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Since yesterday, I have published the complete works of Dashiell Hammett. Then discovered that his work is not out of copyright. So, it will not appear on the Grendel Hall Press website.
However, Philo Grubb, Correspondence School Detective, by Ellis Parker Butler, is out of copyright, has been published, and has been uploaded to the Grendel Hall Press website.
This is one of a series of "deteckativin'" books which became fashionable shortly after the advent of Sherlock Holmes and Co. A number of people, including George Barr McCutcheon (whose Anderson Barr books are delightful), decided that producing send-ups of the genre was worth their time.
I think that reading and publishing such send-ups is worth my time. I hope you do, too.
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Any Twin Citians out there?
I’m looking for people who’d like to form a small group of writers and readers (three to five of us would be about right). The ideal members will be people who are not just writers but really strong readers, who are adept at analyzing literature, and who can articulate in both contemporary and canonical terms what their literary sensibility is. (I tend to prefer and have been influenced by a style that’s more Proust via Nabokov than, say, Hemingway via Carver, but I can still be responsive to writers who are cultivating a style closer to the latter.) As a group, we’d meet several times a month to critique each other’s writing and discuss literature on a level that’s constructive and inspiring to us as writers.
If this sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, please contact me at hsilep [at] yahoo. com. Tell me about your literary aesthetic and what kind of writing you do.
So, well, about me: I’ve done the MFA thing (although, in retrospect, not at a time when I could’ve gotten the most out of it), studied literature at the doctoral level, write reviews of current literary fiction and poetry, and have some experience on the inside of the small press scene. I write fiction and prose poetry, and take absolutely to heart what Mallarmé said about it being the job of the poet to renew the language of the tribe.
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Hello,
Although I intend to do my own research, I hope that I might find a starting point by asking for recommendations in this community.
I've been keeping tabs on what I read, and have noticed that the list of authors is primarily populated by dead white males, living white males, and white women. I'm very fond of the books I read, but I'm starting to appreciate that reading work from this general group might be somewhat limiting. I'd love to read authors with different voices, who write from perspectives I'm unfamiliar with.
If possible, would you be kind enough to recommend books (non-fiction, fiction, poetry, anything that you consider worthwhile) by authors from Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Japan, the Pacific and Asia? I'm interested in the well-established authors as well as work by newer authors.
Sorry for such a general question! This request covers a very broad area, I know.
Thanks in advance.
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Something odd and slightly unsettling is happening to me with alarming frequency during my current book read. I'm only on page seventy-three but on nearly every page so far there are paragraphs, sentences, or phrases that I think are poorly written. Well, maybe not always poorly written but certainly improvable.
I can't decide if this is simply a sign that it's not a particularly well-written book or if my eye (or ear, I hear myself in my head when I read) has improved because of my own writing efforts. Once you've agonized over getting a sentence just right, are you more apt to recognize a sentence that wasn't agonized over? I think I'm interested enough in the plot to keep going and am hoping that once I'm more deeply engaged the faults I'm finding will quietly fade away, but at this point I'm more than a little worried.
The book is Chris Bohjalian's The Double Bind. I've read two others by him that I really enjoyed- Midwives and Trans-Sister Radio. When I saw this on the buy 2 get 1 free table I grabbed it. I understand that not every book by a particular author can be as good as every other, and because I haven't re-read either of the other two I honestly don't know if it's me or the writing. It seems clunky, wordy for the sake of wordiness, explanations and descriptions that seem out of place, even the names are overused. Maybe it's so alarming because it's been ages since I read a book I didn't love or like a lot.
Don't just talk amongst yourselves... talk here.
Xposted to:
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) hipsterbookclub
webofbooks
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I am reading an absolutely fabulous book right now, A Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich. This is the first novel of hers I've read and its so good I wonder if I will be less or more wowed by her previous books when I get to them, and get to them I will. It really feels like this might be her masterpiece.
The novel tells the intertwined stories of the Indians and the whites on and near a reservation. Narrated by various inhabitants of the town, this story weaves back and forth between the present (the lives of several of the locals) and the past (the original explorers and their harrowing journey to establish town in the first place, and later in time, a tragic lynching.) Here we see a young girl experiencing first love, a religious zealot who's lost her zeal trying to break free from the hold of the cult, a judge remembering the case of a tragically sad sack torn between two women, a grandfather's tale of the lynching he not only witnessed but experienced firsthand. . . each tale touching on the other, building from one character to the next.
I'm not quite down with the book, with a hundred or so pages to go, and unless Erdrich somehow ruins everything in the last third, I'll have to say this is one of the best books I have read so far this year.
crossposted to booktards
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) scarredbyitall reviewed The White Darkness for us back in January, and I was intrigued enough by her description to request it from the library. I was frustrated by the beginning of the book, and I'm still a little irritated that the narrator was so passive, but this was a beautiful book. I wish I had the original copy in which I stuck post-it flags on the most remarkable passages.
Searching for her original review, I realized scarredbyitall ALSO recommended The Dead of Summer to the book salon. I will be reviewing that soon, along with If I Did It and When The Husband Is The Suspect. My ultimate dream is to team up in a three-way girl-power true crime fighting ring with scarredbyitall and zenithblue.
The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean
An Insatiable Lust for the Antarctic, July 6, 2008
Fourteen year-old Sym is a classic young adult protagonist – the partially deaf social outcast who loses herself in intellectual pursuits and gets the boy in the end. Sym is obsessed with the white darkness of Antarctica, which is the favorite subject of her stand-in father, the wannabe adventurer Uncle Victor. Uncle Victor and Sym share a private world of science and history which makes Sym’s outward life more bearable, especially after the death of her father.
As the story opens, Uncle Victor surprises Sym with an elite tourist expedition to the South Pole. Victor reveals that he is on a quest for Symme’s Hole, a secret, mythical entrance to an underground civilization at the center of the earth. The reader will quickly realize that Victor harms others in his singleminded pursuit of adventure, but our narrator is painfully blind to Uncle Victor’s sociopathic behavior. She passively accompanies him without questioning why he stranded her mother at home, destroyed their cell phone, and drugged their friends on the expedition. As the novel unfolds further, Sym slowly realizes how manipulative and deceitful Uncle Victor has been her entire life, and she is faced with life-or-death survival in the company of a maniac.
THE WHITE DARKNESS is an adventure tale, a romance, and a coming-of-age story. The novel is lyrically beautiful on the subject of the South Pole, but the protagonist’s extreme passivity and lack of awareness renders parts of the narrative slow and frustrating to read. Still, I was hooked by the suspense, and I enjoyed the voyage through this queer, white world.
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I was given a second copy of Silent In The Grave. It's the only book I've really loved and gone crazy about so far this year. So I am giving a copy away to share the wowness. Details are on my book blog, anyone is welcome to enter. The deadline is 16JUN08.
The blurb: "To say I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband's dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor..."
For Lady Julia Grey, her husband's sudden death at a dinner party is extremely inconvenient. However, things take a turn for the worse when inscrutable private investigator Nicholas Brisbane reveals that the death was not due to natural causes. Drawn away from her comfortable, conventional life, Julia is exposed to threatening notes, secret societies and gypsy curses, not to mention Nicholas' charismatic unpredictability. This sparkling, witty tale is the first in a captivating new series featuring Lady Julia and Nicholas Brisbane.
My original review of the book.
X-posted a bit, apologies if you see it in a few places. :)
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Amazon.com to me
Dear Customer:
Starting May 31, 2008, the Borders.com/Waldenbooks.com website is no longer associated with Amazon.com. If you have been a customer of Borders.com/Waldenbooks.com teamed with Amazon.com, you have the option to receive information from Borders/Waldenbooks via e-mail--simply click on the link below and sign up by June 15, 2008:
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If you placed an order for an available item from the Borders.com/Waldenbooks.com website teamed with Amazon.com before May 31, 2008, Amazon.com will fulfill that order and provide any necessary customer service associated with that order. If you have any questions about an open order, you can view your order information in Your Account on Amazon.com or find more information on our Help pages here:
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Thanks for shopping at the Borders.com/Waldenbooks.com website teamed with Amazon.com.
Given Borders' current financial woes, is Amazon cutting its losses, or just being needlessly cruel? And should I spend the rest of my Borders gift card sooner rather than later?
Will Borders survive? Discuss.
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My guilty reading pleasure is true crime. I tend to like my true crime books of a certain caliber. The latest true crime read was When the Husband Is the Suspect which I didn't realize was written by F. Lee Bailey until I was a few murders in. Realizing that the author is a well-known and controversial defense attorney biased me to the reading. It was one of the stranger reading experiences I've had. I couldn't completely let go of the notion that the author wasn't to be trusted, though I found I liked his writing style. His often morbid and ironic sense of humor sometimes made me laugh and sometimes made me uncomfortable. The humor was needed to cut the darkness of the subject, and when it comes to murder, any jokes made in an attempt to lighten the reading are bound to be black humor. Still.
All of the crimes in the book are about uxoricide, or murder of one spouse by the other. (I am now trying to work that word into all of my conversations, which seems to be making people, my boyfriend in particular, nervous.) The cases range from Sam Sheppard to John Mason, going in order of the year the murders were committed. Many of the cases had similar threads--money as a motive, an unwanted baby as motive, or sociopathology. I liked the way Bailey organzied each chapter, with a timeline of events, an introduction to the players in the case, and a breakdown of the trial and the mistakes made by both lawyers and defendants. This is a defense attorney's view of uxoricide, and it's fascinating.
Some of the murders I was well aware of--Scott Peterson, O.J. Simpson--but others were largely unknown to me. I realized I would be lousy on a jury for a murder charge because I found that I couldn't be sure about guilt or innocence of a defendant in the majority of the cases. Of course not being on a jury, one doesn't get all the details of a trial, and I suspected that sometimes Bailey was leaving things out. The Simpson case was a particularly strange read. I have read a lot about that case and there were things I know Bailey didn't cover. Of course, he couldn't cover everything in a single chapter, which he tells the reader straightaway, but I still felt he was covering details that helped his view and ignoring details that support the other. In the cases Bailey worked, he suggests there is much grey area and that means the defendant was likely innocent or at least shouldn't be convicted. In the cases he did not work, he seems content to assume guilt. In several of these latter cases I was left with doubt. Bailey spends much time writing about the sloppiness of police investigations, until the reader feels that police never properly investigate a crime scene. He also writes about the husband's demeanor after the murder of a spouse and he urges the reader to question the "acting ability" of these men, as in, some of the husbands must be innocent because they would have had to be incredible actors to carry off their nochalant behavior had they just committed a bloody crime. In some ways, I felt like Bailey was trying to coach any future jurors on future murder cases in a way that would benefit a defense attorney. Perhaps this is an unfair assessment of mine.
If you like true crime, Court TV style, then this is a book for you. If anyone else here has read it, I'd love to get your take on Bailey's take.
(crossposted to booktards)
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excited
confused
frustrated
content
charming