Observations from the Balcony

-Gabe does a quick take on Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace:“It is amazingly written; taut and filled with rhythmic incantation that serves to draw the reader directly into Minami’s psyche. Very powerful stuff, somewhere between the triumvirate of Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway and Haruki Murakami.”

-Meg Gardiner eats her young

-a swift, exciting horror-thriller

-”It’s Friday Craig, anything can happen”: Patti has all of your Friday Forgotten Book highlights

Joshua Henkin is posting like a maniac over at The Elegant Variation: The Three Stages of Writing; What Gets Taught in a Creative Writing Class?; Present Tense Fiction: Redux; How Dialogue is like bowling; Can Writing Be Taught?

-How an online author appearance can go wrong

-My Book My Movie: Last Call by JD Seamus

-DVD BLIP: Layercake

-DVD Blip: The Godfather

-DVD Blip: Pulp Fiction

-DVD Blip: Children of Men

-DVD Blip: 3:10 to Yuma

-The Wire Complete series DVD set

-DVD Blip: Road House

-Adrian McKinty wants to hold a contest but doesn’t know how

-Publisher Imprint Report Card pt. 3

-The latest issue of The Short Review

-There’s a story idea here somewhere:“Lake County Sheriff Mark C. Curran Jr. sentenced himself today to a week in his own jail, saying he believes spending time behind bars will make him a better cop and a better person.”

-Notebook reviews

-I see dead blurbs

-“Now you can find independent, specialty, chain and college bookstores throughout the country, and survey the book retail landscape in any region.”

-DVD Review: Redbelt

-JT Ellison on writing Southern

-Quickgasms on The Laughter of Dead Kings and The Spy’s Bedside Book

-“There’s been an upsurge in several kinds of Irish fiction …. Crime fiction is a small part of that.”

-TV Review: The Shield final season ep. 1

-Info on release of Deadwood the complete series

-Some thoughts onIt Didn’t Mean Anything: A Psychoanalytic Reading of American Detective Fiction by Alexander N. Howe

-On writing comedy

-DVD Review: Woman in the Window

-“Shouldn’t violent actions have terrible consequences on the page as they do in the mean streets and combat zones? Clearly, I think the answer is yes, but truthfully, only to a point. A very fine line separates verisimilitude from a discomfiting violence-as-pornography. Like other forms of pornography, I suppose, it’s hard for me to define, but I know it when I see it.”

-Adrian Mckinty decided on that contest