Smart Bitches, Trashy Books
Bringing you the famous and cheeky SBTB blog for romance enthusiasts. If you're into the romance genre, this is where you want to be. If you're not, avoid at all costs to preserve your sanity. Ha ha. We're just kidding. There are some good things happening in the genre. Stay Golden, Horny Girl!
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B+ Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake by Alexis Hall May 18, 2021 · Forever Contemporary RomanceRomance TW/CW for the book Emotional abuse, bi-phobia, gaslighting, sexual assault Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake is a fun rom-com in which a single mom enters a baking contest (a fictional version of The Great British Bake Off) and finds true love. The question is not “will she find true love” but “with whom will she find it?” Readers should expect to be very hungry while reading this book, as well as by turns amused, inf…
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Sorry if there are repeats from the previous week! I’ve been traveling! The Ashford Affair The Ashford Affair by Lauren Willig is $2.99! A historical fiction with dual timelines and a family secret, this book has a 3.8-star average on Goodreads. Fans of the Pink Carnation series may like this, though reviewers caution it has less spying and derring-do than that series. Sarah also gave this one a B! As a lawyer in a large Manhattan firm, just shy of making partner, Clem…
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C+ Elysium Girls by Kate Pentecost April 14, 2020 · Little, Brown Books for Young Readers Science Fiction/Fantasy Elysium Girls begins in a small Oklahoma town in 1835. The tiny town of Elysium is trying to make it through the Dust Bowl years after the massive dust storms of Black Sunday (April 14, 1935) scour the land and leave survivors in what seems to be the only town left in the world. There’s no telephone, no radio, nothing but desert. People can wander in the desert up to a point, but beyond Elysium either pe…
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This is going to be a quick edition of the Books on Sale today because I’m taking my kids to be vaccinated this morning! Show Spoiler http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/download.gif And they have appointments at a drive through set up at an amusement park. That’s never not going to be hilarious to me. Party time! Vaccinate! So here are a few very quick deals and recommendations, and if you’ve spotted more sales, you know what to do. If you missed a Books on Sale post this week, they’re all collected on this page until midnight tonight! Today I’m going to acquire some inoculations for my house teens and possibly also some fries and a fun…
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http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-content/themes/smartbitches/images/posts/hide-your-wallet.jpg Welcome to Book Beat! Book Beat aims to highlight other books that we may hear about through friends, social media, or other sources. We could see a gorgeous ad! Or find a new-to-us author on a list of underrated romances! Think of Book Beat as Teen Beat or Tiger Beat, but for books. And no staples to open to get the fold-out poster. Drag Me Up Author: R.M. Virtues Released: March 16, 2021 by Strange Hungers Publishing Genre: Contemporary Romance, LGBTQIA, Ro…
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http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-content/themes/smartbitches/images/posts/hide-your-wallet.jpg If you’re new to Hide Your Wallet, this is where we list new releases we’re pretty excited for in the coming month. Each reviewer has a book maximum (five per person), but we’ve separated HYW into two parts. The first HYW of the month will cover books that release from the 1st to the 14th. The second HYW will cover books released from the 15th to the end of the month. We also think this will help us feature books from smaller publishers who don’t have buy links up as quickly as the big five. As always, if we missed any books that you’re par…
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http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-content/themes/smartbitches/images/podcast/header_05c.jpg The transcript for Podcast 457. YouTube Vlogging And a Very Meet Cute With Colin Dobson-Fox of Foxes Afloat has been posted! This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks. ❤ Click here to subscribe to The Podcast → View the full article
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Yes, beans. Simmer Down Simmer Down by Sarah Smith is $1.99! Maya was excited about this one when it released, and it has a 3.4-star average on Goodreads. Readers report that there are some rivalry and competition tropes ahoy, along with a significant amount of food p0rn. In this finger-licking good rom-com, two is the perfect number of cooks in the kitchen. Nikki DiMarco knew life wouldn’t be all sunshine and coconuts when she quit her dream job to help her mom serve…
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Colin Dobson-Fox is the co-host and producer behind one of my favorite YouTube channels, Foxes Afloat, which recently reached over 100k subscribers (a very big deal in YouTube Land). Colin and his husband Shaun live aboard a narrowboat in the UK, and produce weekly vlogs of their travels, and their lives, including Colin’s life with autism and with mental illness. This is a bit afield of my usual interviews, but I was fascinated by Colin’s editing process as he takes over 40 hours of film and edits to a 15-30 minute vlog. We also talk about how his relationship with his husband Shawn started (don’t miss that part) (Seriously, goodest part). Vlogs (and blogs, and podcast…
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Thank you for all the sale suggestions this week! Today we’ve got some bestsellers including a Brenda Jackson novel, plus some cookbooks! YAY FOOD! The Ex Talk The Ex Talk by Rachel Lynn Solomon is $1.99! Several of you flagged this one yesterday, including Annie Kate, who said that this book “is cute and funny and emotional, and also the hero’s hobby is restoring antique cast-iron pans, so obviously $1.99 is a steal.” (This would be the type of book I’d surprise gift to several friends – which I’m goin…
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C- The Lady Has a Past by Amanda Quick May 4, 2021 · Berkley Historical: AmericanRomantic SuspenseRomance CW/TW Content warning: While the main characters are OK, the entire plot centres around a kidnapping and blackmail ring that involves the sexual assault of women. Nothing is described in graphic detail, but it’s pretty upsetting. Another character is a survivor of abuse by her spouse. The Lady Has a Past is a really strong romantic thriller with mild paranormal elements that delivers on both the thriller and …
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Thanks for all the comments highlighting deals you’ve spotted! There are some great sales on this week. Wolf Rain by Nalini Singh is $1.99 – and this might be a Kindle Daily Deal so go, go, go! I did an epic read-through of the Psy-Changeling series from December 2020 through January 2021, and this was one of my favorites. There’s yearning, monumental impediments to the protagonists’ connection, badassery, and the usual, delightful emphasis on compassion and empathy, the latter much more overt. If you like this series, this is a terrific deal – and the n…
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F The Shadow in the Glass by J.J.A. Harwood March 18, 2021 · HarperVoyager Literary Fiction TW/CW TW: Sexual Assault, Abortion The Shadow in the Glass is marketed as a Gothic Cinderella story, which is totally my jam, but in reality what I got was a Faustian morality tale with some Cinderella themes. It was a depressing read overall and, this is a big spoiler but an important one: Click for Spoiler It doesn’t have a HEA. In fact the end is very sad. Even if I meant to read this as a Faustian morality tale, i…
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Some of these titles might make a lovely gift for that reader you know who is finally (finally!) able to plan a vacation. (I love surprising people with gifted digital books.) When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo is a Kindle Daily Deal at $1.99 that appears to be price-matched. Woo hoo! This is the second novella in the Singing Hills Cycle series, and it has a 4.3-star average on Goodreads! Aarya mentioned this one in a December 2020 Hide Your Wallet, s…
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This HaBO is from Shawna, who is looking for this time travel romance: I’m trying to recall a time travel romance novel about a modern-day guy who goes to England for his cousin’s wedding (for some reason, I’m remembering a ridiculous nickname for the cousin like “Cubby”?), and I think he flies to London with a materialistic, status-obsessed girlfriend he doesn’t see a future with. They arrive in London in a hard rain, and while the cab takes them to his cousin’s estate, the protagonist thinks he sees a raven flying alongside the car, but convinces himself he was imagining it with the rain. At his cousin’s house, he falls into a fountain and gets sucked back to (I think)…
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B People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry May 11, 2021 · Berkley Romance Back when we used to take vacations (sigh, those wild pre-Covid days, how fun-filled they were…) they often began badly, what with trying to get packed in time and flying in coach and all the other bother of getting from one place to another. However, after a certain transitional period, the vacation would become enjoyable, perhaps even emotionally meaningful and moving. This is the experience I had with People We Meet On Vacation, a book I …
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http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Depositphotos_52671211_original-300x200.jpgWelcome back to Wednesday Links! I’m still in Florida and let’s just say it isn’t going super well. My flight was also delayed by a giant man baby refusing to wear a mask and then cursing out a plane mostly full of families going to Disney. On the bright side, I did get a pretty sporty rental car and I went to Atlanta for the Georgia Aquarium to finally see their whale sharks. … In the recent Hide Your Wallet, Sneezy mentioned a nonfiction title called The Dark Fantastic. Well apparently it’s part of a larger collection of pop culture nonfiction that sounds pret…
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I’m gathering up the Books on Sale this week, so if you’ve spotted some good discounts, let us know in the comments! The Best Man Plan The Best Man Plan by Jaci Burton is $1.99! This is book one of the Boots & Bouquets series, and is a one night stand/friends to lovers contemporary romance (sniff, sniff…is that catnip?). Book two, The Engagement Arrangement, comes out on June 29, so if you like this one, the next one will release very soon. The Best Man Plan has a 3.69 average on Goodreads – did yo…
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B+ From Little Tokyo, With Love by Sarah Kuhn May 11, 2021 · Viking Books for Young Readers RomanceYoung Adult From Little Tokyo, With Love is a modern day, urban, feminist Cinderella meets nure-onna. It is a YA featuring a biracial girl with a ‘kaiju temper’ who prefers monsters to princesses and I am totally here for it. Riki is the daughter of a Japanese-American woman who died in childbirth. Her father, who abandoned Riki’s mother when she found out she was pregnant, was White. Riki is being raised by her Japan…
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You all look like you need some Cover Snark! http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/image-51.png From Peggy. Thanks, Peggy! Sarah: I keep reading the title as “Walk Away.” Yes. Walk away. Slowly. Get outta there. Tara: via GIPHY Amanda: No thank you. Carrie: Aww finally Cousin Itt gets his own story! Shana: That’s gonna give me nightmares Carrie: A Man and his Merkin: A Un-hygenic Love Story. Sneezy: Huh. Been a while since that cut of bikini bottoms were in. This one looks itchy. Unless all of that’s his pubic hair. Catherine: That was my first thought too and now I need to scrub my eyeballs. Sarah: Stay tuned for potential sequel…
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My Kind of Earl My Kind of Earl by Vivienne Lorret is $1.99! This is book two in The Mating Habits of Scoundrels series. Elyse mentioned this in a previous Hide Your Wallet because she was very intrigued by the idea of the heroine starting a fight in a brothel. USA Today bestselling author Vivienne Lorret continues her charming new trilogy with a bluestocking whose search for information on the mating habits of scoundrels has her stumbling upon the missing heir to an earldom… in the London underworld. Jane Pickerington never intended to start a brawl in a brothel. Sh…
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http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-content/themes/smartbitches/images/posts/kickass-women.jpg Recently I read Prospects of a Woman by Wendy Voorsanger, and discovered a new Kickass Woman in its pages. One of the characters is loosely based on real-life photographer Anne Brigman, a passionate traveller and artist who was a leading figure in the Photo-Secession Movement in the arts. The real-life photographer was in California later than her fictional counterpart, but the real and fictional women share a common artistic style and personal philosophy. Anne was born Anne Wardrope Nott to missionary parents in Hawa…
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B- Prospects of a Woman by Wendy Voorsanger October 20, 2020 · She Writes Press Literary Fiction TW/CW Abortion, death of animals including a dog, description of bear-baiting, discussions of homophobia and racism Prospects of a Woman is a historical novel, very much not a romance, about a woman who finds her independence in California during the Gold Rush. It’s written by a local author and the sense of place is solid all throughout the book, anchoring the story of an angry woman who feels incomplete for much of …
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Crazy Stupid Bromance Crazy Stupid Bromance by Lyssa Kay Adams is $1.99! This is the third book in the Bromance Book Club contemporary romance series. Totally on board with the cat cafe named Toebeans. However, I feel like these books have been hit or miss. Thoughts? A hacktivist and a cat café owner decode the friend zone in this romantic comedy from the author of Undercover Bromance. Alexis Carlisle and her cat café, ToeBeans, have shot to fame after she came forward as a victim of a celebrity chef’s sexual harassment. When a new customer approaches to confide i…
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http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/bigstock-Keukenhof-flower-garden-also-289372672-e1556807413689.jpgIt’s that time again! Whatcha Reading time! This is where we discuss are the wonderful books, weird things, and perhaps big letdowns we’ve read in the last couple weeks. Let’s get into it! Shana: I’m reading Accidentally Engaged by Farah Heron. Kiki reviewed it, and I’m absolutely loving it. Sneezy: I’m so excited for you! A | BN | KCatherine: I’ve just started reading The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennett by Katherine Crowley ( A | BN | K ) and it’s really good! It’s set a few years after Pride and Prejudice, and just after the death of…
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ALGONKIAN SUCCESS STORIES
WTF is Wrong With Stephen King?
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Women’s Fiction, Paranormal Romance, & More
Kings of the Wyld RECOMMENDED: Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames is $2.99 and part of today’s Kindle Daily Deals! Queen Beverly Jenkins recommended this one on a previous podcast: The book is amazing! It’s laugh-out-loud funny in some parts. The writing is wonderful. Clay Cooper and his band were once the best of the best — the meanest, dirtiest, most feared crew of mercenaries this side of the Heartwyld. Their glory days long past, the mercs have grown apart and grown old, fat, drunk – or a combination of the three. Then an ex-bandmate turns up at Clay’s door with a plea for help. His daughter Rose is trapped in a city besieged by an enemy one hundred thousand strong and hungry for blood. Rescuing Rose is the kind of mission that only the very brave or the very stupid would sign up for. It’s time to get the band back together for one last tour across the Wyld. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Velvet Was the Night Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno Garcia is $1.99 and another KDD! This is a noir/mystery novel set in Mexico during the 1970s. I believe this was also a Hide Your Wallet pick and I remember being super excited. Also, what a cool damn cover. From the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic comes a “delicious, twisted treat for lovers of noir” about a daydreaming secretary, a lonesome enforcer, and the mystery of a missing woman they’re both desperate to find. 1970s, Mexico City. Maite is a secretary who lives for one thing: the latest issue of Secret Romance. While student protests and political unrest consume the city, Maite escapes into stories of passion and danger. Her next-door neighbor, Leonora, a beautiful art student, seems to live a life of intrigue and romance that Maite envies. When Leonora disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite finds herself searching for the missing woman—and journeying deeper into Leonora’s secret life of student radicals and dissidents. Meanwhile, someone else is also looking for Leonora at the behest of his boss, a shadowy figure who commands goon squads dedicated to squashing political activists. Elvis is an eccentric criminal who longs to escape his own life: He loathes violence and loves old movies and rock ’n’ roll. But as Elvis searches for the missing woman, he comes to observe Maite from a distance—and grows more and more obsessed with this woman who shares his love of music and the unspoken loneliness of his heart. Now as Maite and Elvis come closer to discovering the truth behind Leonora’s disappearance, they can no longer escape the danger that threatens to consume their lives, with hitmen, government agents, and Russian spies all aiming to protect Leonora’s secrets—at gunpoint. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Mom Jeans and Other Mistakes Mom Jeans and Other Mistakes by Alexa Martin is $1.99! This came out in September of last year and is more women’s fiction about two best friends. I don’t remember hearing much about this one when it originally dropped. Have you read it? Two best friends say I do to living together, for better or worse, in this bold women’s fiction novel from Alexa Martin. Jude Andrews is famous. Well, at least on Instagram. Her brand is clean eating, good vibes, Pilates, and casually looking like a sun-kissed goddess. In real life, however, she’s a total disaster. She has a strained relationship with her fame-hungry mom and her latest bad decision emptied out her entire savings account. Lauren Turner had a plan: graduate medical school and become the top surgeon in the country. But when she became unexpectedly pregnant, those plans changed. And when her fiancé left her, they changed again. Now navigating the new world of coparenting, mom groups, and dating, she decides to launch a mommy podcast with all the advice she wishes someone had given her. Jude and Lauren don’t have much in common, but maybe that’s why they’ve been best friends since the third grade. Through ups and downs, they’ve been by each other’s sides. But now? They’re broke, single, and do the only thing that makes sense–move in together, just like they talked about when they were teenagers. Except when they were younger, the plan didn’t include a five-year-old daughter and more baggage than their new townhouse can hold. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Eternal Rider Eternal Rider by Larissa Ione is 99c! This is book one in the Lords of Deliverance series. I read this one back in 2011 and gave it 2 stars on Goodreads, though left no notes. I do remember preferring Ione’s paranormal demon hospital romance a bit more. They are here. They ride. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. His name is Ares, and the fate of mankind rests on his powerful shoulders. If he falls to the forces of evil, the world falls too. As one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, he is far stronger than any mortal, but even he cannot fight his destiny forever. Not when his own brother plots against him. Yet there is one last hope. Gifted in a way other humans can’t-or won’t-understand, Cara Thornhart is the key to both this Horseman’s safety and his doom. But involving Cara will prove treacherous, even beyond the maddening, dangerous desire that seizes them the moment they meet. For staving off eternal darkness could have a staggering cost: Cara’s life. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article -
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Who Are You Reading Now?
You read that right. Not what are you reading, but who. To me, that subtle change reveals an ongoing seismic shift in reading and, by extension, in writing. Who an author is has come to matter intensely in what readers choose to read (or not to read). To be clear, this is not about a reader choosing a specific author’s books because of what they write—a preferred genre; a favorite topic or theme; a beloved story-telling style; the characters; the voice; the beauty of the writing. This is about a reader choosing a specific author’s books because of who that author is—their lived experiences, their personal characteristics, their opinions. Book selection based on an author’s identity has been the mainstay of non-fiction (particularly celebrity memoirs) for a long time, but it has been less of an influence in fiction. Until now. Readers now intentionally expand (or limit) their reading selections based on the perceived diversity or conformity of an author or on the perceived legitimacy of an author to write a specific story. In many cases, choosing who to read pulls readers out of their usual reading habits and boundaries. By altering reading patterns, this shift alters writing and publication patterns. It also alters the job of being a writer. It means that who the writer is, as a person, determines what stories that specific writer can credibly tell. A writer with a good story and a compelling life story can be vaulted into the limelight. On the other hand, social media responses to any perceived mismatch between author identity and story can be (and have been) astonishingly cruel. But if who an author is limits the stories they are allowed to tell, however they choose to tell it, then the line between fiction and reality has been sundered. If the work of art—the story–is no longer seen as separate from the creator of the art, writing becomes a matter of self-presentation and self-awareness as much as putting words on the page. This shift is not a bad thing. It is also not an unequivocally good thing. It can make new, once-silenced voices audible; but it can also limit what any one voice can say. It can break down barriers, encouraging readers to expand their author list, adding more diversity and variety. It also has the capacity to harden existing boundaries. What is less obvious is exactly what this shift will mean for writers. Writing is no longer just a job, not what you do; it’s who you are. The emphasis on author identity makes writing, all writing, inherently political and inherently personal. And in this age of polarization, there is no middle ground. No anonymous author. Pen names are no protection in this world of outing and social media policing. Writers become public figures. Unable to hide behind the scenes. I believe writers are aware of this shift, down to their very bones, and that it influences daily decisions about what to write, how to write it, and (consciously or subconsciously) how to defend it. Writing, while simultaneously trying to assess how your ‘authority’ to write any particular line, character decision, or story arc might be interpreted or misinterpreted by any number of interested social groups, is debilitating. Being proactive—writing intentionally to generate or provoke reactions—highlights the power of writing, but rarely plays out according to plan. The consequence: writers either become self-aware and intentional about who they are in public and private and how that matches what they write or risk dismissal or misinterpretation. One clear example of how this works is the ongoing public push-pull debate over whether ‘un-diverse’ authors can write about ‘diverse’ characters or the reverse. Google the phrases ‘white authors writing black characters’ and ‘black authors writing white characters’ and thousands of pages of discussion and advice on how it should or shouldn’t be done are overwhelming. If a writer is only able to write about personal experience, grounded in lived actuality, then are we left only with memoir? Or are all writers required to become scholars, exhaustively researching the ‘reality’ underlying their ability to tell a story? Is fiction dead? I am writing this piece because I think writers need to acknowledge this shift is happening, face it head on, and chart a course through it with intentionality. I have no absolute answers, but I am deeply aware how powerfully it has influenced my writing. It has made me want to be more sensitive and inclusive in how and what I write. It has made me fearful to do so. I have a blog for my nonfiction work that is about old hospitals, but I haven’t posted anything new in years. Partly because, well, life. But also partly because in writing about hospitals, I have to write about diversity – how persons of color were housed and treated differently. How doctors and nurses interacted with each other in sexist ways. And putting that out there, at this point in time, as a writer not representative of the groups under study, is intimidating. How much research do I need to support my ability to tell someone else’s story? Did I get it right? Is there a way I could get it right? But the bottom line remains: if I don’t tell the story, regardless of who says I can or can’t tell it, then it will remain untold. And that silence, that untelling, is not a writer’s choice. I’m not here to say whether this shift is going to make writing (and reading) more or less equitable, inclusive, influential, or transformative. I simply want to start a conversation (or at least spark some awareness) about what it means to be a writer in this day and age. Can a writer be someone who sends their work out into the world while remaining safely behind the scenes? Or is a writer out there in the world, waving their ‘freak flag’ or ‘normal flag’ high, standing next to their works and ready for all the public scrutiny and debate? And yes, that is a provocative and polarized contrast. Who do you want to be as a writer? And who will be your readers? How do you handle the issue of writing about characters that do not share your personal characteristics or backgrounds or experiences? About Jeanne KisackyJeanne Kisacky trained to be an architect before going back to her first love--writing. She studied the history of architecture, has written and published nonfiction, and has taught college courses. She is the author of the recently published book, Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing, 1870-1940. She currently fights valiantly to keep her writing time despite the demands of a day-job, a family, and a very particular cat. More Posts [url={url}]View the full article[/url] -
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The Best New Crime Shows Coming in October
It’s just about October, which means your streaming services are going to be packed full of horror, but for the avid crime watcher there’s still quite a bit to look forward to, as long as you don’t mind a tinge of fright in your weekly viewing, or else you’re a fan of British mystery in particular, in which case you’re in luck, because there are some gems headed across the Atlantic in the weeks ahead. Here, a few highlights on the calendar. Sherwood (Britbox / Premieres October 4) Set in a Nottinghamshire mining village, Sherwood tracks an investigation into two murders in a community still processing the legacy of a miners’ strike decades before. Clues point to one of the victim’s suspicions about secret police infiltration and disruption in the miners’ ranks, and possibly an ongoing coverup. Alaska Daily (ABC / Premieres October 6) Tom McCarthy (Spotlight) is back to the world of investigative reporting. This time Hilary Swank plays the dogged journalist, summoned from New York to Alaska to work on a story about women from indigenous communities gone missing. She’s paired up with a local to help her navigate the ins-and-outs of the uncanny north. Surprising that this one should land with ABC, but McCarthy has a history of working on prestige features and network hits. A Friend of the Family (Peacock / Premieres October 6) Nick Antosca (Channel Zero, The Act) is the creator by this incredibly sinister story based on true events, with Jake Lacy getting the turn as a psychopath who insinuates himself into the neighbor’s family and kidnaps the daughter multiple times over a span of years. The Midnight Club (Netflix / Premieres October 7) It’s the annual Mike Flanagan repertory production on Netflix, and I for one am pretty happy to have it. This time around Flanagan is co-creating with Leah Fong, adapting from the book by Christopher Pike, which depicts a group of young people in a hospice home who try to out-scare one another with late night story sessions, who soon find themselves at the center of a terrifying plot. Shantaram (Apple TV+ / Premieres October 14) Charlie Hunnam is playing an Australian bank robber who goes on the lam to India. That’s really all I need to know to give this one a chance. Looks like it has some pretty atmospheric location shooting, too. Magpie Murders (PBS / Premieres October 16) In what appears to be a truly perfect marriage, Masterpiece is bringing us an adaptation of Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders, a lovely meta-mystery about a novelist who dies with the whereabouts of his final book’s last chapter unknown, setting his editor off on a scramble to solve the real crime and piece together the whodunnit. Here’s hoping we see even more from this series on PBS. View the full article -
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The Best New True Crime Books Out Now
CrimeReads editors select the best new nonfiction crime books from September and August. Barbie Latza Nadeau, The Godmother: Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women (Penguin) Barbie Latza Nadeau’s new study brings us inside the mafia clans of Italy to draw a revealing portrait of the women who prop up these family structures, and who sometimes build power bases of their own, to violent ends. The book is in large part the story of Pupetta Maresca, the Naples woman who, at eighteen, avenged her husband’s gangland murder, served time in prison, and later became a media sensation. But The Godmother is also about the largely misunderstood role women play in organized crime in Italy, and what that role reveals about contemporary society. –DM Greg King, Penny Wilson, Nothing but the Night (St. Martin’s) In this compelling historical narrative, King and Wilson reexamine one of the nation’s most famous cases and come up with an alternative interpretation of the relationship between Leopold and Loeb. They also offer a vivid sketch of Clarence Darrow, the lion of the American bar, finding a complex humanity that drove him toward the case and into one of the most celebrated summations in the annals of American jurisprudence. –DM Beverly Lowry, Deer Creek Drive: A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta (Knopf) In Beverly Lowry’s hometown, when she was a small child just beginning to learn the horrific history of the American South, an elderly white woman known for being hateful was murdered with great violence. Her daughter tried to blame the crime on a Black man, but was instead put on trial herself—he attack was too brutal and lengthy for the townsfolk to ascribe such violence to the vulnerable Black community; what’s more, the daughter was suspected of a too-close relationship with a schoolteacher and this, combined with her mannish courtroom outfits, signaled her to be a gender rebel and thus a probable murderess. The daughter found herself convicted, but unending support from her loving husband (the contra-indicator for her suspected lesbianism) and the class differences between this upper-class wife and mother and her lower-class prisonmates eventually convinced the governor to secure her release back into the community that had so rejected her during the trial. –MO Andy Kroll, A Death on W Street (PublicAffairs) In 2016, a young DC staffer named Seth Rich was killed on his way home from work. The death was presumed to be in connection with a robbery, but when no arrests were made, a world of online conspiracy theorists and propaganda operatives stepped in with an elaborate lie about the Clinton family and a criminal coverup (and some much stranger, dark theories, of course). In Kroll’s new book, he chronicles Rich’s real life and death, as well as the dark forces that interrupted his family’s grief and made their tragedy into an online fascination and a hideous, dangerous distortion of reality. –DM Joe Pompeo, Blood and Ink: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime (William Morrow) The 1922 murder of a prominent reverend and a woman from the church choir serves as the basis for Pompeo’s Blood & Ink, which takes a fresh look at the grisly murder. A new media landscape was emerging at the time of the crime, and Pompeo does an admirable job of linking up the mystery to the wider cultural forces at play. –DM Kathleen Hale, Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls (Grove Press) Kathleen Hale initially wrote about the Slenderman case for Hazlitt, an article that still stands out from the general sensationalist coverage of the case for its enormous empathy for all involved. When two middle schoolers stabbed another middle schooler in the woods in 2012, they claimed to do it on behalf of a mysterious figure known as Slenderman. Hysterical parenting sites spread a moral panic about CreepyPasta, the website where stories of Slenderman originated and then became memes, but undiagnosed schizophrenia, midwestern stoicism, and intense friendship dynamics are much more to blame for the attack, as Kathleen Hale illustrates in both the original article and now a full-length title. –MO T. J. English, Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld (William Morrow) T.J. English’s newest slice of American noir culture is a sweeping history of the long, entangled tradition of jazz and organized crime, from the early days of Storyville, with Black performers and Sicilian club owners operating a complicated network of protection, endorsement, exploitation, and wild, creative invention. In cities across America, jazz musicians often found their homes in connected clubs and performing venues. Some believed it was to their benefit, but as the century rolled on, divisions within the arts community began to spread, as some musicians no longer wanted to play along for the mobsters who had a taste of their careers and profits. So in the end, the story becomes a distinctly American one, of course: of racial inequality, economic injustice, and the immortal art form that sprang from this hotbed of corruption and striving. –DM View the full article -
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Why Cold War Noir is Back in Play
I am obsessed. I can’t escape it. My thoughts are dominated by the evil, the mystery, the cruelty of one eccentric episode in modern history: The Cold War. It’s what I read. It’s what I write. It’s my lens for the world. And, even though the Cold War was pronounced dead with the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of 1989, I see evidence of the Cold War around me daily, lurking like some half-seen figure in the shadows. The war in Ukraine? The daily propaganda messages from the Kremlin, amplified by China’s supportive posturing against the West, is the mirror image of events from the Korean War of the 1950s, when China was the combatant and the Soviet Union was the supporter. Strange theories about Covid or Monkeypox hatched in secret labs? Reminds me of the fears of bioterrorism immediately following WWII that led to the creation, for military purposes, of what today is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fear, mystery, hidden forces, alien powers, random chaos pushing people towards nihilism, those are the key issues of the Cold War. And they remain alive and well-fed in 2022, fueling a renewed interest in the Cold War in literature, film and television. To be clear, I take a broader view of the Cold War than simply defining it as the era of Soviet-American tensions between 1945-1989. That is the true Cold War. But to me, the broader, literary idea of the Cold War extends to any era in which enemies unknown threaten the stability, the livelihood and existence of regular people in a period where, officially, no war exists. George Orwell’s 1984, published in England in 1948? Absolutely Cold War. Amazon Prime’s 2015-2019 series The Man in the High Castle, based on Phillip K. Dick’s 1962 alternate history in which America loses WWII and is subjugated by the victors, Japan and Germany? Totally Cold War. There was a time in the late 1970s through the 1980s, when Cold War spy stories dominated the book trade like massive nuclear-armed missiles on the horizon. John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Len Deighton’s Game, Set, Match series, and others were the epic novels of the era, lovingly and painstakingly turned into television miniseries with big budgets and headline actors. But all that faded away for a few decades when the Cold War was said to have ended. Cold War, dead. Spy stories, out. But, like radioactive dust, the winds have blown life back into the Cold War. One of the best detective thrillers of 2021, according to Stephen King: Five Decembers, a brilliant saga by James Kestrel, set in Hawaii and Hong Kong spanning pre-Pearl Harbor to the end of WWII. The book is crammed with mysterious espionage forces and clandestine military preparations when neither America nor Hong Kong were officially involved in war. New Cold War thrillers out this year include Joseph Kanon’s The Berlin Exchange, the story of a spy swap, and Anika Scott’s The Soviet Sisters, also set in Berlin, but from a distinctively Eastern perspective. Here’s my bet: We are going to see a continued rise of new Cold War books, especially Noir tales, in the next two years. Just as the Kennedy assassinations in the 1960s, the Watergate break-in and coverup in 1972, and the CIA-backed coup and assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 led to a slew of government conspiracy-laced thrillers, like James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor and Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File, I think we are ripe for an exploration of unsettling forces loose in the world today. Why? Because literature becomes a go-to, partly for solace to heal and explain modern tensions through the lens of history, and partly to echo and reinforce themes of alienation, anxiety and social distress, much like a tongue probing a chipped tooth. After all, when Mickey Spillane’s private eye antihero Mike Hammer decried his essence as a government-trained, war-inured, legalized killer in One Lonely Night, published in 1951, he was reflecting back more than a decade of turmoil, doubt and repercussions from World War II. And readers loved it. From my scan of the horizon, there are a handful of wild forces at play that are unlikely to be tamed any time soon: mistrust for government, fear of war, whether conventional war or cyber-war, and fear of increasingly powerful and seemingly malevolent technology. After all, who isn’t, deep down, afraid of what Google or the NSA knows about them? Throw in a few conspiracy theories smoldering on the internet and you’ve got the seeds for a new crop of Cold War novels. My own novel, The Man from Mittelwerk, is set in California in 1950, with a traumatized World War II vet facing his worst nightmare, the appearance of Nazi scientists in America. (This really happened: The U.S. imported 1,600 top German Scientists under a secret program called Operation Paperclip.) I don’t want to spoil the story here, but I will say, even though it’s a Cold War thriller with spies and codes and a few murders, it’s actually a critique of our modern obsession with technology. As a writer, the Cold War is an extra character that serves as the best sort of Noir villain, hidden, cruel, unpredictable, like a poison gas in the air. I was inspired by Philip Kerr’s brilliant Berlin Noir trilogy, a Chandler-style detective story transplanted from the mean streets of Los Angeles to the madness of Nazi Berlin. Nobody beats Kerr in describing the daily life for Germans under Hitler. Kerr painted a picture of the attempt to normalize the oppression of the Nazi regime across all aspects of daily life, from the “volunteer” donation drives to the suddenly booming business for his lead character, ex-cop Bernie Gunther, in searching for missing persons, usually Jews, usually dead in the river. On the surface, Kerr wrote detective stories in homage to Chandler, but in reality, he portrayed an epic battle of good versus pervasive evil. Whether that evil represented war or a political force or technology gone wild doesn’t really matter. It’s the struggle that keeps the reader’s interest. In the tumultuous time we’re in, the winds of cold war continue to chill us. There are battles being fought in undeclared wars, some we know about, some we may never know. It’s in these times that people turn to Cold War noir to help them understand the world we’re in. Decades after it was pronounced dead, the Cold War lives on for readers, for writers, for all of us. *** View the full article -
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On the Importance of Character and Setting
“It feels, indeed, as if the characters and everything that happens to them exist in some limbo of the imagination, so that what I am doing is not inventing them but getting in touch with them and putting their story down in black and white, a process of revelation, not of creation.” Nobody could put it better than that. The quotation comes from the inimitable P. D. James, in Talking About Detective Fiction. And that’s what it’s like for me: the characters are there, somewhere in that limbo, and I check in with them whenever I want to see what they’re up to. So, character is, to me, the most important element of a story. And I must have succeeded to some extent: I get very strong reactions to my three main characters: Monty Collins, Father Brennan Burke, and Maura MacNeil. With respect to Monty, I attended a book club one time, and one reader referred to Monty; she said quite heatedly that she would never advise her children to go to a lawyer like Monty! I said, “You would if you wanted them acquitted of murder.” Some people find Maura MacNeil a little too lippy; she does have a mouth on her, no question. Brennan Burke once said, “She has a tongue in her head that could slit the hull of a freighter.” Father Burke inspires the strongest and most frequent reactions. I’ve had everything from love — “What church is he at? I’m a single woman and I’d like to meet him.” — to outrage about his boozing and his (only occasionally) breaking of his vows, in particular, the promise to live a life of chastity. One reader declared: “He is not fit to do anything but get down on his knees and scrub the floor of his church!” I’ve even had readers worry about him: “What’s he going to do about this?” Or, “You can’t let that happen to Brennan!” This tells me that I have created (or, citing P.D. James, I am in touch with) a character who is not bland or forgettable; my readers are not indifferent to him. In order to portray a believable and compelling character, a writer has to have an ear for dialogue. I love writing dialogue, and regional dialects. If I sit at a table with a group of people, I may not be able to remember afterwards what anybody was wearing. But I can recall conversations, often word for word, and I can bring back the accents, the tone and cadence of the voices. I find in some writers’ books that the dialogue doesn’t ring true and the attempts at humour fall flat. It’s not all that easy to do, or not easy to do well. An intelligent, witty character should sound it; an old lag doing hard time in a cell should talk like one. Inseparable from all this is the “voice”, the voice in which the story is told, whether it’s a character speaking in the first person, or the voice of the author/narrator. Sometimes the voice alone, if the writing is particularly fine, is enough to hook me on a story or a series. It could be the wit of Caroline Graham in her Midsomer Murders series, the unapologetic erudition of Dorothy L. Sayers in the Lord Peter Wimsey books, or the evocative, poetic writing of R.J. Ellory in A Quiet Belief in Angels. Or John Brady, rightly commended in this New York Times review of his Matt Minogue series: “Although he writes with realistic precision of Irish police procedures, Mr. Brady adopts a tone of battered lyricism for Minogue’s keening thoughts about the spiritual corruption he sees around him. It’s a sad sound, the lamentations of a decent man’s conscience, but it’s the music that keeps drawing us back to this haunting series.” How many writers could ever hope to reach that pinnacle of achievement?! Having said all that, it’s interesting to recall the importance that P.D. James accorded to setting. “Place, after all, is where the characters play out their tragicomedies, and it is only if the action is firmly rooted in a physical reality that we can enter fully into their world.” Of course, she portrays setting brilliantly in her novels. Setting is important to me, as well. Not surprisingly, my stories are set in places that hold great interest for me, e.g., my own city of Halifax, Nova Scotia; Dublin and other cities in Ireland; Italy; and Germany. My most recent novel, Fenian Street, was inspired directly by the street of that name in Dublin. Historically, and at the time of my novel — the 1970s — it was a street of tenements, called the Corpo Flats there, meaning public housing for the poor and working classes. My main character, Shay Rynne, is a lad from the Corpo Flats in Fenian Street, who wants to succeed in the Garda Síochána, the Irish police, despite the prejudice against him because of his background. Now, here are a few of my most cherished writers, who excel in the elements of setting and character. With such an illustrious history of writing and storytelling, Ireland has so many great writers that a list would fill volumes. I’ll mention only a few of my favourites. Liz Nugent is exceptional at creating character and suspense, from Unraveling Oliver through to Little Cruelties. For a brilliantly written police series set in Dublin, see Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, beginning with In the Woods. A recent standalone novel is The Searcher. And we have Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy series. The books are set in McKinty’s native town, Carrickfergus, and the surrounding areas, including Belfast. McKinty transports you right into the turmoil of Northern Ireland. There are six books in the Duffy series, with the seventh expected soon: The Detective Up Late. Another great crime writer from the North of Ireland is Stuart Neville. He was born in Armagh and, like McKinty, knows all about the dark side of life in his native land. He has an excellent series of crime novels starting with The Ghosts of Belfast (a.k.a. The Twelve) and, most recently, a standalone novel, The House of Ashes. Ironically, Neville has revealed, when he first started writing about his home country and seeking to publish his work, he was told that setting stories in Northern Ireland was “death for sales” and he should try to disguise or play down the setting in promotional materials! His first novel had to be titled The Twelve for sales in the U.K. instead of The Ghosts of Belfast. Neville and McKinty have certainly overcome that particular prejudice. And, interestingly, the two of them are the editors of a collection titled Belfast Noir. Moving on to Italy. Donna Leon writes a wonderful series set in Venice, featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. Brunetti is a wonderfully drawn character, one I keep coming back to. And the secretary in the Questura, Signorina Elettra, is one of a kind; she is a genius at doing things for Brunetti on the sly, mining her computer and digging up any information Brunetti needs, often information that is meant to be inaccessible. Leon, via Brunetti, has an uncanny ability to penetrate people’s minds, revealing with wit and asperity aspects of the characters’ behavior and thoughts that the characters do not know they are revealing. And her descriptions of Venice make you feel you are right in the centre of that legendary city. The most recent book, number 31(!) in the series, is Give Unto Others. Finally, we turn to Germany, and one of the greatest-ever writers of historical fiction, Robert Harris. He has set stories in ancient Rome, England, France, and Russia among other places. I particularly like his books about Germany, namely Fatherland, Munich and V2. His recreation of places and past times is incomparable. He has a new book out, Act of Oblivion, about the 1649 murder of King Charles I. And now I’ll return to my own city, Halifax, which suffered catastrophic damage in the explosion of December 6, 1917, an event which has inspired many writers of fiction and non-fiction, and I intend to be one of them. *** View the full article -
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530. Writing the Book You Want to Read with Kyla Zhao
A | BN | K | AB Kyla Zhao is my guest this week ahead of the release of her debut novel, The Fraud Squad, coming out in January! Kyla’s book was inspired by her time working for high society magazines like Tatler and Vogue in Singapore. We talk about cultural differences, Trader Joe’s, and how her book was her antidote to doom scrolling in 2020. … Music: purple-planet.com Listen to the podcast → Read the transcript → Here are the books we discuss in this podcast: You can find out how to access magazines through your library digitally using Libby and other platforms. And you can find Kyla Zhao on her website, Kyla Zhao.com. If you like the podcast, you can subscribe to our feed, or find us at iTunes. You can also find us on Stitcher, and Spotify, too. We also have a cool page for the podcast on iTunes. Thanks to our sponsors: Podcast → More ways to sponsor: Sponsor us through Patreon! (What is Patreon?) http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-content/themes/smartbitches/images/podcast/patreon.png What did you think of today's episode? Got ideas? Suggestions? You can talk to us on the blog entries for the podcast or talk to us on Facebook if that's where you hang out online. You can email us at sbjpodcast@gmail.com or you can call and leave us a message at our Google voice number: 201-371-3272. Please don't forget to give us a name and where you're calling from so we can work your message into an upcoming podcast. Thanks for listening! Podcast Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Forever, publisher of TikTok sensation Archer’s Voice by Mia Sheridan. If you like emotional, hopeful romances with complicated, flawed characters, and a nice serving of angst on the side, this book is perfect for you. When Bree Prescott arrives in the sleepy, lakeside town of Pelion, Maine, she hopes against hope that this is the place where she will finally find the peace she so desperately seeks. On her first day there, her life collides with Archer Hale, an isolated man who holds a secret agony of his own. A man no one else sees. Archer’s Voice is the story of a woman chained to the memory of one horrifying night and the man whose love is the key to her freedom. It is the story of a silent man who lives with an excruciating wound and the woman who helps him find his voice. It is the story of suffering, fate, and the transformative power of love. Readers on TikTok have been exclaiming about Archer’s Voice for awhile now, and every day new BookTok fans discover this book. I always say that any book a reader hasn’t read is a New book, and Archer’s Voice is a bestseller almost ten years after it’s first publication. Discover the book thousands of readers can’t stop talking about. Find your copy of Archer’s Voice wherever books are sold. Remember to subscribe to our podcast feed, find us on iTunes or on Stitcher. View the full article -
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An Anthology, Romantic Suspense, & More
Twice a Quinceañera Twice a Quinceañera by Yamile Saied Méndez is $2.99! This was mentioned on a previous Hide Your Wallet and I remember Sarah being excited for this on in a previous podcast. Did any of you grab this one when it released? Acclaimed author of the Reese Witherspoon YA Book Club Pick Furia, Yamile Saied Méndez makes her adult fiction debut with this sparkling, whimsical novel of an accomplished young woman who discovers what it really means to come into her own . . . One month short of her wedding day—and her thirtieth birthday—Nadia Palacio finds herself standing up to her infuriating, cheating fiancé for the first time in . . . well, ever. But that same courage doesn’t translate to breaking the news to her Argentinian family. She’s hyperventilating before facing them when she glimpses a magazine piece about a Latina woman celebrating herself—with a second quinceañera, aka Sweet 15! And that gives Nadia a brilliant idea . . . With a wedding venue already paid for, and family from all over the world with plane tickets, Nadia is determined to create her own happily-ever-after. Since the math adds up perfectly, she’ll celebrate her treintañera, her double quinces. As the first professional in her family, raising a glass to her achievements is the best plan she’s had in years. Until she discovers that the man in charge of the venue is none other than her college fling that became far more than a fling. And he looks even more delicious than a three-tiered cake . . . Full of exuberant heart, Twice a Quinceañera is a pure delight for every woman who needs to be her own biggest fan—and who dreams of a second chance at first love. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. The Arrangement The Arrangement is an anthology containing historical romance novellas from Sylvia Day, Minerva Spencer, and Kristin Vayden. It’s on sale for 99c! I’m unsure if the Day novella was previously published, but all the stores have a marriage of convenience theme. Some Goodreads reviews mention there being too much sexytimes. A trio of sizzling historical romances that prove passion is timeless . . . MISCHIEF AND THE MARQUESS by Sylvia Day Justin, the Marquess of Fontaine, and Lady Sophie Milton-Riley are completely ill-suited to one another. But they will have to prove it in order to end their mothers’ insistence that they should marry. Yet the more they attempt to demonstrate how wrong their union would be, the more surprisingly, irresistibly right things feel . . . THE DUKE’S TREASURE by Minerva Spencer Plain, prickly Josephine Loman has loved Beaumont Halliwell, the Fifth Duke of Wroxton, since the first time she saw him. But the most beautiful man she’s ever met had eyes only for Jo’s erstwhile friend, who betrayed Beau’s trust by marrying his brother. Beau hasn’t been home in years, but when his brother dies in an accident, he must marry to save the impoverished dukedom. And Jo is the overlooked heiress who will turn his world upside down . . . THE INCONVENIENT COUNTESS by Kristin Vayden As the eldest in a poverty-stricken family of daughters, Miss Diana Katherine Lambson’s only option is a marriage of convenience. Her only prospect is a rogue with a miserable reputation. Her only true desire: freedom. And that is exactly what Charles Brook, Earl of Barrington, is willing to offer, in return for the respectability their union will give him. He will even provide Diana with a contract. But does she dare entrust her future to a scoundrel? Does she dare not to? Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. A Rogue by Any Other Name RECOMMENDED: A Rogue by Any Other Name by Sarah MacLean is $1.99! This is book one in the Rules of Scoundrels series, all of which take place in and around a gaming hall. We had two A-grade guest reviews for this one. What a scoundrel wants, a scoundrel gets… A decade ago, the Marquess of Bourne was cast from society with nothing but his title. Now a partner in London’s most exclusive gaming hell, the cold, ruthless Bourne will do whatever it takes to regain his inheritance—including marrying perfect, proper Lady Penelope Marbury. A broken engagement and years of disappointing courtships have left Penelope with little interest in a quiet, comfortable marriage, and a longing for something more. How lucky that her new husband has access to such unexplored pleasures. Bourne may be a prince of London’s underworld, but he vows to keep Penelope untouched by its wickedness—a challenge indeed as the lady discovers her own desires, and her willingness to wager anything for them… even her heart. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Hidden Hidden by Rebecca Zanetti is $1.99! This is the first book in her Deep Ops romantic suspense series and I’m very curious about it. It has a 4-star rating on Goodreads, which is impressive. However, if you’ve tried Zanetti’s books in the past and have mixed feelings, readers definitely suggest trying the sample first. Hide. That’s all Pippa can do to escape the terror chasing her. But now that she’s off the grid in a safe house, she finds plenty of interesting things to watch through the window. Like her new neighbor, with his startling green eyes, killer smile, and sexy bad-boy tattoo . . . Run. Malcolm West is fleeing the hell he unleashed in his last assignment as an undercover cop. A backwoods bungalow sounds like the perfect place to start over. Until he discovers he’s been set up . . . Fight. Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to bring them together. No matter how much he resents that, and his own driving needs, Malcolm will have to dig deep and let loose the banished killer inside himself, or Pippa’s fears could come true faster than the flip of a bolt in a lock . . . Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article -
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Fairy Tale
“My mother couldn’t believe the Queen’s hats. My mother disliked birds and hats.” Queen Elizabeth II in New Zealand, 1953. Licensed under CC0 2.0. When the Queen of Tuvalu died, I remembered. My parents were pleased that at ten years old I liked Mark Twain. And then they discovered that, as with Cleo the Talking Dog five years earlier, I would not move on from The Prince and the Pauper. I wasn’t interested in any other non-school book. I’d seen the film of Twain’s novel and Errol Flynn had the right to sit in my presence every week when I reread my favorite parts. Tom Sawyer? Any luckily orphaned boy princes? No? Then no thanks. My mother had purchased from a door-to-door salesman in 1958 our 1957 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia. We never owned another set. My knowledge of the world came from our ever more out-of-date encyclopedia. My science is still very Sputnik-era. I let the twenty-four taped, dogged volumes go with much regret in 2009 after my parents died. As I was tiring of Twain’s lookalike boys and their protector, Miles Hendon, I found in the encyclopedia a black-and-white illustration of a painting of two princes in dark clothes. They had light long hair and looked scared. Princes were unlucky. I lived in Indianapolis, Indiana. I longed to be unlucky. The two brothers were in a place with a dark staircase called the Tower of London. And, yes, the L volume of our encyclopedia set had so much on London, headed by a drawing of really old London dominated by “S. Pauwls Church.” I studied the narrow houses packed around it. My father couldn’t tell me for sure what “eel ships” were, but they were the largest vessels on the river in the drawing. So that’s where my nursery rhyme jumble of “all fall down” came from. (When did I come across the drawing that had the Globe Theatre marked in it and London Bridge full of houses over the “Thames fluuius”? Much later, when Shakespeare’s history plays were still way over my head.) I looked up stuff in the encyclopedia and in volume E I learned the counties of England from a map. England was superimposed over the state of Alabama to show how small the realm was. I tried to learn the list of English kings and queens going back to Alfred, but names before the Tudors (“To doors,” like “to arms,” I said, before I learned “two doors”) were hard. I looked up whatever I hadn’t heard of before. Sometimes the encyclopedia let me down. Then in February of 1964 came The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and the British pop invasion. (Everything is on YouTube now, including an audio recording of the Beatles concert I went to at the Indiana State Fair cow barn in September of 1964. The screaming.) Fan magazines about The Beatles were supplemented by expensive and out-of-date copies of The Illustrated London News, which I begged my parents for on Sundays when they went downtown to the newspaper store across from the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on the Circle. I was twelve years old when I first heard the voice of Queen Elizabeth II. It was a Saturday morning in 1965 and instead of cartoons or Little Rascals films on television, there was a broadcast of a memorial being dedicated to the late President Kennedy at Runnymede. I learned then what the Magna Carta was. My mother mocked the Queen’s accent: “Efrika.” When had the Queen talked about Africa? In 1965, I got up real early to watch the funeral of Winston Churchill. “I Vow to Thee, My Country” brought me to tears. I’d never heard “My Country ’Tis of Thee” sung as “God Save the Queen.” To add to my illustrated histories of great European military battles, I wanted coffee-table publications about Churchill. It was just a hobby, a history buff–type project, but then my family became alarmed when I insisted to my older sister that she must have meant Wat Tyler, who led the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and marched on London. No, Watts. California. Los Angeles. Black people. Riots. What else had I missed or failed to take in? Around the dinner table, my mother and my sisters thought I was hilarious. Except black people had been killed during Watts, my father said, very serious. To fall in love with Great Expectations at the new “white” school was fine, but my parents were offended when a history teacher told them how astonished he’d been when he began to recite in class “They came three thousand miles and died…” and I finished the stanza. (We’d been to Concord, Massachusetts. I had a little replica of the Grave of British Soldiers with that verse on it.) My parents did not like it when white people were surprised that black people knew anything. Maybe my parents’ ambivalence about my out-of-nowhere Anglophilia began then. It was a joke, distasteful to them, but then I could beat white people at their own game with it. I’d never been into sports and my father had played football for Fisk until he was kicked out for calling his French teacher queer. Maybe it had been a little weird when I got caught experimenting on my feet with my mother’s nail polish at a school friend’s when he burst in to tell me that somebody had just shot Lee Harvey Oswald on television. I was put in the special squad for sissies and fat boys at the new “white” school. In those days of vinyl, I had a record of historic speeches that I still listened to a lot after school. “This is Windsor Castle, His Royal Highness, Prince Edward.” I didn’t understand what was the constitutional impossibility that had kept Edward VIII from speaking before this broadcast, but I responded to the dramatic flummery of his self-pity: “… and to discharge my duties as king as I [eye-ya] would wish to do … of the British race …” (Race?) Unlucky kings were another matter. A known closet case to myself, my Anglophilia blossomed into a private gay culture. I’d not heard of Oscar Wilde but in 1969 when I was sixteen and locking every door behind me, I had no need of him. I’d discovered the House of Stuart. Flame on. Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser and The First Churchills on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre and the BBC documentary The Royal Family and the broadcast of the investiture of the Prince of Wales—one great vanilla mound of unlucky princes with Her Majesty the faultless berry on top. My mother said, Yuck. My mother and Queen Elizabeth were born in the same year. My mother couldn’t believe the Queen’s hats. My mother disliked birds and hats. She was always in favor of missing church, except on holidays. A bow and a bit of veil. Her imitation of the Queen’s voice was a high, squeezed little pipe. I said “liege man” and my mother said “liege man my foot.” I moved on to the Hanovers. The high school bookstore had stuff in it like Elizabeth Longford’s biography of Queen Victoria. My father put on his serious voice. He had avoided the army for as long as he could, because he and his friends at Morehouse had had no wish to fight for the British Empire or the French Empire, for that matter. My Anglo-American version of history went something like the House of Hapsburg with its weird chins degenerated and a son of the French House of Bourbon became King of Spain in 1700, provoking the thirteen-year War of the Spanish Succession. By the Treaty of Utrecht, Spain had lost the Netherlands and its possessions in Italy, but at the same time immigration from Spain to its colonies in Central America, Latin America, and South America was at its height. The populations there had already started dying, as soon as the Europeans brought diseases. I saw footnotes but did not read accounts from the Spanish conquests. Anyway, Spain kept going downhill in the Anglo version of its history and was a husk of an empire that fell apart in the nineteenth century. Before Pearl Harbor, lots of black people, Langston Hughes among them, had regarded Japan as the non-white empire that would counter European power in the Pacific. My father said he was not one of them. He got sent to Italy, a beautiful country, but the poverty he saw in Naples was worse than anything he’d come across in Georgia. The locals attacked black soldiers who they thought were after Italian women. Protestant conquest of the globe was different in my Anglo-American version, obeying as it did the imperatives of trade, capital, and progress. Trade. Yes, that commodity, human beings. There had been some debate among their captors as to whether or not slaves—as we said and as history books also said when I was in high school—should be baptized. Maybe the villain is conquest in the name of monotheism. Spain and France never had the large abolitionist movements of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and the United States. Most of the captured and imprisoned Africans were transported to lands controlled by Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking people, not to those lands squatted by England. My father tried again. These people do not care about us. But I knew from The British Overseas by C. E. Carrington that during the War of 1812 the slaves, as we said then, ran off to the British lines, because they would be free and sent to Nova Scotia. My father put on his don’t-hand-me-that face, but it was too late. I wanted buckles on my shoes and ruffles on my cuffs. I wrote “Sonnets Written in Dejection near Indianapolis.” Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, danced in Accra in 1961 with Queen Elizabeth, Head of the British Commonwealth, to a specially composed highlife tune, “Welcome, Your Majesty.” That was the year, 1961, that I took my first plane ride. My mother wore gloves and a hat. Life went on after the World Book Encyclopedia of 1957. The Queen‘s prince consort, happy as his Frankish ancestors, danced with Ghana’s Egyptian-born first lady. Black women were crowded around to check out the smooth moves of the dancers and one pretty spectacular diamond tiara. I’d seen a photograph and read the caption. Among the Zande, the Queen was given the name Naingitere. The name means “she who flies high in the sky with a white smoke.” The Queen owned a plane. Naingitere could be given only to a girl child with the characteristics of a ruler. Such were chosen by the deity to rule. I lied and said I was going to London with a school group. High school graduation present, 1971. My father had probably guessed that this was a solo flight, because he slipped some of his condoms—they came in little blue plastic containers of wet—into my shaving kit. I was unaware for a week and then paid it no mind for days that I’d brought my Afroed head of every obtuseness to a London that belonged not to the Queen’s men, but to Enoch Powell. Shit happened. Darryl Pinckney’s memoir, Come Back in September, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the fall. View the full article -
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Interview with Simon Crook (SILVERWEED ROAD)
Simon Crook has been a film journalist for over twenty years, visiting film sets and interviewing talent for Empire magazine. A new and exciting voice in domestic horror, he is perfectly placed to translate the recent successes of the genre from the silver screen to the written word – while adding something new and wholly his own. Social links: @sicrook on Twitter Welcome to the Hive, Simon. Firstly congratulations on your debut Silverweed Road. Can you tell us all about it, what can readers expect? Silverweed Road is a horror short story collection set on a cursed street in Kent. The pitch I originally sent HarperVoyager was ‘A New Horror Behind Every Door’, and that logline ended up on the book’s front cover. It’s a real Devil’s pick and mix – the ten horror stories range from were-foxes to predatory swimming pools, mutant cuttlefish to cursed rings, vengeful urns to demonic jackdaws, plus a darts player who makes a deal with the Devil himself. I guess what sets it apart from the standard anthology format is the way the stories link together: characters and events interweave, turning the street into this weird horror eco-system. Silverweed exists in its own little purgatory, itching between classic horror anthology and a splintered novel. What can readers expect? Horror. Weirdness. Madness. Laughter. Fear. Chills. And hopefully, an unsettling sense that anything can happen. I tend to see the horror genre as a booby-trapped playground. Of all the genres, it’s the most unpredictable. Definitely the most fun to write. Tell us a little something about your writing process – do you have a certain method? Do you find music helps? Give us a glimpse into your world! Oh, God. The idea of listening to music while I’m writing brings me out in hives. I’m blessed and cursed with the hearing of a bat. Play me a tune, and I can pretty much instantly play it on piano, so if music’s playing as I write, my brain will start analysing the bass line, the hi-hat or whether the guitar is panned right or left. If I do listen to anything, it’s white noise. But not any white noise. It has to be a 10-hour track on YouTube called Celestial. The monotonous blur sharpens the focus. Admittedly, it sounds like a ghost yawning, but it works for me. Other than that, it’s good old-fashioned graft. I’ve been a magazine journalist since I was 24, and deadlines have to be met, whether you feel like writing or not. I’ll drag my feet, like everyone else, but with procrastination comes guilt, and that drags you back to the desk. When I’m writing a feature, I’ll always outline, and it’s the same for fiction. Writing’s an act of discovery, but rather than grope around in the dark, I like to light the path ahead so at least I know where my story is going. Having said that, I’m a big fan of the William Gibson Method: if isn’t happening, have a nap. A brief nap does wonders for your subconscious: it seems to magically untangle any problems. Don’t just take it from me. Salvador Dali used to go to sleep on a chair, holding a spoon with a bucket by his feet. The moment he entered a woozy dream state, his hand would relax and the spoon would drop, hit the bucket, the clang would wake him up and he’d start painting. His weirdest, darkest, most surreal art were all created in that fuggy waking-dream state. So, yeah, naps. Naps and coffee. Lots of coffee. Speaking of worlds, what initially inspired you to write a collection of horror stories set on a cursed street in Britain? Were there any particular spooky experiences or favourite urban myths which you always planned to write about from the beginning? This goes right back to my childhood. Late at night, during Christmas, the BBC would air horror films in the late-night slot – either classic Hammer or an Amicus anthology. I was a mutinous little tyke back then, so I’d sneak out of bed and watch them while everyone else was asleep. It’s like a Proustian nightmare, I guess: I’ve never shaken off the sense that horror feels forbidden. Silverweed Road was inspired by those Amicus portmanteaus, and a genuine love of horror short stories. My Damascus moment was less about the stories than where to contain them. Once I realised a street had never been used as a horror anthology location, I knew I was onto something. Silverweed Road is a real street on a housing estate, by the way, close to where I grew up. All the roads are named after obscure plants with really peculiar folklore connotations: Yarrow Road, Speedwell Avenue, Valerian Way and, of course, Silverweed Road. That struck me as weirdly magical: this otherwise banal suburban estate with these vaguely occult street names. But then Kent is weird and ancient, especially the Medway Towns. Everywhere you turn, there’s a ghost story lurking. Seen at a certain angle, the Garden of England resembles a graveyard. Rochester’s Coopers Arms, where I used to drink, is home to a monk who was walled-up alive. Mote Park, where I used to play, is haunted by a girl in a white nightdress. And most notorious of all, less than a mile from Silverweed Road, is Bluebell Hill: the most haunted highway in Britain. There’s been over 50 sightings of its hitchhiking phantom – most often a bride, soaked in rain – who begs a lift only to vanish from the backseat. I was obsessed with that story as a kid. Ok, remind me never to visit these places! *shivers* It gets weirder though. At the bottom of Bluebell Hill is Kits Coty: a neolithic long barrow that predates Stone Henge and is said to be haunted by a trio of witches. All of those legends seeped into me as a child, and helped shape the curse that wrecks Silverweed Road. I love that idea: that wherever we walk, others have walked before, and their dark histories creep up from the pavements. If you had to be transported into one of your own stories, which would you choose and how do you think you would fare? Nice! So you’re basically asking me to imagine my own death?! Practically every story ends with a horrific fatality. Well you know, it is the spooky season after all, we had to get a touch macabre with our questions! I definitely wouldn’t want to end up like poor Cleo Marsh in ‘The Pool’, or Leo Harbinger in ‘Dust’. I’m obsessed with cuttlefish, so Erik Akoto’s experimental aquarium appeals… until I think about what happens to him. No, it would have to be ‘Darts With The Devil’. Darts is sorely underrepresented in literature – aside from Martin Amis’ London Fields, I can’t recall it ever appearing in fiction, and I love the sport. I used to be pretty handy with the arrows in my youth, but I’m a solid 26-er nowadays. So the idea of a darts player making a Faustian pact to hit any number he likes was basically wish-fulfilment. As long as I don’t the suffer fate, I’ll take Terry Slater’s demonic darting superpower. Can you tell us a bit more about your characters? Did you have a favourite character you particularly enjoyed writing? Or one you found the most difficult to craft? OK, so here’s the thing with short stories. Unlike novels, it’s the plot that drives the story, not the character. Clive Barker said it best. When he wrote Books Of Blood, he didn’t care what his protagonist had for breakfast. What mattered was the set-up, the horror, then the twist. It sounds counter-intuitive and arse-over-elbow, but you plot first, then throw in a character best (or least equipped) to deal with the horror. That’s where the fun starts. Augustus Fry, the antagonist in ‘Caught Red-Handed’, was a scream to write: a pompous, greedy antiques grifter who gets his comeuppance when he all but steals a cursed ring. He was basically late-stage capitalism made flesh, so I went full-scale Roald Dahl-villain with him. I find anger, especially masculine anger, both terrifying and perversely funny so a lot of Silverweed’s residents have lost control before the horror even starts (a classic example would be my irascible gardener, Victor Hagman, in ‘The Jackdaw’). Oh yes, Victor had some serious anger issues! I suppose Silverweed Road is a world without heroes: all of the characters are tragic, scarred or deeply flawed, so I still feel a pinch of guilt for putting my gentler residents – Shanta Kapoor in ‘Crash Flowers’, Cleo Marsh in ‘The Pool’ – through the mill. I’m equal opportunities when it comes to horror, but it’s very much by design the smartest characters in the book are all women. Who (or what) have been your most significant horror influences? Are there any creators who inspired you the most in Silverweed Road? I avoided reading any fiction while I was writing Silverweed Road – I didn’t want to risk inviting any influence. What I DID read in-between stories was poetry – specifically, Philip Larkin. Larkin has this supernatural talent for painting incredibly vivid images in very few words, and was a crucial reminder in the power of economy. Short stories are a very direct discipline, so if I ever felt I was getting verbose or too indulgent, I’d inhale some Larkin to snap me out of it. That said, there’s bound to be an element of subconscious influence on the stories. I’ve since realised ‘Caught Red-Handed’ was channelling MR James, and I adore Ramsay Campbell and Clive Barker, so their influence is probably lurking in there somewhere. How do you feel your experience as a film journalist, particularly in the horror cinema genre, has helped shape you as a writer? And I have to ask, who was the most interesting celebrity you have interviewed? (Was it Kermit the Frog?!) Ha! Oh, Kermit. I spent a day at the Tower Of London, where a Muppets film was being shot. I met Kermit in the Muppets storeroom, with all these spare body parts everywhere, like a Muppet Chainsaw Massacre. Kermit’s ‘helper’, the puppeteer Steve Whitmire, sat down with me in full view, Kermit on his lap with his black arm stick visible, and I thought, well that’s the magic gone. The moment Kermit spoke, Whitmire vanished, and somehow, I was talking to a frog. It was pure Muppet voodoo. We chatted about chicken visas, Kermit’s favourite road (the A40 [Editor: AGREED. The Welsh bits anyway]), the tuxedo he was wearing (“The size is Extra Spindly”). Kermit is real and I’ll take those 50 magical minutes to the grave. Everyone should have a go. There should be walk-in Kermit booths on the streets. Oh this is brilliant!! I’d love to meet Kermit! Whenever I visit a film set for Empire, I talk to everyone – from the carpenters to the costumers – because everyone has a story and everyone is interesting. Despite being a film journalist for 20 odd years, it still feels a bit vulgar and name-droppy talking about it, but I’ve been lucky enough to meet some incredible people while they’re working on set. Jeff Bridges sat sketching me while we chatted. I spent a day hanging out with Jack Black (very chilled and the opposite of his screen persona). Michael Caine is a walking anecdote machine. David Cronenberg is a big softie and one of the smartest people alive. Interviewing Mike Leigh is like going into battle and Ray Winstone made me laugh so hard I choked on one his toffees. This will disappoint the easily scandalised, but apart from Miss Piggy, I’ve never met anyone you’d class as ‘Difficult’. As for writing Silverweed Road – I live and breath horror cinema but I consciously avoided ‘borrowing’ film imagery. The book is, for my sins, the product of my own weird imagination. I guess the transformation scene in the were-fox story, ‘The Vanslow Fox’, was a warped homage to An American Werewolf In London, and the burning wallpaper in ‘Caught Red-Handed’ was inspired by the hotel corridor sequence in Barton Fink. Otherwise, that’s it. I’m a visual writer, so art played a far more important role. ‘The Pool’ was inspired by a Mark Rothko painting, and Goya’s Ghostly Vision inspired the grimoire in ‘The Mogon’. As for the jackdaws, that comes from real-life. One winter, every day for two months, a flock of jackdaws would fly directly over the house during twilight. It was an amazing spectacle – so many jackdaws, the sky would actually go dark. I’ve never forgotten it, and they ended up in the book. I guess I was plagiarising nature. We see such varying opinions from authors when it comes to the time of editing their books. How have you found the editing process? Enjoyable, stressful or satisfying? All of the above. There’s that old chestnut: ‘writing is rewriting’, but I think there’s more to it than that. You have to play the Man With Two Brains. When you’re writing, you’re inviting your subconscious to take control. Editing is more like the Ice Bucket Challenge: your brain splashes from its waking-dream state and your analytical side kicks in. Just knowing they’re two entirely different processes is part of the battle. And it is a battle: you’re basically at war with your past self, and it takes guts (and time) to admit where you’ve gone wrong. ‘Kill your babies’ is a brutal saying all writers are familiar with – most often, that will involve sacrificing a finely sculptured paragraph you’ve chipped at for months. If it slows down the pace, it’s probably self-indulgent and begging for a mercy killing. Editing wise, there was a fair bit of benevolent butchery involved. The original manuscript had 14 stories, but the deadline was looming, and it felt right to kill a few tales and focus on the survivors. The biggest change came with the final draft. I’d originally kicked off the anthology with an opening statement from Detective Chief Inspector Heath. My editor suggested we make the detective a regular character, either introducing each story or providing a footnote at the end, so I went for the latter. Editing isn’t always about the red pen: it’s about adding stuff too. It was a genius suggestion from my very smart editor, and despite the extra work, a scream to write. DCI Heath’s post-script really glued the story world together (most of his theories are wrong about the culprit behind each story, so it had the added bonus of making the reader feel smart). This one is just fun and is one of our favourite questions here on the Fantasy Hive: which fantastical creature would you ride into battle and why? Ha! OK… I’d ride on the back of Medusa, wielding a sledgehammer. She can turn the enemies to stone, and I can demolish them. And if that doesn’t pan out, there’s always Kermit The Frog as back-up. Kermit for the win!! Haha! Tell us about a horror book you love. What should our readers add to their Halloween TBR? Haunted house novels are a spooky season staple aren’t they? If you want something modern, I’d recommend Anne River Siddons’ The House Next Door in a heartbeat. And if you’re after something more gothic, try Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece The Haunting Of Hill House. I’ve genuinely lost count how many times I’ve read her novel. “God! Whose hand was I holding?” is, for my money, the scariest line in literature. Horror short stories are my wheelhouse, obviously, so the list of recommendations would fill the internet. In terms of Pleasure Shivers, you can’t beat MR James, but I’ll go for a story a little less celebrated: Marghanita Laski’s ‘The Tower’. I turned pale as milk the first time I read that. As for me, I’ll likely be re-reading Clive Barker’s Books Of Blood this Halloween. Six volumes. Thirty stories. All of them black gold. It’s the apex predator of horror anthologies. What’s next for you, Simon? Can you tell us a little something about your current work(s) in progress? Have you any upcoming projects which you can share? Oh, I’ve got a bunch of horror projects on the burn – and something Silverweed Road-related that could be quite fun. Are you planning anything fun to celebrate your new release? Do you have any upcoming virtual or in-person events our readers may be interested in? There are radio interviews and podcasts lined up, and some fun tie-in features for Time Out and The Guardian. And I’m really looking forward to an event with the brilliant CJ Tudor. It’s quite freakish: both of us have horror anthologies out on the same day, both of us have gnarly trees on the cover and, even spookier, both of us have a story called ‘Dust’ in our collections. CJ’s a legend, so chatting horror with her will be a giggle and an honour. It’s funny, really: in terms of horror, the publishing world has lagged about five years behind TV and cinema, where the genre’s still experiencing a second golden age. With brilliant writers like Paul Tremblay, CJ Tudor and Catriona Ward getting their due, I sense a dark tide rising, and a growing appetite for literary horror. Fingers and eyes crossed, the future is black. Finally, what is the one thing you hope readers take away from your writing? If just one Silverweed story results in a creepy Pleasure Shiver, then I’ve done my job. Thank you so much for joining us today! It’s been an absolute pleasure. Stay shivery. Silverweed Road is out today from HarperVoyager. You can find a copy HERE The post Interview with Simon Crook (SILVERWEED ROAD) appeared first on The Fantasy Hive. View the full article -
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I’ve Heard Such Mixed Things
It is a truth universally acknowledged, a reader in possession of a platform must be in want of an opinion. As news desks covering books have disappeared, book bloggers and bookstagrammers and booktokers have proliferated. As such, I hate to break it to you, but you’re going to see some really mean comments about your book. But chin up, because the reality is? There have always been people who hated your book. In a different generation, they just wouldn’t have had an easy way to let you know they hated it. And while that might not seem like much of a silver lining, then let this be: there are also people who love it and will talk about it so much you’ll wonder who, exactly, is paying them. So, this is the way of things now, for better or worse. But whether the social media reviews are good or bad, it’s the volume of them that can feel particularly relentless. Your publisher wants them to be relentless. Relentless is a good thing in this ecosystem of content attention. Yet for all the good it may ultimately do, we should at least acknowledge that it’s different. That authors today are dealing with something authors yesterday did not: the presumption of access. And its corollary: the feeling that your reader is now looking over your shoulder. So here are some things that help me navigate all that (when I remember to take my own advice): No book is universally beloved so stop trying to write one that is. Because of my day job, I get tagged in reviews of other writer’s audiobooks. Sometimes I’m tagged even when the author isn’t, because while the reviewer liked my performance, it’s a bad review of the book (and the good reviewers have learned not to tag the author in negative reviews – seriously, what HEROES). So let me tell you: books you may think are universally beloved? Aren’t. There is some corner of social media that hates them. One of my favorite moments in one of my favorite movies, The Big Sick, has Ray Romano’s character utterly baffled by internet opinions: “This is why I don’t want to go online, ‘cause it’s never good. You go online, they hated Forrest Gump. Frickin best movie ever.” Even if you, in your social media bubble, have seen only positive posts about these books, trust me, if you scroll through the comments, you will inevitably see that someone has written: “oh, I’m so glad you liked it! I’ve heard such mixed things.” Whaaaat? you will think. Where? The internet. That’s where. Universally beloved books don’t exist. No one has ever written one. You will never write one. So you don’t have to try to! Your opinion is just as valid as theirs. Roland Barthes argued that once a text is out in the world, the author, for all intents and purposes, is dead. That their opinion of the work they’ve created is no longer more valid than that of any reader. That’s a tough pill to swallow. After all, we are the final arbiters of right or wrong interpretations of our work. If a reader fundamentally misunderstands something about, say, our plot, then they are, objectively, wrong. But that doesn’t mean their opinion of the work is wrong. And in turn, that certainly doesn’t mean that our opinion of our work is wrong. In fact, I would argue – and I did – it’s the only thing that matters (see my previous post about only competing with yourself). Some people are just miserable. In my experience, most reviewers understand how to say something that reflects their personal, subjective experience. “This book wasn’t the right fit for me.” “I just didn’t connect with it”. The ones who are vitriolic and have zero self-awareness (“this book is trash!!” “worst book ever written!!!”) are not to be taken seriously, the same way we don’t take seriously those same people in the real world. They are misanthropic and tedious on Instagram, just as they are in life. Would you let this kind of person offer their unsolicited opinion about your wife, your kid, your job? Realize this is a them problem, not a you problem. Have boundaries around whose words you take to heart. If you can’t stick to your boundaries, then control your interaction. Goodreads is for readers, not authors. We all know that, right? So what are you doing on there? Can’t keep up with Facebook comments? You don’t actually have to. Overwhelmed by Instagram? Don’t let people tag you. Seriously. I know authors who have changed their settings to prevent people from tagging them. When they’re ready – if they ever are – to see what’s being said about their book, they will search for the hashtag. Or, a heretical proposal: you could delegate a friend to send you only the good posts. Now, some people will argue, well, if you’re going to read the good reviews you should also read the bad. Why? Please, explain that to me. The time for notes and critiques has passed. The book is done. Anything you may learn from bad reviews can only be applied to the next book and that’s like trying to divine from tea leaves what the weather will be tomorrow. Besides, if you’re anything like me, no one’s going to think there’s more wrong with your book than you already do. In my opinion, we all have to believe we’re writing for a reason. That all this work is worth it. So if you only want to read reviews that make you feel like it actually is worth it, then do that. Fill your boot, man. Whatever gets you back at the desk. For that reason, I love this post by Therese Walsh and I think about the phrase “protect the flame” at least once a week. You didn’t write the book for the people who don’t like it. Intellectually, we know this. But when we’re slogging our way through a draft, spending years on this thing, it’s not, uhhhh, fun when people don’t like it. Oh, it isn’t personal? Of course it’s personal! It’s my heart and my brain and my guts and my time on this earth poured onto those pages about which your review just said, “I mean… meh?” As a writer, actor, and artist in general, I long ago learned you can’t please everyone. How could you? No one book (or performance or song or painting) can be for everyone. When you aim for that, you get books that don’t take risks, that don’t say anything new, don’t challenge. And guess what happens then? There will still be people who don’t like it. Why? Because it’s derivative. They’ve seen it a million times before. The goal is not, nor should it be, to “write for everyone.” It should be, I think, to write for someone. And on that note… The final thing I’ll leave you with is that something social media does not celebrate is the magic of dumb-luck timing. So much energy goes into ARC reviews, then launch week, then the first month on-sale. But books continue to live and some of my favorite posts are the ones that happen 8 months, 14 months, 2 years after pub. When someone picked it up at a Little Free Library in a vacation town, or their cousin’s coworker’s sister gave it to them at a bachelorette weekend, or they saw another post where someone said, “I’ve heard such mixed things” and they thought, well, I’ll be the judge of that. I’m truly mystified by how books find readers at the right time. Your book can be just what someone needed. And the same person, had they read it last year, or right after they broke up with their boyfriend or, hell, right after they fell in love with their new boyfriend, wouldn’t have liked it. They weren’t ready for it then. What we like isn’t static. When we were kids, we didn’t like brussels sprouts. Now, we may crave them. Crisped up, with a little balsamic glaze and bacon? Freakin best vegetable ever. That’s who you’re writing for. Some future version of someone. You’re writing for an audience you can’t know, at a time you can’t predict. It’s some real message-in-a-bottle stuff. That’s what social media is like to me: making a wish, taking aim, and watching whose shore your book washes up on. Question: Have you had the experience of reading a book and not liking it, then picking it up again at a different time and it’s like a new book? About Julia WhelanJulia Whelan is a screenwriter, lifelong actor, and award-winning audiobook narrator of over 500 titles. Her performance of her own debut novel, the internationally best-selling My Oxford Year, garnered a Society of Voice Arts award. She is also a Grammy-nominated audiobook director, a former writing tutor, a half-decent amateur baker, and a certified tea sommelier. Her forthcoming book, Thank You for Listening--about a former actress turned successful audiobook narrator who has lost sight of her dreams and her journey of self-discovery, love, and acceptance when she agrees to narrate one last romance novel--releases in August, 2022. Web | Twitter | Instagram | More Posts [url={url}]View the full article[/url] -
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The Best Reviewed Crime Books of the Month
Deanna Raybourn, Killers of a Certain Age (Berkley Books) “… so inventive, the only ageist wisecracks it deserves are the ones its characters make about themselves … a singular suspense story thanks to its deftly fluctuating tone, which is by turns comical, violent and unexpectedly affecting … t’s impossible not to root for these dangerous dames and their refusal to let themselves be put on the ash heap — a phrase that, in this thriller, should be taken literally.” –Maureen Corrigan (Washington Post) Robert Harris, Act of Oblivion (Harper) “Fast-paced yet wonderfully detailed … Cleverly, the adventures and privations of Ned Whalley and his son-in-law, Will Goffe, are set in counterpoint to the trials of Will’s wife, Frances, as she hides in London with five young children, relying on the charity of her religious community as she faces plague, poverty and the great fire that will later destroy much of the city.” –Alida Becker (New York Times Book Review) Tracey Lien, All That’s Left Unsaid (William Morrow) “… suspenseful … Lien’s novel, by turns gripping and heartbreaking, makes room for forgiveness and understanding. Ky knows all about her people, and to know all is to forgive all.” –Arlene McKanic (Bookpage) Kate Atkinson, Shrines of Gaiety (Doubleday) “Shrines of Gaiety revolves around this grimy power struggle, and yet is—outwardly at least—Ms. Atkinson’s airiest creation to date. A feather-light confection of intersecting dramas that recalls the antic comedies of P.G. Wodehouse, the novel has it all: a runaway teenager, a sleuthing ex-librarian, a dogged Chief Inspector, even a stash of purloined jewels. There is the perfect balance throughout of sweetness and heartbreak … And, as always, there is the unmistakable zest of Ms. Atkinson’s dry wit … t is hard to think of another writer who can flit from darkness to levity, often in a single sentence, without lapsing into coyness or cynicism…Ms. Atkinson has perfected the comic wizardry that keeps us both airborne and immersed in her mosaic-like narratives … if such scenes border on farce—just as some of the novel’s dialogue veers toward archness—this only accentuates the underlying darkness. For here, once again, with nonchalant dexterity, Ms. Atkinson has depicted a world ripped apart by war and a city still emerging from the shroud of ‘muffled mourning.'” –Anna Mundow (Wall Street Journal) Richard Osman, The Bullet That Missed (Pamela Dorman Books) “Osman concocts a satisfyingly complex whodunit full of neat twists and wrong turns. But unlike most crime novelists, he ensures his book’s strength and momentum stem not from its plot or its thrills but rather its perfectly formed characters. Once again, the quartet of friends makes for delightful company … If there is fault to be found it is a recurring one throughout the series – namely that Osman’s two men have less to do than his two women, and as a result feel like extras around the main double-act. But what a double-act … What could have been twee and uninvolving is in fact heartwarming and enthralling. ‘They carried a kind of magic, the four of them,’ a policeman muses. That magic is still there in abundance.” –Malcolm Forbes (Washington Post) Barbie Latza Nadeau, The Godmother: Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women (Penguin Books) “Pupetta, who died last December at 86, may be the star but she is hardly the only engaging figure in this crisply written, dutifully researched book exploring the role of women in a sector of Italian society not noted for its embrace of a #MeToo ethos … [Nadeau’s] prose is straightforward, with welcome flashes of irony.” –Clyde Haberman (New York Times Book Review) Daniel Stashower, American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper (Minotaur) “The premise is a grind house fever dream … The reality of this case is far more mundane and messy, and far more fascinating … Both Ness and the Torso Killer are operating in Cleveland at the same time, but Stashower is admirably forthcoming about how these two threads barely intersect … Stashower demonstrates an ear for the vivid poetry of the era’s tabloid journalism as he resurfaces the outlandish writing that came out of the press’s attempt to cover the Torso Killer … American Demon is a winding, and sometimes confusing, jaunt.” –Patton Oswalt (New York Times Book Review) Virginia Hartman, The Marsh Queen (Gallery Books) “With its atmospheric swampland setting, Hartman’s debut brings to mind Delia Owens’ blockbuster Where the Crawdads Sing (2018), while the mystery itself is on par with Stacy Willingham’s A Flicker in the Dark (2022)…While the plot has many different threads to follow, the fast pace and short chapters keep the story moving for an enjoyable ride.” –Cari Dubiel (Booklist) Iain Reid, We Spread (Gallery/Scout) “.. another masterful example of high-concept psychological horror. Laid out in captivating, first-person prose … Through Reid’s spare, fragmented passages, the reader is immediately situated deep within Penny’s solitary world: hours, days, perhaps weeks pass in a heartbeat. We know only what she sees and experiences … Reid confronts that which is unavoidable for us all: ageing and death. His deft hand at plot and atmosphere calls to mind the films of David Lynch or the ‘strange tales’ of English author Robert Aickman. We Spread is a fast-paced, engrossing thriller that will hold you in its clutches from the opening right through to its stunning conclusion.” –Justin Avery (Readings-Aus) Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing (Vintage) “… a grim, disturbing novel of family drama and mental illness, yet a bizarrely funny glimpse into one woman’s mind … Hogarth rocks readers via Abby’s turmoil, her swings from devotion to fury, self-loathing to self-aggrandizement. Motherthing keeps readers as unstable as its narrator, struggling to manage the traumas and the waves of emotion … The result of these roiling thoughts and images is a darkly comic, kaleidoscopic novel of unhealthy fixations, love, murder, the gifts and wounds that family can inflict and one woman’s fight to save herself.” –Julia Kastner (Shelf Awareness) View the full article -
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The Complicated Life of Leo Marks
Sometimes you discover writers in the most roundabout ways. I must have seen Michael Powell’s 1960 film Peeping Tom two or three times before I knew anything about its screenwriter, the man responsible for its unusual story about a shy and sympathetic cameraman who is also a serial killer, his modus operandi being to film his victims while he stabs them. I’d never put together that the name listed as screenwriter in the film’s credits, Leo Marks, bore a similarity to the main character’s name, Mark Lewis. It wasn’t until I bought the Criterion edition of the film on DVD and watched the documentary extra on it called “A Very British Psycho” that I learned the rich story of the person who dreamed up Peeping Tom and how the film’s narrative derived quite logically from the life Marks had lived. Born in 1920, Marks grew up in London, and he spent a substantial portion of his childhood surrounded by old books. His father co-owned Marks & Co., an antiquarian bookshop on Charing Cross Road. This was the shop made famous decades later when Helen Hanff’s book 84 Charing Cross (1970) came out. From her apartment in New York, Hanff for years had corresponded with and bought books from the store’s chief buyer, a man named Frank Doel. By that time, Leo Marks had lived a few lives. He’d been a World War II cryptographer involved in espionage for the Allies, and he had moved on to his career as a playwright and screenwriter. “He’s weird, I tell you,” the person who introduced him to director Michael Powell, in the nineteen fifties, said. “You ought to see him. He lives double or triple lives, he’s difficult to get ahold of, and he’s full of mystery and conundrums.” And it had all started, Marks’ oddness, his peculiar obsessions, in that bookstore. On a Saturday morning when Marks was eight, his father took him to the bookshop to start getting him acquainted with the family business. His father taught him such essential things as the profit margin of rare books. The store was doing so well that it would be closed on Saturdays, and the education of the young Leo Marks proceeded once a week every Saturday. As a reward, Saturday afternoons after the sessions, his mother would take him up the street to a nearby movie theater, and from this routine, the association between books and film developed in Marx. But soon enough, something else was added to the formative mix. Edgar Allan Poe set him off. When Marks was eight-and-a-half, his father showed him a signed first edition of Poe’s “The Gold Bug” he had just acquired, explaining what it had cost to buy and at what price he would sell it. Marks opened the story out of curiosity, and he found himself reading a story about a code that needed to be broken to find a buried treasure. Marks had never known what codes were or how they functioned, but at that very moment, devouring the story, Marks became enamored of cryptography. He had no need that day for a trip to the movies. Eager to crack a code himself, he remembered his father telling him that every book in the store over five pounds had its cost written on it in code on the book’s back cover. This was to allow the staff leeway in how much discount to give to individual customers. His father had not explained the code’s workings to him, however, and so by himself, over the course of an afternoon, using as a basis that he knew the cost of “The Gold Bug” volume and could see the code price listed on the back, Marks cracked his father’s pricing code. He would do this as well later at the rare bookshop his grandfather owned and the one his cousins owned, all in London. The little boy had hit upon a passion. But not only for codes. As he would later write in Between Silk and Cyanide, the book about his life, “From that moment onwards, I had two ambitions: to know as much about codes as Edgar Allan Poe, and one day to become a writer, probably of horror-stories, possibly of films”. He was 21 years old, in 1942, when he got conscripted for World War Two. Marks applied and was accepted to a school for cryptographers. The newbies were slated to take an eight-week course, after which they would be graded and sent to Bletchley Park, the country house and estate that was the British headquarters for code breaking. Marks completed within a day a training exercise that was expected to take the aspiring code masters a week, but instead of being dispatched to Bletchley, as the rest of his class was, the powers that be earmarked him for “some potty outfit in Baker Street, an open house for misfits”. It was clear, despite his talents, that those in charge regarded him as a challenging man to teach and manage. The potty outfit was called SOE (Special Operations Executive). Here, too, he had a bumpy start. Informed that SOE’s primary function was dropping agents into Europe and that he would be tasked with keeping an eye on the security of the agents’ codes, the lieutenant briefing him handed him a code to break. This was to test his abilities. That it took Marks hours to make headway with it disappointed the lieutenant, who told Marks that prospective SOE cryptographers usually cracked it in twenty minutes. As it turned out, Marks had not been given the needed cipher key. The lieutenant had meant for him to do a simple speed decoding test, not to break the entire code, which SOE considered secure. But Marks, after several hours, had broken it, and he asked his superior, “You mean, sir – that SOE is actually using this code?” “We were,” his superior answered. “We have others now.” Marks rose fast within the SOE ranks. Agents then were using existing poems for their codes, or familiar quotations, language they could remember easily. Marks’ first job was to provide ciphers to the agents in the field, so that, by radio, they could send their information to London, and the writers often tapped for poem-codes included Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, and Poe. Sometimes agents used the Bible as their source. The problem, as Marks realized right away, was that some poems and quotes in use were so well-known that German agents knew them as well, even in English, and could guess the ciphers. Somehow, this susceptibility had never dawned on the SOE brass. Not one to quash his thoughts, Marks spoke up about the need to improve the quality and security of the coding, and his solution, which was something novel, was to have the agents memorize original poems, language created from scratch, and to use those poems as the basis for their codes. But who would come up with these poems? Who would compose these verses which would have to be coherent and rhythmical enough for agents doing work under great pressure to memorize? It was not as if SOE had reincarnations of Shakespeare, Keats, and Shelly on hand. Marks had never been a poetry writer himself, not even as a hobby, but he took the lead in this project, and from that point till the end of the war, he wrote hundreds of poems, contributions, as he put it, to the ditty-box. To one agent he gave these verses: They cannot know What makes you as you are Nor can they hear Those voices from afar Which whisper to you You are not alone. They cannot reach That inner core of you That long before of you The child inside Deep deep inside Which gives the man his pride What you are They can never be And what they are Will soon be history. After the war, one poem he wrote for an agent would become famous because of its use in a film. Carve her Name with Pride, from 1958, was about Violette Szabo, one of the many women SOE used as agents on the continent, behind enemy lines. To her he gave a poem that had occurred to him on Christmas Eve 1943, lines inspired by the recent death of his girlfriend in an airplane crash. At the SOE briefing room in London, before Szabo departed for her mission, Marks recited the poem for her, not mentioning its provenance and saying, when Violette asked, that he didn’t know who had written it. The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours The love that I have Of the life that I have Is yours and yours and yours. A sleep I shall have A rest I shall have Yet death will be but a pause For the peace of my years In the long green grass Will be yours and yours and yours On her second mission into Nazi-occupied France, the German army captured Szabo. She was tortured, sent to a concentration camp, and executed. Carve Her Name with Pride, starring Virginia McKenna and Paul Scofield, dramatized her experiences and made Marks’ poem famous. He’d given the film’s producer permission to use it on the condition that its author’s name not be revealed. As he writes, “Thousands of letters poured in asking who’d written it and the Rank Organization professed not to know…” Not until sometime after Peeping Tom came out did the press somehow get wind that he had written the poem, and the knowledge caused them much consternation. The press had loathed Peeping Tom, with critics lambasting it as vile and disgusting and worthy of being flushed down the toilet, and they had a hard time reconciling its scriptwriter with the man who had written such a moving ode for a heroic figure from the war. Throughout the film, Mark Lewis, cameraman-murderer, is trying to capture something ineffable. He is obsessed with photographing a specific thing only his victims can provide. What exactly that something is we don’t discover until near the film’s conclusion, but we do know from early in the story that what Mark is after relates to that most basic of human emotions – fear. This is the emotion his psychologist father studied when Mark was a child, using Mark as his guinea pig in fear-inducing experiments he devised. For Leo Marks as well, fear was a preoccupation. Having discovered its potency in fiction through Poe, he had then lived with it, immersed in it, during his years with SOE. Every time, he’d have a briefing with an agent about to be dispatched to occupied Europe, he’d know that the agent might be killed on the mission. At that briefing, he’d try to probe the agent and get inside the agent’s head so as to understand the person as fully as possible. He’d do this in part because he felt he owed it to the agent about to risk his or her life, but also for a practical reason. Earlier, before Marks started at SOE, agents at work sending back messages that had mistakes in their coding would be asked to repeat the message so it would no longer be indecipherable. Mistakes happened, naturally, due to the stress agents were under while conveying their messages to London. But for an agent to repeat a message took time and served to increase the chance of the agent being caught while transmitting. A number of agents had in fact been captured this way. Marks declared that this was an unnecessary risk and that there would be no such thing, henceforth, as an indecipherable message. An agent in the field would transmit a message once and then, wherever they were, be on the move. One transmission, perfectly done or not, and the staff at SOE headquarters would have to decipher it. Marks got his way on this proposal, and he put together a team of 450 women whose sole job was to crack the so-called indecipherables. One such message took 750,000 attempts to decode. But decode the garbled transmissions his team did, and a primary help in this labor was knowing how the agent’s mind worked. Understanding the person’s mental quirks, their interests and neuroses, their general thinking process, often gave a clue to what lay behind the agent’s coding errors. Cryptography mixed with applied psychology one might call this, where the stakes were life and death, and Marks barely slept for four years. It makes total sense that he would say, though the film has nothing to do with codes, that the idea for Peeping Tom was born in the briefing rooms, the fear-saturated environment, of SOE. But voyeurism, pleasure in looking? This is the activity that defines Mark Lewis, and the question is how did Leo Marks alight on this particular subject for his script. Again, he says it connects to his wartime experience. At SOE, dealing with secrets and codes and fear, managing people of every imaginable type, he had indeed developed a keen interest in human psychology. To both the men in his charge and the hundreds of women, as they toiled non-stop in their pressure-cooker offices, he had been something of a psychotherapist. He would come to draw a connection. If psychotherapy is the study of the secrets people keep from themselves, then codes is the study of secrets nations keep from one another. And as he explained, he “became convinced that all cryptographers are basically voyeurs, and I wanted to write the study of one particular voyeur”. Peeping Tom, to this day, is among best movies ever made about voyeurism. Its influence has been wide-ranging, cited of course by Martin Scorsese for its depiction of film-making as violating and aggressive, a precursor to slasher films. You see nods to it in many a Brian DePalma film, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, and a host of others. And just what was Leo Marks’ voyeur trying to capture with his camera while filming and filming, pointing his lens at women he kills? What did he hope to see while moving in for close-ups that would be the last thing his unsuspecting subjects ever experienced? He was, like Leo Marks and his cryptographer colleagues at SOE, trying to break a code. But the codes the cryptographers wrestled with were ultimately, after strenuous efforts, breakable. Not so for Mark Lewis, the sad and obsessed cameraman, who found that what he was trying to grasp is ungraspable, impossible. View the full article
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