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Finances are rarely as they seem. The sports media blasts $100 million dollar deal headlines on an almost daily basis. But it’s only been in recent years that they began drawing the distinction between the guaranteed portions versus the purely imaginary Monopoly money the player will never actually receive. While basketball and baseball contracts are [...]

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A while ago, there was an uproar of discussion regarding the nature of book reviews and whether the critic should be, in the most simplistic way of speaking, “nice” or not. Quite a bit of the conversation centered on William Giraldi’s self-congratulatory, excessively assholish, show offy, “Let’s see how many references and allusions I can [...]

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Longtime entertainment and sports industry veteran David Fishof is appearing at Book Soup in Los Angeles today at 7:00pm. Once a sports agent to athletes like baseball slugger Lou Pinella and quarterbacks Vince Ferragamo and Phil Simms, Fishof switched his focus to the entertainment world in the eighties. He reunited the Monkees and started the [...]

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Add guitarist and singer Lita Ford to the burgeoning list of rockers with book deals. [Here's a round up of hard rock books.] Reports are that the former Runaways member and longtime solo artist has signed a publishing deal with William Morrow for a memoir called Living Like a Runaway. Joel Selvin is flying co-pilot [...]

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To the outsider, the world of books and publishing is sometimes perceived as a stuffy, stodgy, genteel world of college professors, pipes, and tweed jackets with elbow patches. Now imagine that quiet book reading, with a string quartet playing the corner, being crashed by a bunch of unwashed, drugged out rockers. That clash of cultures [...]

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If you spend any amount of time online, either writing blogs or reading blogs, then prepare to have one of two reactions when you read Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday: 1) You will read nothing you didn’t already know and you will be decidedly nonplussed. 2) You will [...]

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David Duhr at The Dallas Morning News had a great review of Growing Up Dead in Texas by Stephen Graham Jones. The payoff of the review? Without giving away any spoilers, Duhr calls Jones’ latest, “one of the truest, and finest, war stories you’re likely to read.” I’ve been running behind so I’m just starting [...]

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In The World Without You, Joshua Henkin explores the different ways in which family members grieve after a journalist is murdered in a warzone. The novel centers around the Frankels, a financially comfortable Jewish family from Manhattan who spend the weekends and summers in their Berkshires country house. The clan is composed of Gretchen, a [...]

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My guitar hero book, Power Chord is being published on July 31. Be sure to follow along with all the high volume fun by ‘liking’ the official Power Chord page on Facebook or checking out the book’s website. More information is being added all the time and it’s going to get hectic in the next [...]

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In My Date with Neanderthal Woman by David Galef, there’s an intriguing amount of absurdity and fantasy that remains rooted in reality. Winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Competition, the book plants outlandish situations into normal, mundane circumstances to which we can all relate. [Disclosure: Galef sat on my thesis committee in graduate [...]

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When the house lights go down and the crowd jumps to its feet and the spotlight operators squint through the dry ice, seeking musicians on the stage, the bass player is often the last rocker they highlight. Singers and guitarists generally get most of the attention. So perhaps it’s fitting that Duff McKagan released It’s [...]

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Everyone involved with writing and publishing complains about the volume of submissions. Aspiring authors lament the astronomical numbers of competing submissions. Agents and editors constantly talk about how they’re inundated with proposals. And certainly every aspiring author has inwardly groaned every time Aunt Mildred talks about how she wants to write a book and how [...]

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In recent days, we examined the trend towards everyone with a Marshall amp stack releasing a book of some form. And, unfortunately, many of those books haven’t been very fulfilling. So I wanted to close the discussion by mentioning some hard rock and heavy metal books that are interesting and different and worth a read. [...]

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During this weeklong examination of the hard rock and heavy metal memoir trend, it’s impossible to ignore the role of the co-author in these projects. Sometimes the co-authors (or ghostwriters if you prefer that title) can bring a level of literary high art to the proceedings. Other times, co-authors are reduced to mere typists by [...]

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