David Abrams's Blog, page 157

Hitchcock, With a Twist of Noir: Night Film by Marisha Pessl

Night Film
by Marisha Pessl
Reviewed by Priscilla Walter

This year, two of my favorite writers are publishing new books.  In October, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch will be released, and in August, Marisha Pessl’s Night Film hits the shelves.  I was lucky enough to score an electronic copy of the ARC of Night Film from NetGalley , and oh, people, let me tell you: it’s terrific.

A veteran investigative journalist, Scott McGrath, is drawn to investigate the alleged suicide of Ashley Cordova...

Bookstore of the Month: Calling All Indies

Introducing a new feature at The Quivering Pen: the Bookstore of the Month .  If you look to the upper right corner of this webpage, you'll see an independent bookstore enjoying the spotlight for four weeks at a time.  All links to book titles mentioned in Quivering Pen blog posts will direct readers to that bookstore's website during that given month in hopes that you'll give some consideration to purchasing that book (or, better yet, several books) from that store.

I earn no commiss...

Bookstore of the Month: Fact and Fiction in Missoula, MT

Fact and Fiction
220 N Higgins
Missoula, MT 59802
(406) 721-2881
Fact and Fiction on Facebook
Fact and Fiction on Twitter


It's my pleasure to kick off the new Bookstore of the Month feature with Fact and Fiction, the literary linchpin of downtown Missoula, Montana.  Fact and Fiction was where I officially launched Fobbit with a reading and signing three days after the novel's publication last September.  Let me tell you, there's no greater feeling in the world to a debut novelist than to...

New American Classic: The Son by Phillipp Meyer

The Son
by Phillipp Meyer
Reviewed by Shannon Nemer

Philipp Meyer's The Son focuses on three generations of The McCulloughs, a family made wealthy through years of oil drilling on their vast Texas ranch.  In alternating chapters, the novel begins with the family's patriarch Eli McCullough, who is kidnapped by the Comanches prior to the Civil War and slowly adopted by the tribe.  Haunted by an incident involving his landholding Mexican neighbors and unwilling to fully prescribe to the M...

Front Porch Books: July 2013 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of books--mainly advance review copies (aka "uncorrected proofs" and "galleys")--I've received from publishers, but also sprinkled with packages from Book Mooch, Amazon and other sources.  Because my dear friends, Mr. FedEx and Mrs. UPS, leave them with a doorbell-and-dash method of delivery, I call them my Front Porch Books.  In this digital age, ARCs are also beamed to the doorstep of my Kindle via NetGalley and Edelweiss.  Note: most of t...

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Counsellor by Cormac McCarthy

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.




In the final seconds of the trailer for The Counsellor , Penelope Cruz asks Michael Fassbender, "Have you been bad?"  That is the essential question for anything flowing from the ink of Cormac McCarthy's imagination, isn't it?  McCarthy has rightfully earned a reputation for creating bad people in good books.  So it goes with The Counsellor, an original movie sc...

My First Time: Kevin P. Keating

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands.  Today’s guest is Kevin Keating, author of The Natural Order of Things , a finalist for the L.A. Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.  After working as a boilermaker in the steel mills in Ohio, Keating became a professor of English and began teaching a...

Sunday Sentence: Return to Oakpine by Ron Carlson

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I've read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.





The two men sat in the quiet bar.  Suddenly the light dimmed again under a cloud, and it was a moment that went out on them, through the big plate-glass window across the gray street and up above the town in a moment, reaching past the last house and the few bad roads newly bladed into the prairie and the antelope in clusters on greengray hillsides beyond that and then hovering beyo...

Cooling off with Mr. and Mrs. North

It was too hot to do anything but seek the cool comfort of the snappy, cocktail-party repartee of Mr. and Mrs. North.

While I'm enjoying the literary pleasures of Ron Carlson's new novel, Return to Oakpine , I was in the mood for something a little lighter at the end of an unbearably hot day.  (Did I mention that our home in Butte, Montana doesn't have air conditioning and that the mercury in the thermometer has taken up residency north of 85 degrees* for the past two weeks?)


So I set aside...

Friday Freebie: Ballistics by D. W. Wilson

Congratulations to Kelly Dolson, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer and Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer.

This week's book giveaway is Ballistics , the new debut novel by D. W. Wilson (author of the story collection Once You Break a Knuckle ). Here's more about the book from the publisher:

It is summer and the Canadian Rockies are on fire.  As the forests blaze, Alan West heads into their shadows, returning from university to his...