 posts
Coming in May: Long Island Noir
Following my not-so-hard-and-fast rule that a book exists once it’s listed on all the major online retailing sites (*coughAmazoncough*) here is something I can finally share with the world after sitting on it for many moons: my short story “Past President” will appear in LONG ISLAND NOIR, edited by Kaylie Jones and published by Akashic next May. I’m in some excellent...
Anonymous asked: How does one navigate twitter. I'm not sensitive to it yet. It's driving me nuts!
“There are plenty of good sentences in this book, but they’re all the work...”
– Lawrence Block, understandably warding people off from buying QR Markham’s staggeringly comprehensive piece of plagiarism masquerading as a spy thriller on Amazon.
ETA: Lou Rowan, QR Markham aka Quentin Rowan’s father, “reviewed” ASSASSIN OF SECRETS on Amazon last week as...
October 2011
6 posts
Further Reasons Why Binky Urban Rules the Literary...
I was going to do a full-fledged review of Walter Isaacson’s STEVE JOBS bio, and I might still do that someday! But really I wanted to unearth all the ways in which Amanda “Binky” Urban connects to Steve Jobs, and is likely the driving force for why this book even exists:
Urban represents Walter Isaacson, the former editor of TIME and current Aspen Institute Head, who wrote the...
The Grofields Are Coming, The Grofields Are...
I’ve been holding off on announcing this, but now that listings are popping up all over, I need not hold off any longer: Some months ago, the kind folks at the University of Chicago Press dropped me a line to say they were reissuing three additional Richard Stark novels featuring Parker’s sidekick Alan Grofield next spring, and might I be interested in writing an introduction to the...
Giuliano Mignini: Knox prosecutor who believes he... →
There’s been billions of pixels metaphorically spilled about all things Amanda Knox, many more ever since an appeals court found her and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Solecito not guilty of murdering Meredith Kercher in Perugia on Monday. My opinion on the case is as clear-cut as it gets, and has been almost from the get-go.
Why? Because the man who prosecuted the case, Guilano Mignini, also...
Cheerful News.
lazybookreviews:
One of Canada’s absolute all-time worst citizens, the serial child murderer Clifford Olson, has finally died in jail, after decades of extracting money from the government in exchange for doling out information about grave sites and showing up to faint-hope parole hearings in order to taunt the families.
Not being a death-penalty person, I think that a slow death from cancer in...
September 2011
8 posts
The Posthumous Life of Shel Silverstein →
Today is publication day for Shel Silverstein’s new, entirely original poetry collection EVERY THING ON IT, and I wrote about it for The Atlantic a little less than a year after I last wrote about Shel for the publication. It should come as little surprise that I thought ETOI is really great, setting off my brain’s wonder-and-glee-meter off the charts many times. If there’s one...
Book Review: The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern... →
This is the most-hyped debut novel of the fall season - even more than THE ART OF FIELDING - and I reviewed it for The National Post. I enjoyed it, but I did pick some serious nits, mostly to do with the lack of grounding in a particular time period, especially when the story spans almost 40 years. But there’s magic and it was fun and it should sell a bazillion copies.
“Greater New York is in some ways like a house. Manhattan is the living room,...”
– Donald Westlake wrote this in his 1976 novel Dancing Aztecs, which I didn’t quite love as much as the first time around, when I would tell everyone I knew and didn’t know that it was among the funniest novels I’ve ever read. I think I didn’t love it as much because I could...
2 tags
4 tags
This Book Cannot Be Published Fast Enough
Wall Street Journal features writer Mary Pilon’s THE MONOPOLISTS: Obsession, Fury and the Scandal Behind an American Icon, the inside story of how the game Monopoly came into existence, how the legend of its provenance was fabricated, how Parker Brothers stole the rights to the original game away from its owners, and one man’s lifelong obsession to get them back, based on twelve...
Artists Recall The Week of 9/11, When The World... →
Yes, it’s another 9/11-centric story. There are lots already with far more to come as the 10th anniversary approaches. But I’ve long been intrigued by what happened to those who woke up that Tuesday morning and realized that what was supposed to be a time celebrating a new book, film, music or art launch was engulfed by something far larger, tragic, and traumatic.
I spoke with...
2 tags
McNally Jackson Bookmongers: Help for Reviewers of... →
mcnallyjackson:
It’s a home run!
Rookie novelist Chad Harbach
Rookie of the year!
The [baseball player’s name] of novelists
A grand slam of a novel!
A fastball down the middle—and into our hearts
Like the great baseball player Babe Ruth, The Art of Fielding is heavy—and swinging for the fences.
Something…
I wish John Updike and John Leonard were both alive because I would really...
August 2011
4 posts
kngaknga asked: 10 seconds of your day: Did you find beginning freelance journalism a laborious endeavor? And, honestly now, was it worth it? Does it bring unadulterated joy?
Shel Silverstein Stars & Stripes Interview, 1968
Recently on a late night I pored through the archives of the Stars & Stripes, the US Army’s official newspaper, looking for the text of an interview I knew Shel Silverstein had done with the paper in the late 1960s. He had good reason: Shel had been the Army’s cartoonist from 1953 through 1955, when he was drafted and stationed in Tokyo at a time when he had, in his own words,...
5 tags
An Unofficial List of Authors With Work Optioned...
I am far too lazy to concoct a slideshow but I hereby grant some enterprising for-profit (or better, not-for-profit!*) website to do just that. Without further ado:
1. Sara Gran, adaptation of her 2006 novel DOPE
2. Tom Perrotta, adaptation of his forthcoming novel THE LEFTOVERS
3. Michael Chabon & Ayelet Waldman, HOBGOBLIN, original series concept
4. Chad Harbach, adaptation of his...
Anonymous asked: I just read Butcher's Moon a few days ago and then did Comeback ... I loved Butcher's Moon but part of me felt a bit guilty that the bulk of the book was like rooting for an ad hoc gang to hit a mean bunch of mobsters like they were predictably moving targets in a shooting gallery. Comeback is pretty good. Parker's reintroduction is done on a slow burn while Stark gets you right up...
July 2011
4 posts
Secret Upper East Side Bookstore Delights Readers... →
I am of two minds about all the attention Michael Seidenberg is getting this week thanks to a (wonderful) mini-documentary on Etsy. On the one hand, Brazen Head Books is a magical, amazing place, ever since @drmabuse and I started going there a few years ago at the behest of friends, looking at Michael’s phenomenal collection of used books (the crime fiction section is also great) and...
“Stephanie Cha’s debut SONG & SIREN, about a young woman whose...”
– I am of two minds on this brand-new book deal: I want to read it, but I’m not entirely certain I approve of overt Chandler fetishization. Also, relating to something I literally posted on Twitter less than an hour ago, I’m also tired of lazy Chandler/Hammett comparisons. But I suppose...
Alex Shakar's 'The Year of Wonders' →
If you’re connected to the book world, you’ll probably want to read this essay at The Millions by Alex Shakar on how he spent a year as the Next Big Thing, with a Massive Advance to boot — only for his book to be published days after 9/11, instantly “irrelevant.”
There were a lot of books that met the same fate. Sam Lipsyte’s THE SUBJECT STEVE. Stona...
June 2011
17 posts
Please Note
Unlike Confessions, this here Tumblr is a raggedy cousin to the blog, a place where I shoot my mouth off, reblog cartoons and pictures and generally act in a fairly laissez-faire manner. In that spirit I enabled the “ask” button to, well, answer questions. As a result, a few helpful tips:
Please do not pitch me your book. Those get deleted automatically, same way book pitches via...
