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08-21-03: David
Corbett Interview Online, The Bukowski Hangover Project,
Weird Web Art from the Fortean List
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David
Corbett Interview Online
My interview
with David Corbett, author of 'The
Devil's
Redhead'
and 'Done
for
Dime' is
now online. Don't miss this interview -- Corbett
has a million great tales to tell about his time
working for a San Francisco Private Investigation
firm, and how they played out into his fiction.
Find out about the gentlemen marijuana smugglers of
the 1980's and the drug-dealing real estate tycoons
of the inner city. It's dirty California Politics
at its best! The interview is available in
MP3
or RealAudio
format.
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The
Bukowski Hangover Project
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This collection clearly includes the
blood of the poets, short-story writers,
and essayists.
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Victor Thorn, editor of the online
webzine Babel
Magazine, is putting out an
anthology of Bukowski-flavored
fiction and anecdotes. I'm
acquainted with at least one of the writers, Michael
Meloan, who knew Buk through a mutual friend. Those
who are looking for a new dose of Bukowski-lit would
be well advised to sign up for this title in advance,
and I'm certain you'll enjoy Mike's contribution,
probably some wild-hair of a story about the things he
gets up to or would like to get up to; you can find
more of Mike's work at Babel, and I'm guessing that
you'll find many of the writers for this anthology
there as well.
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Weird
Web Art from the Fortean List
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Not a blood relative of mine, I swear.
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The Fortean list offer up daily
treasures and I could not pass this by. Alas the
original
URL has vanished, so I had
to go to the Wayback machine to get this image.
However, looking at the site
URL, I found several more
JK Potter-style works worth viewing. Visit there if
you need your mind bent. me, I enjoying this visit
with one of Lovecraft's deep ones. Thanks,
Rachel!
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Characters from Arthur Machen's 'The
White People'.
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What is truly evil? Stones with eyes?
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Rachel also sent through this
Japanese
site, which features
sculptures straight out of Arthur Machen.
I
recently wrote about 'The White
People' in a column on
children and evil. Are you disturbed yet?
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08-20-03: Charles de
Lint finds the 'Spirits in the Wires' John Connolly Makes
the Journey
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Charles
de Lint finds the 'Spirits in the Wires'
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I've had to deal with
these spirits. It's a major
pain.
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I'vejust started
reading Charles de Lint's newest novel,
'Spirits in the Wires'. It's another
Newford novel, with the characters who
usually remain in the background taking
center stage. According to the author,
"The impetus to write this book and the
title as well, was sparked by some offhand
comments made by my friend Richard Kunz
concerning how, with the ever-growing
prevalance of technology in the world,
some of the spirits of fairy tales and
folklore have probably already left the
woods and other pastoral settings to take
up residence in the wires that seem to
connect us to everything: telephone,
cable, electricity. No doubt they're in
the satellite feeds as well."
Now that's an
intriguing statement of sentiment that has
haunted cyberpunk from the get-go. From
the proto-cyberpunk of Lucius Shepherd's
'Green Eyes' to Richard Morgan's quite
recent 'Broken
Angels',
writers have sought to evoke these spirits
-- usally from the SF realm. Now we have
fantasy writers invading cyberspace. I'll
try to whip through this one and let you
know -- Charles de Lint will be touring
shortly; you can find a list of his
appearances here.
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John
Connolly Crosses the Big Pond
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It's here!
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...and here's another novel
that Terry and I just got from Hodder &
Stoughton. I think we'll have some interesting
cognitive dissonance in our reviews, as I'll be
approaching as a horror novel, while she'll be
looking at the mystery. Oh the fun we have
arguing about this stuff. To my mind, there's
more than a little semblance between this novel
and Chuck Palahniuk's wonderful
'Diary'.
You've got your east coast island, your
threatened wife and well -- bad men.
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08-19-03: Audrey
Niffeneggar's Unstuck Romance, Dark, Complex Wolves from
McKean & Gaiman, John Burdett's Snakes on Speed, PKD
Book Club Bonanza
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The
Time Traveler's Wife
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Drop your favorite watch
into a Cuisinart!
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My friend at the
Capitola
Book Cafe told me
about a book that I suspect will become a
favorite of Agony Column readers, though it
may not quite delight me as much as I suspect
it will others. It would be Audrey
Neffeneggar's 'The Time Traveler's Wife'.
According to my contact, this book generated
a huge buzz at BEA. It's the story of a
beautiful art student and an adventuresome
librarian who happens to be unstuck in time,
much as was Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut's
'Slaughterhouse Five'*. In
Ken-Grimwood-in-a-blender fashion they
experience love, out of order. The publisher,
MacAdam/Cage,
is a respected literary house that's giving
this book a big push. It definitely sounds as
if it will please a vast audience -- and
we'll be looking at it soon. The author is
coming to Capitola Book Cafe, Thursday
September 18, at 7:30 PM. She's not the
traveling type, so I'd suggest you pull
yourself around for a signature that may
accrue value. With signed firsts of 'Replay'
going for $75-$150 (and one available from
the almost mythic Don Cannon at Aladdin
Books), and given that 'Replay' was published
by a New York house, this seems like a wise
investment, if you care to think of books
that way.
* I cut my essay-writing teeth on this
novel as a ninth-grader, fascinated by
amazing lure of the word "existential".
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Dark,
Complex Wolves from McKean &
Gaiman
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This new book by Dave McKean and
Neil Gaiman has gorgeous, deep, dark
illustrations. Buy it
immediately.
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As much as I enjoyed the
story and illustrations of Neil Gaiman and Dave
McKean's first collaboration, 'The Day I Swapped
My Dad for Two Goldfish', I found that there
were not as many of the dark, dense collages
that of McKean's as I would have liked. This
book corrects that problem with a bevy of deep,
dark complex images to match Gaiman's sparse,
surreal story. Plus -- it has Piggy. Now my
younger son is too young to remember the days of
Piggy's reign in our house, but I have him
carefully stored above the books with my Totoro.
Yes --I do have a Totoro and you can't have
it!
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John
Burdett's Snakes on Speed
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Chip Kidd's DJ for John Burdett's new
novel.
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The book cover itself; with author and
titles placed so they show through the slots in
the DJ.
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The back cover of Burdett's novel.
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I heard John Burdett interviewed
recently, and I was quite impressed by his description of
writing 'Bangkok 8', so much so that I immediately went
out and bought it. With as Terry says, "snakes on speed
and Buddhist cops, sounds wild and pretty interesting.
Certainly a Rick book, and maybe even a Terry book."
Turns out it gets bonus points for the Chip Kidd cover
design, clever and catching as always. Now, carve me a
few extra hours in the day to read it.
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PKD
Dick Book Club Bonanza
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No, alas, not a first --
they'd know at Logos.
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It's not a first edition,
but it's a beautiful book club version of the
first edition, perfectly preserved and
located at another local independent
bookstore, Logos. the clerk who sold it to me
had already equipped it with a Bro-Dart
jacket. it's not a first but, in true Philip
K. Dick Fashion, it's a perfect facsimile of
a first, manufactured at the same time as the
first. What could be more
appropriate?
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