Books

Booker Shortlist Omits Salman Rushdie, Joseph O'Neill

There were some surprises in today's announcement of the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize -- the books by betting favorites Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence, and Joseph O'Neill, Netherland, didn't make the cut. Literary critic Joseph Sutherland was so sure Rushdie would win the Booker that he wrote, "If The Enchantress of Florence doesn't win this year’s Man Booker I'll curry my proof copy and eat it." (He backed off the promise today.) The nominees for the prize, which will be ... (read more)

2008/09/09

Review: 'Netherland' by Joseph O'Neill

Over the years I've become an obsessive Anglophile, following British football and literature with the kind of unvarnished joy that can only come from being completely ill-informed on a subject. I don't know enough about either one to become jaded, though my adoption of Tottenham Hotspur as favorite team is beginning to change that. My love of British books is exercised by following each year's Man Booker Prize, the most prestigious literary award for fiction in the U.K. The prize goes through ... (read more)

2008/08/28

Locus Awards Change Rules, Foil Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow's short story collection Overclocked was nominated this year for a Locus Award, a science fiction honor voted on by the public and tabulated by Locus magazine. Votes were accepted online, and several links during the balloting on Doctorow's ginormously popular Boing Boing blog helped his book receive the most votes in that category. But if you check out the award winners, you won't find Doctorow's book on the list. Locus changed the rules after voting was over, deciding to give ... (read more)

2008/07/09

Voting Ends for This Year's Hugo Awards

Today's the last day to vote on the 2008 Hugo Awards, which will be given out at the World Science Fiction Convention next month in Denver. I joined the convention as a supporting member last fall to vote for the first time on the awards, which began in 1955 and have become the most coveted prize in science fiction. In April, the Hugo nominees were announced. All of the nominees in several categories can be read for free online, including short stories, novellas, novelettes and fanzines. Four ... (read more)

2008/07/07

Everybody Hates Scott McClellan

Robin D. Laws has a great take on Scott McClellan's tell-all book: Even in the depths of his tenure as Bush press secretary, Scott McClellan always seemed to me like the most likely administration official to write a scathing tell-all. His divided consciousness was always visible as a series of tells that would have led him to the slaughter at any poker table. McClellan's deer-meets-headlights demeanor at tough press conferences signaled a lack of belief in his own statements—a fear that he ... (read more)

2008/06/05

Et Tu, Scott McClellan?

I'm currently reading What Happened, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's 323-page stab in the back to the Bush administration. The book wasn't supposed to be out until June 1, but the publisher lifted the embargo yesterday and I grabbed a copy at Barnes & Noble. Current and former Bush administration officials are playing dumb on McClellan's motive for writing the book, but he makes it crystal clear in the preface: Valerie Plame leakers in the White House used him to pass along ... (read more)

2008/05/29

Review: Emissaries from the Dead by Adam-Troy Castro

While in college in the late '80s I freelanced for Amazing Heroes, a comics magazine that paid slightly more than the postage required to mail the checks. I was part of a reviewing stable that included Adam-Troy Castro, a writer with a misplaced hyphen who recently wrote Emissaries from the Dead, his first science fiction novel set in a world of his own making. Emissaries, which is subtitled "An Andrea Cort Novel," carries forward a protagonist and setting from his short stories. The world's ... (read more)

2008/05/22

Review: A World of Thieves by James Carlos Blake

To get into the spirit of Pulp Guns, a game product I'm testing, I went looking for current crime novels that could've been pulps -- hard-boiled stories of murder and mayhem set in the '30s and '40s. I came pretty close in A World of Thieves, a 2002 novel by James Carlos Blake that follows a family of armed robbers across Louisiana and Texas in 1928. Blake's novel tells the tale of Sonny LaSalle, an 18-year-old amateur boxer from New Orleans who graduates with top grades and should know better ... (read more)

2008/03/13

You're a Sad Man, Charles Schulz

There's been considerable debate in blogs I read over Schulz and Peanuts, a biography of Charles Schulz written by David Michealis. Roleplaying game developer Robin Laws reviews the book: Schulz and Peanuts, by David Michaelis, is a completely absorbing, stunningly researched, pain-scorched biography of the last century’s most influential cartoonist. Charles Schulz's genius was built on traits common to great artists: unstinting discipline, narrowness of focus, solipsism, arrogance, ... (read more)

2008/01/31

Author George MacDonald Fraser Dies

I've never heard of the Flashman series of novels by George MacDonald Fraser, but the description that has accompanied his obituary today has my curiosity sparked: He wrote the first novel of the Flashman Papers in 1969 after he quit as assistant editor of the Glasgow Herald. The book imagines what happened after Flashman -- the bully in Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays -- was expelled from Rugby for drunkenness. Eleven more novels were to follow in the series, during which Flashman -- ... (read more)

2008/01/03

Read More Entries