Ed Gorman's Blog, page 231

The Last Deep Breath by Tom Piccirilli

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In his protagonist Grey Tom Piccirilli has created one of his finest characters. A drifter who latches on to a way to track the troubled girl whom he considered his sister, Grey ends up in the Hollywood porno industry looking for the man she was last linked with.

The prose is immaculate. Not a word wasted. Same with the dialogue. It furthers the story but is nuanced so that it also reveals character, sometimes ironically.

The actress Kendra helps Grey by introducing him to her agent, a wease...

New Books Piece: Rabid Child by Pete Risley

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Available from New Pulp Press http://www.newpulppress.com/titles/ra...

From Pete Risley:

*Rabid Child* was written over a number of years, and repeatedly set aside
for long periods of time in favor of (somewhat) less unpleasant fiction
projects of mine. My unease over *Rabid Child* has been mostly because of
the nature of the main character, a young man named Desmond Cray. Desmond,
to put it mildly, is less than cuddly. You'll have to read the book to see
what I mean. I invented Desmond, but...

Wow. UK lawsuit over "fake" Amazon reviews

From the Guardian
Historian Orlando Figes agrees to pay damages for fake reviews
Orlando Figes posted reviews on Amazon praising his own work and rubbishing that of his rivals

guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 July 2010 19.21 BST

Orlando Figes: 'I have made some foolish errors.' Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

One of Britain's leading historians, Orlando Figes, is to pay damages and costs to two rivals who launched a libel case after a row erupted over fake reviews posted on the Amazon website.

The award-winnin...

Shirley Jackson not good enough for Library of America?

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Ed here: As you've probably guessed by now I'm a big admirer of Laura Miller's reviews and literary criticism. Here she writes with particular insight about the snobbery of literary elitists.

From Salon:

Is Shirley Jackson a great American writer?

The author of "The Lottery" is still not getting the respect she deserves
BY LAURA MILLER

Salon
The Shirley Jackson Awards for excellence in "literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic" were awarded over the weekend, and the resu...

Betrayers by Pill Pronzini

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Bill's Pronzini's Nameless series is not only one of the finest private detective series ever published, it is also the most unique. To a very real extent the books are Bill's autobiography, not in the specific incidents but in the way Nameless feels about living in the world of San Francisco and environs.

In the earliest novels Nameless dealt with the counter-culture many times; then came the Seventies and (god forbid) the "Me" generation; and who can forget the greed decades of the Eighties...

"Thrillers: The 100 Must-Reads," by David Morrell and Hank Wagner

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From the TheWashington Post
Review of "Thrillers: The 100 Must-Reads," by David Morrell and Hank Wagner
By Michael Dirda
Thursday, July 15, 2010; C03

THRILLERS

100 Must-Reads

By David Morrell and Hank Wagner

Oceanview. 378 pp. $27.95

With his very first novel, David Morrell created an iconic character, now as famous as Tarzan or James Bond: "His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid for all anybody knew, standing there by the pump of a gas station on the outskirts of Madison, Kentucky." S...

Forgotten Books: Baby, Come On Inside by David Wagoner

David Wagoner is a celebrated poet who has written a number of novels. My favorite is Baby, Come On Inside for the simple reasons that it's so instructive aout the male ego. It also deals well with the spiritual meaning of the so-called mid-life crisis.

The fifty-year-old pop singer Popsy Meadows couldn't exist today. He's a lineal descendent of Sinatra and all the other bar room crooners who came after. But back when the book was new in 1968 crooners could still be seen all over TV variet...

The Costanza-Steinbrenner Saga

Ed here: Maureen Dowd has posted what's for me the funniest bit yet about George Steinbrenner. This concerns his run-ins with the Seinfeld crew. Since I can never get enough of George Costanza or his parents this one had me smiling all the way through.


July 13, 2010
Sultan of Swagger
By MAUREEN DOWD
Big George Steinbrenner could be hard on his employees, especially little George Costanza.

In the hilarious fictional Yankees world depicted on "Seinfeld," Steinbrenner once had Costanza hauled off to ...

Author posts her vampire novel online for free — and gets an awesome book dea

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from Huffington Post

Author posts her vampire novel online for free — and gets an awesome book deal

Can posting your unpublished novels online for free still lead to a nice book deal, now that the web is saturated with free fiction? It worked for author Marta Acosta, whose young-adult vampire novel will come out from Tor Books.

Acosta says she got tired of waiting for her YA novel, The Shadow Girl Of Birch Grove, to get a book deal. So she posted it online at Scribd, where it became the #1 selli...

Haters challenge Comic-Con as Devil Worshippers

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Ed here: Someday somebody's going to take these maggots down. They're going to ruin one too many funerals of a young dead soldier and then THEY'll know what hell is really all about. (This is from Comic Book News)


Westboro Baptist Church

• Rich Johnston catches word that Westboro Baptist Church, the small but vocal anti-gay extremist group best known for picketing funerals and Jewish institutions, will protest Comic-Con on Thursday -- if only briefly. The Kansas-based congregation, which is he...