1. Ann Patchett, one of my favorite writers, has a new 50-page digital guide and memoir called The Getaway Car.: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life. It's a mix of practical tips about becoming an author (applying to schools, motivating yourself to write) and anecdotes. Here's a bit about one of her favorite teachers (Grace Paley):

Oh, Grace, with her raveling sweaters and thick socks, her gray hair flying in every direction, the dulcet tones of Brooklyn in her voice: She was a masterpiece of human life. There was the time she came to class and said she couldn’t return stories because she had been robbed the night before. A burglar had broken into her apartment and tied her to the kitchen chair. She’d then proceeded to talk to him about his hard life for more than an hour. In the end, he took her camera and her bag full of our homework. I’m sure I was not alone in thinking how lucky that guy was to have gotten so much of Grace’s undivided attention. Another time, she came to class and herded us all into a school van, then she drove us to Times Square. We were to march with the assembling throngs to the Marine recruitment offices chanting USA, CIA, out of Grenada! It was crowded and cold, and after we were sent off down Forty-second Street with our signs, we never did find Grace or the van again.

You can read an excerpt here and buy the Kindle single at Amazon. (Some of the most useful information I've seen yet about having a career as a writer.)



2. Kraken by China Mieville: Easily my least favorite of his books, possibly because it's too similar to his other books. It seems slow despite near constant action, the characters are largely forgettable, and I just couldn't find myself caring about what was going to happen (I finished three or four other books during the time I was reading it). This isn't to say it's without merit - - he makes very clever use of extreme origami, iPod playlists, and trap streets, and after 460 pages, the squid cult at the center of the book finally becomes very interesting. Also, my copy had a fabulous cover by David Stevenson. Available at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.



3. The Cosummata by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins: It's one double cross after another as Mickey Spillane's Morgan navigates a world of high class prostitution, Cuban exiles, and nuclear scientists. The book features a beautifully-painted (and probably NSFW) cover by Robert McGinnis, and was a nice, manly palate cleanser after The Forgotten Garden. You can download a wallpaper-sized version of the cover here, read an excerpt here, and preorder the book at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

READ MORE - Book review roundup

1. Check out Stephen Gammell's creepy illustrations from the three Scary Stories books. Here's an animated gif of one. Via.



2. How to create a 404 error page for Wordpress (designing the page, modifying the code).



3. "Corey Helford Gallery will be offering complimentary mini-giclees of Korin Faught's new painting 'Lovelorn' to the first 400 guests who arrive at the opening this Saturday, September 3rd (doors open at 7PM)."

READ MORE - Link roundup

Cover for Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers:

Perrotta's novel takes place after the rapture, in a small New Jersey suburb, where families are trying to get on with their lives. The Garvey family, for instance, didn't lose any family members in the rapture but has fallen apart in the aftermath. The father, Kevin, watches as his teenagers change and his wife, Laurie, leaves his house to join a cult called "The Guilty Remnant," whose members dress all in white and take a vow of silence.

NPR has a story on the book here. (Perrotta also wrote Election.)

READ MORE - The Leftovers

Identifying Wood available at eBay. Via.

READ MORE - Identifying Wood

1. The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton: I'm awfully glad that I read this for my book club because it gets so painfully slow in the middle that I would have given up otherwise. But the first 100 pages and last 200 are really terrific. Here's the official description:

Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden takes root in your imagination and grows into something enchanting--from a little girl with no memories left alone on a ship to Australia, to a fog-soaked London river bend where orphans comfort themselves with stories of Jack the Ripper, to a Cornish sea heaving against wind-whipped cliffs, crowned by an airless manor house where an overgrown hedge maze ends in the walled garden of a cottage left to rot. This hidden bit of earth revives barren hearts, while the mysterious Authoress's fairy tales (every bit as magical and sinister as Grimm's) whisper truths and ignite the imaginary lives of children. As Morton draws you through a thicket of secrets that spans generations, her story could cross into fairy tale territory if her characters weren't clothed in such complex flesh, their judgment blurred by the heady stench of emotions (envy, lust, pride, love) that furtively flourished in the glasshouse of Edwardian society.

I think I would have enjoyed it even more if I hadn't recently read The Historian, which uses an extremely similar story structure. 44% off at B&N.



2. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman: I'm a little reluctant to review this one because when I first read American Gods I didn't like it very much, but the second time I read it, I loved it. That said, I wasn't really crazy about The Graveyard Book. It reads like a series of short stories forced into one narrative, and the main character is too much the blank slate for my taste. Terrible cover, too.



My favorite moment in the book is when Gaiman describes a Roman the main character meets (which serves as a reminder that the real world is as strange as any fairy tale (or George Martin novel)):

The old Roman's hair was pale in the moonlight, and he wore the toga in which he had been buried, with, beneath it, a thick woolen vest and leggings because this was a cold country at the edge of the world, and the only place colder was Caledonia to the North, where the men were more animal than human and covered in orange fur, and were too savage even to be conquered by the Romans, so would soon be walled off in their perpetual winter.

Available at B&N.



3. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon: A terrific, short murder mystery, with a memorable narrator. $2 used at B&N.

READ MORE - Book review roundup

1. Michael Lewis's latest, outstanding article on the financial apocalypse focuses on Germany. It's 17 pages but well worth your time. Here's a sample paragraph:

This preternatural love of rules, almost for their own sake, punctuates German finance as it does German life. As it happens, a story had just broken that a division of a German insurance company called Munich Re, back in June 2007, or just before the crash, had sponsored a party for its best producers that offered not just chicken dinners and nearest-to-the-pin golf competitions but a blowout with prostitutes in a public bath. In finance, high or low, this sort of thing is of course not unusual. What was striking was how organized the German event was. The company tied white and yellow and red armbands to the prostitutes to indicate which ones were available to which men. After each sexual encounter the prostitute received a stamp on her arm, to indicate how often she had been used. The Germans didn’t want just hookers: they wanted hookers with rules.

OK, here's one more:

This is what makes the German case so peculiar. If they had been merely the only big, developed nation with decent financial morals, they would present one sort of picture, of simple rectitude. But they had done something far more peculiar: during the boom German bankers had gone out of their way to get dirty. They lent money to American subprime borrowers, to Irish real-estate barons, to Icelandic banking tycoons to do things that no German would ever do. The German losses are still being toted up, but at last count they stand at $21 billion in the Icelandic banks, $100 billion in Irish banks, $60 billion in various U.S. subprime-backed bonds, and some yet-to-be-determined amount in Greek bonds. The only financial disaster in the last decade German bankers appear to have missed was investing with Bernie Madoff. (Perhaps the only advantage to the German financial system of having no Jews.) In their own country, however, these seemingly crazed bankers behaved with restraint. The German people did not allow them to behave otherwise. It was another case of clean on the outside, dirty on the inside. The German banks that wanted to get a little dirty needed to go abroad to do it.

2. Kristin Tercek's having an art sale.



3. NPR's top 100 science fiction and fantasy novels.



4. Grantland continues to better than I had hoped. Two great articles today: Whether the Blue Jays are cheating; Whether John Cena has it within him to become a WWE villain, and how that change would impact WWE's earnings. (I'd love to see a chart showing how much traffic ESPN has lost to Grantland. I never even visit ESPN.com anymore.)

READ MORE - Link roundup

Virgin Mistress, Scandalous Love-Child.

Here's one more:


Bossman's Baby Scandal. Via.

READ MORE - Best romance novel yet

1. "However, the volatile situation in Syria means that activists' methods to get documentation off the streets and onto social media are rapidly changing. Unconfirmed reports claim pen phones and small camera phones are being smuggled into Syria by anti-government expatriates and both the Saudi Arabian and American governments."

2. Fascinating article about pirates. When I read about the Barbary pirates in Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, I thought he was greatly exaggerating their exploits. But no:

Initially, the corsairs used galleys, which were fast and easily maneuverable, but the problem of supplying their rowing crews and soldiers, which could total some 184 men, limited their range. But European renegade sailors, such as John Ward, “without any doubt the greatest scoundrel that ever sailed from England,” as a courtier put it, and Danseker the Dutchman, known as the “Divil Captain,” were on hand to supply the expertise needed for a shift to sailing ships.

They could now raid along the British and the Irish Channels — they would even reach as far north as Iceland. Throughout the century, their raids caused havoc in coastal communities, with sailors and fishermen refusing to go to sea. In the Mediterranean, whole stretches of coast in Spain and Italy were deserted.

3. Useless, but a magical idea - - it looks like a camera, but when you press the shutter it doesn't take a picture. Instead, it pulls off from the net a random photo taken by someone else at that exact moment. Via these sites.

READ MORE - Link roundup

A Dance With Dragons is easily the worst book in George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. But I read 950 pages in a week, and often gave up sleep to do so, so it would be silly to call the book bad.

In retrospect, the flaws of the book were trumpeted by Martin himself. A third (or more) of the book is content that was meant to be included in A Feast for Crows. But that book ran too long, so the content was saved for this. In other words, it's b-material that never deserved to be its own book. Another third of the book was frequently described by Martin as the "Meereenese Knot" - - an inescapable plot hole he had worked himself into. His difficulty in solving that "knot" was the reason the book was so famously delayed. What he really needed was someone to tell him that the Meereen portion was trash and should be completely discarded. (Is there somewhere where he's defended the main character's actions in that part of the book? Because they certainly made no sense to me.)

The last two hundred pages more than made up for the rest of the book, though, and it will be a long, difficult wait for the next book.

READ MORE - George Martin's A Dance With Dragons (no spoilers)

Video showing off Keep Our Secrets, by Jordan Crane and McSweeney's, featuring color-changing ink. Available for preorder for $8 at B&N. Via.

READ MORE - Kid's book with color-changing ink

I usually wait for paperbacks, but decided to read this right away to avoid spoilers. After 400 pages, I say the new characters are entirely forgettable, Daenarys has lost what once made her appealing, and the plot is so, so tedious.

And yet, I cannot put it down.

READ MORE - George Martin's A Dance With Dragons

The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo. It's real. Via.

READ MORE - The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo

I received a copy of Chris McDonnell's excellent Sasquatch's Big Hairy Drawing Book. Imagine an activity book with just a touch of Mad Magazine's humor. (Unfortunately, my youngest is a bit too young for it, and my oldest treats drawing and writing as the worst punishment in the world.) Anyway, the book will be available at SDCC (and for preorder at Barnes & Noble) and there's already a Flickr gallery showing off artists' work:

READ MORE - Sasquatch's Big Hairy Drawing Book

The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: Exhibits, Oddities, Images, and Stories from Top Authors and Artists:

The death of Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead in 2003 at his house in Wimpering-on-the-Brook, England, revealed an astonishing discovery: the remains of a remarkable cabinet of curiosities.

A carefully selected group of popular artists and acclaimed, bestselling fantasy authors has been assembled to bring Dr. Lambshead’s cabinet of curiosities to life. Including contributions from Alan Moore, Lev Grossman, Mike Mignola, China MiÉville, Cherie Priest, Carrie Vaughn, Greg Broadmore, Naomi Novik, Garth Nix, Michael Moorcock , Holly Black, Jeffrey Ford, Ted Chiang, and many more.

44% off at B&N.

You can read an excerpt from the Grossman/Mignola collaboration here:



There's also a related contest:



"In celebration of The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: Exhibits, Oddities, Images, and Stories from Top Authors and Artists, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, one lucky winner will acquire a working model of the famous Mooney & Finch Somnotrope re-created by Steampunk Workshop founder Jake von Slatt and as described in the new collection! (Click here for a sneak peek at the book).
To enter, simply order the book or ebook from your favorite online retailer and enter your confirmation number on the next page."

READ MORE - Short story by Lev Grossman and Mike Mignola

1. Cool animated poster for The Hunger Games. Ten years from now (at most), this will be standard, right? I was just thinking the other day (as I run out of wall space) that it would make more sense to get a cool digital frame to cycle through posters.

2. In case you want to feel nauseous about the economy.

3. Great one-sentence description of a new book:

a sci-fi mix of Moby Dick and the classic movie Duel, in which an unknown, invincible, Kafkaesque alien ship has returned 300 years after breaking one galactic empire to now threaten the human Commonwealth, and the best and brightest minds that are sent in a invincible ship of their own to stop it, with the only problem being that those best and brightest are also some of the Commonwealth's most twisted sociopaths and if they win, the human empire may find itself in more danger than ever.

4. I haven't tried it yet, but a free adventure game following the same basic concept as the Thursday Next novels sounds great:

You’re Thalia James, a cop who patrols adventure games in search of trouble like characters rebelling against their set roles or stealing the precious objects us Outsiders need to solve important puzzles. The very first scene in the game involves an argument between characters originally cut from The Dig and a conspiracy to return it its earlier, darker Brian Moriarty design. Later, you visit everything from Space Quest X to bits of the cancelled Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, first to train an impetuous new recruit, and then to take care of a bigger challenge involving the world of adventure games slowly turning into a rather more violent place than usual.

*Previously: Thomas Allen's new cover for The Eyre Affair.

READ MORE - Link roundup

1. Provenance by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo: Here's the official description:

Filled with extraordinary characters and told at breakneck speed, Provenance reads like a well-plotted thriller. But this is most certainly not fiction. It is the astonishing narrative of one of the most far-reaching and elaborate cons in the history of art forgery. Stretching from London to Paris to New York, investigative reporters Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo recount the tale of infamous con man and unforgettable villain John Drewe and his accomplice, the affable artist John Myatt. Together they exploited the archives of British art institutions to irrevocably legitimize the hundreds of pieces they forged, many of which are still considered genuine and hang in prominent museums and private collections today.

If you enjoy nonfiction, it doesn't get much better than this. (Although I think the authors were a bit too kind to some of the members of the conspiracy.) If 300 pages sounds like a little much, just enjoy the Wikipedia links I inserted above. But it's only $2 used at B&N, and well worth that price.

2. The Maze Runner by James Dasher: I give the writing and character development a D+, the plot a B, and the cover by Philip Straub a B+ (unusually good for a fantasy novel). The story is Ender's Game meets The Stand, which sounds promising, but I barely managed to force myself to skim the last 40 or so pages to find out what happened. Just read the Wikipedia entry for this one. $5 used at B&N.

3. This Is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams: The first 140 pages are an excellent novella that imagines, "What if Jane McGonigal got stuck in Indonesia during a coup and had to rely on her ARG-loving fans to help her escape?" Unfortunately the next 300 pages are so horrendously cliched and predictable that I (incorrectly) thought the book must have been the author's first. $2 used at B&N, which is a good price for the 140 pages.

4. Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon: An intensely boring collection of his nonfiction essays. However, there were some fun factoids in the essay about Arthur Conan Doyle. For example:

At least one writer has suggested that Conan Doyle might have managed to kill a patient, through Charles Bovary-like ineptitude or more sinister motives; he did subsequently marry the dead man's sister, and took control of the income that she inherited from her brother.

And this is quite a sentence:

Detective Freud might well conclude that Conan Doyle never entirely recovered from the pain and humiliation first of watching his mother cuckold his demented father in his own house and then of being obliged to stand by as the old man was packed off to the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum, never to return.

I wish he'd simply written a novel called The Amazing Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle. $2 used at B&N, but only for the Chabon completist.

READ MORE - Book review roundup (slight spoilers)

1. From an interesting interview with Neil Gaiman:

The last time I was in China, I was very puzzled because none of my children’s picture books are in print in Mainland China. They’re in print in Hong Kong and in Taiwan, in complex Chinese characters, but they are not in print in Mainland China. I asked my producer, “Why aren’t any of my children’s picture books in print in Mainland China?,” and they said, “It’s because of their disrespect for authority.” I said, “Really?!” And they said, “Yeah, look at them. The Wolves in the Walls is about this little girl who tells her parents that there are wolves in the walls, but they do not believe her. There really are wolves in the walls, and thus her parents are proved wrong. And, in The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish, these kids swap their dad. If that happened, society would crumble.”


So, suddenly, it became a goal of mine that was almost a little obsession to write a children’s picture book that would be published in Mainland China, that they could not help but publish, but still could have all of the things that are in my children’s picture books, and I did it. I wrote this book and it’s being painted right now by this wonderful artist, and it’s called Chu’s Day, and it is about a baby panda who sneezes. There is no way that anyone can resist a baby panda who sneezes. This is the single cutest book I’ve ever written. It is written for two-year-olds and is designed in such a way that I’ve tried it on kids and it actually works that when you get to the end, they just look at you and they say, “Read it again!” The only words on page one are, “When Chu sneezed, bad things happened.”

2. Shark.

3. IMDB on The Shining:

Because Danny Lloyd was so young and since it was his first acting job, Stanley Kubrick was highly protective of the child. During the shooting of the movie, Lloyd was under the impression that the film he was making was a drama, not a horror movie. He only realized the truth seven years later, when, aged 13, he was shown a heavily edited version of the film. He didn't see the uncut version of the film until he was 17 - eleven years after he'd made it.

Via.

READ MORE - Link roundup

Because of the Cats by Nicholas Freeling. It's real:

Chief Inspector Piet Van der Valk of the Amsterdam police has a teenage gang on his hands: they are coming into Amsterdam from out-of-town, and they are remarkably professional. They leave behind a trail of wanton damage, senseless brutality, and rape, and one piece of possible evidence- 'the cats won't like it'. ""Because of the Cats was an international best-seller-indeed its group-murder plot was reenacted in real life shortly after, in Latin America-and Van der Valk acquired a huge following.""

One copy with this cover at eBay. Via.

READ MORE - Because of the Cats

Crazy 4 Cult: Cult Movie Art:

The annual Crazy 4 Cult art show in LA has quickly become a phenomenon, with thousands of visitors, a million hits on its website on opening day, and high profile buyers including Kevin Smith and Edgar Wright.

Why? Because the cream of the pop culture-influenced art scene - including Shepard Fairey, creator of the Obama 'Hope' poster - come together to celebrate cult movies with art that is surprising, beautiful and very, very cool.

This lavishly produced book presents the best of the first 4 years of the show, with art inspired by such movies as The Big Lebowski, Edward Scissorhands, Blade Runner, Donnie Darko, A Clockwork Orange, Pulp Fiction and many more.

34% off at Amazon and available tomorrow.

There's also going to be a signing at Gallery 1988 as decribed:



Via.

READ MORE - Crazy 4 Cult: Cult Movie Art (the book)

The Hole in the Middle book and Dunny by Paul Budnitz and Aya Kakeda. I'm not sure about the Dunny, but the book is 33% off at Amazon. Via.

READ MORE - Dunny and kid's book