-Why does The New York Times bestsellers list continue to ignore the gargantuan sales figures of graphic novels? Yes, it may be a blow to a fragile ego to discover that a 20 year old graphic novel just outsold your latest “masterpiece” but shit, if it’s the truth then don’t ignore it.
-A great interview with Stephen King over at Salon. Lots of great answers.
-Over at Jeff Vandermeers blog Will Hindmarch uses a David Simon quote to ask “Sould SF and fantasy (et al) writers worry about being declared inauthentic?”
-Book Review: The Snake Stone by Jason Goodwin
-There’s a new crime fiction zine in town called Crooked: A new outlet for short stories (the good kind, the criminally good kind) is on the way. CROOKED will be devoted strictly to crime fiction short stories that would make Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald proud.
BOOK REVIEWS
-The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
-Gun Work by David Schow
-Gun Work by David Schow
-Cleancut by Lynda La Plante
-Welcome tothe Jungle by Jim Butcher and Ardian Syaf
-Rough Weather by Robert B Parker
-Goliath Bone by Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins
MOVIE/TV/DVD REVIEWS
-Body Heat
-Deadline at Dawn pt. 1 and pt. 2
-Thee Days of the Condor
-Review round up of this weeks Shield
-An Affair in Trinidad
-Gomorrah
-SCRIP
MISC.
-Women and Horror
-Holmes’ and Watson’s World. A minute of footage from London in 1904.
-Andrew Wheeler weighs in on the recent revelation that Borders is not picking up a lot of new SF/F authors and their books.
-Apparently Harriet Klausner has lost her number 1 spot.
-The professional writer rarely includes a lot of physical detail when he describes someone. Most good fiction these days (literary, genre, whatever) respects the reader’s intelligence, and assumes that he or she doesn’t want to be told every last little thing about a character’s appearance — height, weight, eye color, hair color, dress, age, race, etc.
-Friday Forgotten Books summary
-Bookstores in bad times
-Tom Piccirilli has a new blog and answers a Q&A: “Starting to catch on, Skippy? Crime fiction can be just as bold and wrenching as horror. Maybe even more so, since the rules are understood from the very opening. No angels are going to show up in the final chapter to draw your ass out of the fire. No holy water is going to stop your foe, no last minute antidote to the killer virus will be found. It’s just you and someone who wants to kill you, and you live or die by just how much pain you can take and how much smarter and tougher you are over the other guy, or how much smarter and tougher he is than you.”
-Is there a flaw in Cory Doctorow’s business model? And is it fatal?
-Terms from Film and Fiction Useful in Writing About our Works
-If we believe that art requires madness or genius or an expensive education, we’ll just decide that art is for other people. If we believe that art is something only children do, we’ll grow out of it and leave it behind. But what if we were to believe that art is part of all of us, part of what makes us human?
-So, so sad
-But the Germans have this idea that crime fiction ought to be much more literary and “serious.” Apparently this means no explicit sex or violence, just lots of depressed, angst-ridden (male, of course) detectives brooding and contemplating the meaning of life. In fact, there was a scathing write-up in the local paper about my reading in Leipzig (published before the reading even took place.) The author was complaining that it was stupid and pointless to feature a trashy hardboiled writer at a venue meant for more serious literary fiction. I really had a blast blowing everyone’s expectations out of the water. I may be a trashy pulp writer, but I have no problem talking about the underlying gender issues and other socially relevant “serious” themes in Money Shot. I hope I did my part as a hardboiled missionary in a land of unbelievers. I’ll bet I opened up a mind or two.
-Raymond Chandler and the Rise of the Zombie Novels
