It sounds like hyperbole but I don’t care: Jem Poster’s sophomore effort, Rifling Paradise (Overlook) is as near perfect a book as I have encountered in a very long time. It is a work of historical fiction and the history here — Australia in the Victorian era — is pitch perfect. Rifling Paradise looks like a book, but it is not: it’s really a time machine. The story finds minor English landowner, Charles Redbourne, heading […]
This time of year, the pressure to be paired is almost palpable. And whether or not society is supportive of singles seems to be a cyclic thing. Sometimes the pendulum swings one way and everyone is looking for a reason to justify both unpairing or even just celebrating your single state. But that’s not the cycle that we’re currently in. In Love in 90 Days (Center Street) author Diana Kirschner makes this abundantly clear: Love […]
Back in 2002 when Richard K. Morgan’s first book, Altered Carbon, hit the shelves, both readers and reviewers went nuts. In January Magazine’s Best of 2002, gabe chouinard made the book one of his picks for best of the year. “If Raymond Chandler had ever spent any amount of time wallowing in the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s,” wrote chouinard, “I’m pretty sure he could have written Altered Carbon, an absolutely stellar first novel from […]
If timing is everything, Jabari Asim, formerly an editor at The Washington Post and currently editor-in-chief of The Crisis — the magazine of the NAACP — has it all figured out. The author of 2007’s The N Word: Who Say It, Who Shouldn’t and Why approaches Barack Obama’s new presidency from a cultural perspective in What Obama Means: For Our Culture, Our Politics, and Our Future (William Morrow). Asim uses his talent, his training and […]
In a very short time, author R. Scott Bakker has proven that he is well on his way to building a universe that is arguably comparable with those created by the likes of Frank Herbert (Dune) and Isaac Asimov (Foundation). What Bakker does that — again, arguably — his contemporaries do not and that those SFF luminaries did was completely imagine — from the ground up — a universe so satisfyingly detailed you felt as […]
In 2004 he rocked us with The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, a look at the classic fictional detective that was closer — and in some ways more intimate — than any that had gone before. Author Leslie S. Klinger offered up an almost line-by-line commentary on the great work. In the process, he unearthed bits and pieces that had been left behind over the years — a bit of literary archeology, if you will. Fans […]
There’s something sweetly sentimental in all the testosterone lurking not far beneath the covers of The Eleventh Man (Harcourt), a football novel that melds into World War II from Ivan Doig (This House of Sky, The Whistling Season). That would seem a contradiction in terms — sweet sentiment. Masses of testosterone — but somehow it’s not. Somehow it works in a book that manages to be epic in scope and fact. The war licked its […]
For those not keeping score, Grandmaster Flash has been to urban music what Todd Rundgren has been to MOR pop. Clearly, both would exist without these important early purveyors, but — and arguably — the resulting genres would have been quite different. In The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats (Broadway), Flash — with the help of bestselling author David Ritz (Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye, Rhythm and the Blues) riffs […]
If I were to compile a list of road movies — or any other kind, for that matter — it would be tempting to try and make it a sort of best of. Filmmaker and writer Jason Wood resists that temptation in 100 Road Movies (BFI), something he explains in his introduction: I would argue that one of the objectives of any kind of “list” or guide style of book is to stimulate debate, conjecture […]
In one of those odd coincidences of collective unconscious, 2008 saw the publication of two important books on mid-20th century art forger Han van Meergeren. Back in June we got The Forger’s Spell (Harper) by Edward Dolnick, a beautifully researched and illustrated look at the man most often thought to be one of the most successful art forgers of all time. Nor is Dolnick a neophyte to the shores of art crime. A previous work, […]
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