just finished reading Pete Dexter’s Paper Trails, subtitled: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage i’ve read all his novels memorable among them Train, Paris Trout and Deadwood (yup, the basis for the HBO series for which they conveniently forgot his masterful source novel; …
just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip, the first novel in the 2nd volume of the new Library of America PKD collection. this one masterfully posits a connection between dysfunctions like schizophrenia and autism and their inherent alienation from reality and further muses about how conception of time and space may be enhanced/sped-up in …
just finished reading one of Lawrence Block’s collections of vignettes starring his charming philatelist/hired assassin, Keller, Hit Parade. easy on the eyes, though i have a hard time placing him on the same level as a similarly pseudonymic but eminently superior crime writer, Donald E Westlake. i’m spoiled. just trying to be broad in my …
just finished reading the sizable tome, Best American Fantasy. no, it’s not a biography of my girlfriend. it’s a collection from 2006 edited by Matthew Cheney and Ann & Jeff Vandermeer. it’s most successful when addressing ‘fantasy’ as form instead of genre (y’all should leave dragons to Lucius Shepard, who dabbles in them occasionally though …
just finished re-reading Philip K. Dick’s classic basis for the film Blade Runner, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as usual, PKD takes the reins of a far more complex possibility set than can be sustained in even the best of Hollywood’s Sci-Fi pantheon. still, the droids don’t give up quite so laxly in the …
just finished reading Seb Doubinsky‘s haunting novel The Song Of Synth, a tale of hackers, poets, revolutionaries, and multiple levels of deceit and duplicity, underpinned by SYNTH, a reality-enhancing drug (or is it an implied morality/conscience/consciousness?) Seb writes with a great balance of cinematic concision and romance that makes for compelling reading. highly recommended.