Ben Tanzer's Blog, page 48

This Podcast Will Change Your Life, Episode Ninety-Six - It'll Be Shite, starring the Bill Hillmann.

And man are we Hillmann. We are also podcast, Irvine Welsh, The Old Neighborhood, running with the bulls, hustling, Ernest Hemingway, boxing, gorings, street gangs, I-94 E, and so much more, that it will surely change your life, if even only for a moment.

"I said, a hip hop the hippie the hippie - To the hip hip hop, a you don't stop." Big Bank Hank (1957-2014)

Wherein we get to Writers Recommend at TNBBC's The Next Best Book Blog and so we do by getting all The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll.

So totally Writers Recommend indeed. And so totally appreciative we are. Excerpt? Word.

"I re-read books as a boy, I was ravenous for words and the escape and balm they provided, and some books filled the chasm for me again, and again, Carrie, The Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders, Flowers in the Attic, Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, The Chocolate War, and so many others, but none of them was The Basketball Diaries.

            It was electric, and real time, all live wire, and nerve endings, a mash-up of masturbation, drugs, sports, underage sex, predators, crime, writing, hustle, art, New York City in the mid-sixties, and people love to talk about cities, especially New York City as characters in stories, but usually they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, here though New York City was oozing and fresh, and another breathing slice of a book, that was so graphic, vivid, and fraught with gunk and stickiness, it was like watching a documentary."

This (chap) Book Will Change Your Life - Don't Ask Me To Spell It Out by the Robert James Russell.

There is the Russell and Don't Ask Me To Spell It Out from the WhiskeyPaper and we have read it and blurbed it and we are happy to report that it changed our lives and we believe it may just change your life as well, so please do hit it when it is available to be hit, well done, thank you.

“Don’t Ask Me To Spell It Out takes flight in the jagged chasm between who we are and who we want to be, starkly illustrating how we love, and lose, only to re-build ourselves again.”

And then there was the time that Lost in Space was all Pop Up Book Fair, yo.

In which the winners of the Bartleby Snopes Sixth Annual Dialogue Only Contest have been chosen and the mass celebrations may officially commence.

Seriously, we have winners and commencement, and the possibility that all of it just may change your life.

Books booze music Sunday yes.

"This is a book of everyday living, in the way that a William Carlos Williams poem was about everyday living." Lost in Space. Humbled love appreciations.

All of it. And massively at that. Excerpt? Word.

"This is Kurt Vonnegut, pushing a stroller, still interested in cleavage. Being a father is to be in a perpetual state of failure. Tanzer allows us to understand that the success of parenthood, of personhood, comes from that failure, from being present and engaged enough to fail, so that eventually it all comes back as love." 

Bare Bulbs Swinging by the Meg Tuite, Michelle Reale, and Heather Fowler, and the Winner of the 2013 Twin Antlers Prize, is so preorder.

For real. More here. And do hit it, now, like right now, it just might change your life.

"Tanzer keeps the story focused on human frailty." Orphans. Preach.

And yes, we would really like preach to be a thing. Is that cool? Also, excerpt? Word.

"The story is smart and absurd and even eerie in parts which is a new bent for the author. The scifi elements never go off the deep end -- they always feel believable, trusting the reader to grasp everything without all the details."