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Halloween is my Christmas  So last night I paid twenty bucks then stood in line for better than two hours to finally get to stumble and cringe and scream my way through a haunted house. And I’ve got to say, I would have waited four hours. Six. Just because that thrill of being scared, that [...]

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I’m afraid (no pun intended) that my horror knowledge is woefully lacking. Aside from the trauma that Disney’s The Headless Horseman inflicted upon me as a small boy growing up on a horse farm, I don’t know that much about frights and the things that go bump in the night. So I turned to Stephen [...]

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It’s been a while for me. Fiction hasn’t been moving me much lately. And even my love of short stories had let me down. Nothing was exciting me. Until I read Richard Lange’s Dead Boys: Stories. This wonderous literary collection has enough tint of noir to be thrilling and the author’s voice is undeniable. Full of [...]

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Eric Clapton’s Clapton: The Autobiography debuted at #2 on The New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Bestseller List. It’s an interesting read that I’ll discuss a bit more fully this week. What made my reading experience even more unusual was by immediately following up Slowhand’s book with his former wife Pattie Boyd’s Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, [...]

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If you’re in New York City tonight, be sure to swing by the Dweck Center at the Brooklyn Public Library (Central Branch at Grand Army Plaza) to help the great Akashic celebrate ten years of publishing fantastic books. The celebration includes readings by Amiri Baraka, Arthur Nersesian, T Cooper, Preston L. Allen, Felicia Luna Lemus, and [...]

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The Arkansas Traveler Online Edition website, from the University of Arkansas’s school newspaper, finally notices the trend of fratire. More than 16 months after Warren St. John from The New York Times coined the phrase. The odd thing about the Arkansas article isn’t so much the lateness of their notice. But instead it’s the similarities that [...]

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Jim DeRogatis, pop music critic of The Chicago Sun Times eviscerates Ian Christie’s Everybody Wants Some: The Van Halen Saga. I read the book the day it was first released and didn’t find it to be that bad. It wasn’t as good as I was hoping, but I didn’t think it was awful. My main criticism [...]

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Mark at The Elegant Variation has yet another great post about what happens to a book before it hits the store shelves. This time, he discusses the unbelieveable chores of a copyeditor.

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The great Bat Segundo has posted another round of stellar podcast interviews recently. The most notable of the bunch (although they’re all good) is George Saunders, fresh off his appearance on David Letterman.

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Mark at The Elegant Variation has an absolutely fantastic post about all the things that have to happen after a book is accepted for publication. He chronicles some of the things he’s working on and really gives some great insight on how publishing works for that year-and-a-half from book deal to bookstore shelves.

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I posted a brief mention of Richard Lange’s Dead Boys: Stories over at Beatrice yesterday. I’ll have more on this enjoyable book in the next couple of days. And we’ll have an interview with Lange appearing soon. For now, check out the Beatrice post and be sure to pick up this great new story collection.

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 There were reports yesterday that bestselling author Jon Krakauer sued his publisher, Houghton Mifflin Co, and a printing company. His suit alleges the companies ”made more than 1.2 million ‘unauthorized and impermissible’ reproductions of Into Thin Air‘ in a textbook.” What’s interesting to me about this is that it illustrates all the various mechanisms in which a [...]

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