It seems like every other day, someone in our bookish blogging world offers a theory for why major media book coverage is shrinking. Generally, these concepts involve the economy, the proliferation of blogs, the short attention spans of today’s consumers, and a few little green martians. But today, I’m going to offer another, admittedly outlandish, [...]
In bestselling author Anthony Bozza’s new book, Why AC/DC Matters we get the kind of impassioned art criticism that is normally relegated to websites, fanzines, and independent publishers. Now, in the sake of full disclosure, Bozza is a friend and business colleague of mine. So take these comments with a grain of salt if you [...]
Dinitia Smith wrote an interesting review of A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias. I’m generally not keen on books dealing with the slow decline of someone facing terminal illness, but this review piqued my interest. And the last line of the piece is a pretty cool encapsulation of the book and it’s achievement: “in the [...]
I spent a good deal of time wrapped up in Tony Bacon’s Million Dollar Les Paul: In Search of the Most Valuable Guitar in the World this past weekend. It’s an engaging read that is an exhaustive look into the roots of a collecting craze involving 1958 to 1960 Gibson Les Paul guitars. Bacon points [...]
Louis Bayard reviewed Matt Bondurant’s new novel, The Wettest County in the World for Salon.com. The novel, based on Bondurant’s grandfather, deals with crime, corruption, and moonshine in the hills of rural Virginia. “Bondurant’s bootleggers are eminently touchable and, even in their worst moments, touching,” Bayard writes. “This is a lyrical and riveting book about [...]
I wrote about Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society for CrunchGear. Click here to read the entire piece. Manjoo’s text is intriguing. He points out how, as people, we have always had a tendency to believe what we want to believe. However, recent technological advances make it easier for us [...]
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 [...]
I’ve been pretty hard on writing/publishing books. Far too many of them are just garbage. And I’ve been pretty vocal about the titles that comprise my Mount Rushmore of writing texts. An interesting new addition to the discussion is Walter Mosley’s This Year You Write Your Novel.
A couple of reviews in the New York Times yesterday caught my attention. James Poniewozik reviewed Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End and found it “perceptive and and darkly entertaining.” And Walter Kirn reviewed William Vollman’s newest book, Poor People. Kirn makes an interesting point that Vollman’s own motives in all of his adventurous [...]
My review of The Garbageman and the Prostitute by Zack Wentz appeared on PopMatters last Friday. If you didn’t see it, be sure to check out the entire piece here. And we’ll let Zack keep on keeping on here at Slushpile.net since he was kind enough to interview Kevin Sampsell for me. Check out the next [...]