I realize that the next book in Mary Balogh’s Huxtable series came out on Tuesday, May 19, but I won’t be reviewing it for today’s column. Instead, I will be reviewing To Beguile a Beast by Elizabeth Hoyt, who is one of the few historical romance novelists whose novels I enjoy for the writing itself (as opposed to just for the story). It is in the way she tells the story, the words she uses, the formatting she employs, as well as the direction the story progresses, that allows me to put her in a higher class than the typical romance novelist. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, romancing history by Katie Colvin
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Sometimes a book comes along at the right moment in your life and helps you through a rough patch. And this book is one of them. 

Let me begin by saying this The Bro Code has no merit. It isn’t literature. It isn’t even a narrative. It’s based on a book in the TV series How I Met Your Mother. In the show a male character, Barney, a complete womanizer, quotes endless rules on how guys should act. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing by Steve Mazzeo
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My initial response to Rick Barot’s Want (aside from the inevitable “ooh” that comes from trailing one’s fingers across a volume from Sarabande Books) was to think, immediately, that he is an amazing poet. This is someone whose work I’m almost obliged to share with others. Indeed, the first three poems in this, his second collection, are currently jockeying (along with a 20-minute rendition of a Pink Floyd song) in my mind for inclusion in this review. All are damn fine poems, and I want to tell you about all of them. I want, as a critic, to tell you about most of the poems in this book, to gaze in as minute detail as is possible into the soundness of the lines and the vividness of the imagery. Alas, criticism, like any other form of writing, is a negotiation with such competing desires (and with those doubts that shadow them).

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, living poetry by Les Kay
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About a year ago, I read Christopher Meeks’ collection of short stories, Months and Seasons, and I found myself swept up in the stories. When I got the opportunity to read his first novel, The Brightest Moon of the Century, I knew I was in for a treat. Edward is a pretty typical guy, but he manages to turn very ordinary experiences into an extraordinary story. The writing is exceptional, with interesting turns of phrase that left me laughing but nodding my head in agreement or commisseration.

This is how a life together ends. With a pork chop and then a click.

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
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Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is more fun to read than just about any book I know. By “fun” I mean that it’s a lot more than funny, but, being a poem, plus a critical appraisal of a book (with copious footnotes), and a novel, all combined, it engages the reader — as one flips back and forth through its pages — in the same way a really great puzzle or a game does. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, now read this! by Christopher Guerin
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Robert Leuci, the former New York City detective who was the subject of the book and film Prince of the City, is a crime writer who lives in Rhode Island, far from the mean streets of New York.

Robert Daley’s Prince of the City  was a first-rate true crime book and Sidney Lumet’s film based on the book with Treat Williams portraying Leuci when he was a young detective and a member of the elite narcotics Special Investigating Unit (SIU) was brilliant and haunting. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, on thrillers and crime by Paul Davis
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The Ultimates, Volume 1 is a re-imagining of superhero groups within the Marvel universe. It’s also thievery. 

And it is crap, utter crap that they repackaged to sell to children and hardcore collectors who can’t resist any comic with “Issue 1” on the cover. It’s crap, from the hackneyed dialogue to the shameless display of super powers, when the heroes prance around and test out how strong or big or small or generally powerful they have become following the experiment/accident/crash/whatever. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, just fantastic by Steve Mazzeo
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Who better to talk about celebrities than Dr. Drew? For more than 25 years he has co-hosted Loveline on the radio and, for 4 years, on MTV. On VH1, he produces and hosts Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew and Sober House. He is definitely an expert on celebrity behavior, and this book is full of anecdotes and descriptions of the famous and the famous-for-being-famous. But where most of see spoiled, self-centered celebrities acting like brats, Dr. Drew sees damaged, suffering people. It’s an entirely different take on the bad behavior of our favorite stars, as well as a look at what it might be doing to us and to our children. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
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Evidence of its being possibly the finest novella of the 20th century, Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice has inspired more than a few offshoots: the gorgeous, haunting Visconti movie (with music of Gustav Mahler), the Benjamin Britten opera, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2007 presentation of the ballet by John Neumeier, Robert Coover’s fantastical Pinocchio in Venice, most recently Geoff Dyer’s novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varansari, plus various graphic novels and even murder mystery spin-offs.

Within the first few pages, you know you’re reading something special. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, now read this! by Christopher Guerin
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I’ve read only the first 200 pages, just 1/5th, of Jonathan Littel’s The Kindly Ones, but so far it has all the art, seriousness, and structure of a great, great novel. The New York Times‘ hard-to-please Michiko Kakutani, in a bitter (even for her) condemnation of the book, calls The Kindly Ones, “a voyeuristic spectacle — like watching a slasher film with lots of close-ups of blood and guts” and “a pointless compilation of atrocities and anti-Semitic remarks, pointlessly combined with a gross collection of sexual fantasies.” She couldn’t be more wrong. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing by Christopher Guerin
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At Last Comes Love is the third book in Mary Balogh’s Huxtable series, and by far my favorite. Margaret Huxtable has told a bounder to her former love interest (whom she waited for while he was away at war, only to learn he has married another woman) that she is engaged. Rushing out of the ballroom before he can question her further about her fiance, she literally runs into Duncan Pennethorne, Earl of Sheringford, who must marry within the next fifteen days or risk losing his flow of income. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, romancing history by Katie Colvin
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Far too much historical analysis falls into two questionable schools of thinking, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the perfect subject for both. The first is the great man theory, where one man single-handedly changes the world because that is what he was put here to do. It suits the American outlook nicely, since this is the John Wayne view of life: a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, no matter how many injuns or cattle rustlers stand in his way. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, politics & government by Sean Cunningham
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I’ve only ever read two of Mary Gaitskill’s story collections: Bad Behavior, her first (published in 1988), and Don’t Cry, her latest. Both are highly charged works of fiction — strong, full of sexuality, intensity, and intelligence. After reading both of these collections, I have come to the conclusion that if I ever had the chance to meet Mary Gaitskill I would be quite intimidated. Her writing is tough and confident, somehow masculine and feminine at the same time, which doesn’t make it feminist — it makes it authentic. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing by Season Evans
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The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane has plenty to recommend it: the Salem Witch Trials, crazy grad school mentors and a hot, agnostic steeplejack. Certainly sounds like a good start to a story, combining historical fiction, a bit of mystery and maybe something a little supernatural. It starts with a very interesting question about the Salem witch trials, one that is not normally addressed in the history books: What if some of these women really were witches? Katherine Howe might have an answer for that. Her ancestors include Elizabeth Howe, hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692 and Elizabeth Proctor, another accused witch, whose story is the basis of Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
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I have been reading Justine, the first volume of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which I had not looked at since college. It has been a happy reunion, conjuring much of  the same magic as before, its cadences echoing in the mind like favorite tunes, causing one to feel as one had not for so very long.

Durrell, I gather, has fallen into neglect since his death in 1990. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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It’s always puzzled me that, at least in some forums, Joseph Conrad is seen as an adventure story writer, as though he wrote for teenage boys. Admittedly, some of his long stories like Youth, Nigger of the Narcissus, and Typhoon have incredible scenes of high adventure and action, but even these are great works of literature. His The Secret Agent, too, with a title that suggests all the elements that go with the spy genre, will surprise, but hardly disappoint, anyone picking it up for an enjoyable read. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, now read this! by Christopher Guerin
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Wolverine Origin (graphic novel) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine don’t have much in common. They deal with different stories in different ways. The book is great and the movie is okay. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, movies by Steve Mazzeo
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In my first column here I noted that as a teenager in the 1960s I devoured crime fiction and thrillers. I bought hardbacks from the book clubs and I purchased a good number of paperbacks books.

I recall a second-hand bookstore where I picked up scores of vintage pulp paperbacks dating back to the 1940s and 1950s. With their lurid covers depicting guns, gore and girls, the novel’s atmosphere was established well before you turned to page one. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, on thrillers and crime by Paul Davis
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My bookshelves are not terribly political. A biography or two, a bit of humor about our political system, but not much else — I figure it’s bad enough I have to see politicians on the news every day, I have no desire to read about them in my leisure time. I accepted The Obama Revolution for review primarily because it came out so close on the heels of the November elections. I thought it would be more interesting to read about a very recent election, one I was very excited about, than to rehash a political contest I barely remembered.  For the most part, I was right. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads, politics & government by Lisa Hura
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A few weeks ago I recommended Carson McCullers’ stunning novella The Ballad of the Sad Café. Since then I’ve read her short novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, which is now my new favorite of her works. Like Ballad, Reflections is concerned with the grotesque, but while in the former work the main characters are physically grotesque, in the latter each of the six main characters is psychologically grotesque, each one a twisted character. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, now read this! by Christopher Guerin
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