Continuing my Summer of Bell, traversing the complete published works of Madison Smartt Bell, I just finished reading his novel, Save Me, Joe Lewis (last words of a deathrow inmate prior to his execution), which follows the criminal path of serial muggers Macrae (the lanky one, always recognizable as our author) and Charlie, with the …
This slim volume, part of Francesco Clemente‘s Hanuman Books series, little volumes like prayer books, is a gem of Patti Smith’s journal entries, poems, lyrics, and photographs. It is a rarified and luminous precis of her gem-like prose and meditation. My friend Jack Regan recommended it to me quite a while ago, and I finally …
I’ve read all the published work of Lucius Shepard, and now have, sadly, read the last of him; his novel, Beautiful Blood, came out just a few months after his passing. Beautiful Blood is the first novel-length excursion through Lucius’ mythology of the Dragon Griaule. First invoked in The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule …
Thanks to Stona Fitch and his Concord Free Press publication of Madison Smartt Bell’s latest book of short stories, Zig Zag Wanderer, I hoarded all his published work and am making my way through them over the course of the summer. Two of his early novels, Soldier’s Joy and Doctor Sleep, I’ve just finished reading. …
Making my way chronologically through the work of Madison Smartt Bell, I just finished reading an early work of his, Straight Cut, recently published as part of the great pulp/noir imprint, Hard Case Crime. A compulsive and compulsory read, this one’s an international crime procedural in the exacting and detailed style of the filmmaker, Jean-Pierre …
I’m a huge Megan Abbott fan. I’ve read all her published work, starting with her L.A. Noir classics, including The Song Is You, my personal fave in the genre/pantheon, Chandler, Cain et alia be damned. I just finished reading her latest, The Fever, befitting her recent mise en scene: the complex and contorted psychology of …