Month: November 2010

Holiday Gift Guide: The Making of Avatar by Jody Duncan and Lisa Fitzpatrick

November 30, 2010 admin 0

Whether or not you liked James Cameron’s industry changing film, Avatar (and based on the box office records it still holds, you probably did), The Making of Avatar (Abrams) is likely to captivate you for hours. It’s a well-executed look at a brilliantly executed film. After all, the film was a technological marvel. Even if this were not a beautifully produced large-scale coffee table book, it would be interesting. With loads of production stills, behind […]

No Image

Insectile Prose Tops Bad Sex in Fiction Award

November 30, 2010 admin 0

The competition was tense for a while, but it’s all over now: the winner of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award for 2010 is Irish author Rowan Somerville who likely won for a sentence the judges said they were particularly impressed by: “Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.” According to The Telegraph, there was more where that came from: Other amorous passages […]

Birthday Bash: Montgomery, Mamet and Twain

November 30, 2010 admin 0

We have noticed before that literary talent seems to arrive in birthday batches. Today, for instance, is the birthday not only of Canada’s beloved children’s author Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874), author of the Anne of Green Gables series, but also of Mark Twain, who was born in a Missouri log cabin in 1835 and controversial playwright David Mamet (1947) who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Glengarry Glen Ross in 1984. Of these the […]

Biography The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women by James Ellroy

November 29, 2010 admin 0

Today in January Magazine’s biography section, editor Linda L. Richards reviews The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women by James Ellroy. Says Richards: The North American reviews I’ve seen of The Hilliker Curse have mostly been astonishingly lukewarm, at best. This has been a head-scratcher because if you actually read the book you see that the writing here is sterling. Prose-wise, the Demon Dog of American Literature has never been in better shape. Mind you, […]

Holiday Gift Guide: Making the Moose Out of Life Nicholas Oldland

November 27, 2010 admin 1

Even though Making the Moose Out of Life (Kids Can Press) was published last August, and it has nothing to do with Christmas or holidays, there’s something very … seasonal about it. Is it because the story revolves around a moose and a bear? (Two animals that also have nothing to do with Christmas, but who always seem kind of seasonal, too.) Or maybe because, in this case, the story also seems to have a […]

Crime Fiction: Dead Man’s Chest by Kerry Greenwood

November 26, 2010 admin 0

When Kerry Greenwood created the rich, beautiful, intelligent Jazz Age sleuth, Phryne Fisher, she was expecting the series to last for about two books. Because she knew all about 1928, that was the year in which it was to be set, permanently. Seventeen books later, the author has finally had to move to January 1929. Phryne Fisher has returned to the Australian coastal town Queenscliff, scene of her second adventure, Flying Too High. That time […]

Holiday Gift Guide: The Sugar Mother and Foxybaby both by Elizabeth Jolley

November 26, 2010 admin 0

Here’s a gift suggestion for the reader who thinks they’ve devoured everything: Elizabeth Jolley. Prior to her death in 2007, Jolley has risen to become one of Australia’s best known and most celebrated authors, known for her dark wit, biting characterizations and sophisticated view of relationships and the world. Jolley was unable to find a publisher for her work until she was in her early 50s, but she managed to publish 14 novels, four short […]

SF/F: All Clear by Connie Willis

November 25, 2010 admin 0

It seems absolutely appropriate that, the year after she was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Connie Willis should publish not one, but two massive books. The most recent of those two, All Clear (Spectra) starts precisely where Blackout left off, except things start off worse than they did in that book. Much worse. Time travel and alternate history both have a significant role in All Clear. I mention it in this way […]

Holiday Gift Guide: The Columbo Collection
by William Link

November 24, 2010 admin 0

Lieutenant Columbo with a cell phone? Finding one of television’s most popular fictional sleuths still on the ball and on the job in the 21st century — 39 years after he first questioned suspects on The NBC Mystery Movie — can seem a bit disorienting. But nobody could do better at bringing Columbo out of mothballs than his co-creator, William Link, author of the book, The Columbo Collection (Crippen & Landru). Together with his lifelong […]

Cookbooks: Harvest to Heat: Cooking With America’s Best Chefs, Farmers, and Artisans by Kelly Kochendorfer and Darryl Estrine

November 24, 2010 admin 0

Thigh-deep in the new food movement, one sometimes wonders where it’s all going to end. Occasionally I came across a book and say: “This. This is it. There is no place — better, more pure, more perfectly in sync with beautiful food — than this. And then another book comes along and blows everything that has gone before out of the water. Harvest to Heat (Taunton) is one such book. It seems to perfectly balance, […]