Literature, both high and low.
Kim Zupan is a carpenter from Missoula, Montana. He is also a writer, though his work was unknown to me until I picked up his debut novel, The Ploughmen, earlier this year. It has a remarkably confident and clear voice for a first book, and while it features a few missteps characteristic of …
Although you wouldn’t know it from reading this blog, I don’t really pay that much attention to Stephen King anymore. He’s far past the stage where he’s ever going to write anything interesting again (I’d say he has been for at least 20 years), and even when he does something …
“HO HO HO! And what is your name, champ?” “Thulsa.” “And do you have a last name, Thulsa, so Santa can find your house from the mailbox?” “Doom.” “Well! Er, ho ho! That should be easy to remember! How many little boys named Doom can there be on your block?” …
While the visitor from abroad or the hinterlands will find New York a largely agreeable clime, from the silvered canyons of finance on Wall Street to the richly variegated taxi dispatch yards of Castle Hill Avenue, it cannot be denied that there are, in these uncertain economic times, organized groups …
It is odd to say that the book on writing by a famous writer is a curious beast; there are, after all, so many of them, how odd could they be? But they occupy a very strange niche in the literary world. They’re something akin to a Lifetime Achievement …
Paul Kingsnorth is the co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, a collective of artists and intellectuals who believe that mankind has irretrievably poisoned the environment. They are producing writing, art, and thought informed by the idea that we are living in the last days of human dominance; their ideas are …
Great novels — and Philip K. Dick’s unsettling 1962 alternate history The Man in the High Castle is certainly a great novel — tend to have in common the fact that much of their greatness is in their ability to communicate the internal. From their omnipotent viewpoint, they can use …
Last week, Matt Singer wrote a wonderful article at ScreenCrush with the title “Stop Telling Me To Turn My Brain Off During Movies”. It was a refreshingly welcome, and long-overdue, answer to the too-frequent claim that, by paying any attention whatsover to a movie’s idiotic qualities, we are somehow betraying …
Hello! Thank you for ordering the Harshstone Press 2015 catalog. The world of children’s book publishing is a highly competitive arena, and with smart, literate parents demanding quality kid-lit at a higher rate than ever before, it’s not easy to stand out. Here at Harshstone, we let our work speak …
When you ask people what they think was the greatest baseball movie ever made, you usually get one of three answers: the charming, effusive Kevin Costner vehicle Bull Durham; the treacly, sentimental Kevin Costner vehicle Field of Dreams; or the moronic but enjoyable Major League, which at least has the advantage of not …
The fucking city man was going to get it, he’d been asking for it all night and he was goddamned well going to get it all right. He thought that Brog Bingand was stupid but he was the stupid one because he was goddamned well going to find out what …
NBC’s The Slap is based on a very important novel, and if you weren’t aware of that already, you will be within two minutes of the first episode. The ponderous voice-over — by Victor Garber, no less! — drops with a thud, delivering lines like “For a moment, Hector luxuriated in …
Goodness knows our society has long mistaken the exhortation to kill its idols for an invitation to shit on its most talented members, but sometimes it seems that comics fandom in particular is determined to isolate the best and brightest of their chosen medium’s creators and relentlessly heap bile on them …
One should never be surprised, exactly, that a person showing talent in one field shows equal talent in another. Most creative people, after all, are individuals of restless imagination, and have no trouble imagining themselves as having the potential to create great works in music, cinema, visual art, or whatever …
Nightfall was David Goodis’ metier. It was his primary compositional material, his inspiration, his preferred period to work. Of all the noir writers of the classic period, he was perhaps the darkest; while his books didn’t feature the raw, violent edges or the grotesque details of Jim Thompson, no one …
