just finished reading Butcher’s Moon, by the darkest of Donald E. Westlake’s nom-de-plumes, Richard Stark, starring his criminal mastermind and hardman, Parker. this one’s about Parker going for some stashed loot, and finding it already snatched, ends up with a whole posse of his former work-mates taking down a small city mob. no one …
just finished reading Joe R. Lansdale‘s latest and greatest, The Thicket, this righteous revenge quest replete with his unmatched level of humor and horror, the wonder of youth against the cynicism of a cold hard world, characters that you’d want to spend a few years with, dialogue and meditation in the Charles Portis/Cormac McCarthy mode, …
just finished reading Blair Tindall‘s devastating memoir of her life as a freelance oboist in NYC, Mozart in the Jungle. she’s spot-on in portraying the miserable hamster-wheel lives of her colleagues, but lost importantly, Blair slips in an essential history of arts funding in America, in particular the Ford Foundation-led largesse of the 60’s, …
just finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s latest shaggy-dog novel, Bleeding Edge. he’s always happiest, it seems, steeped in byzantine webs of paranoiac conspiracies, and never more so than here, where he out-cyberpunks William Gibson while trawling through not the near future, but the recent past. 9/11 is the centerpoint of an anum of virtual reality technology, …
just finished reading another collection of Philip K. Dick short stories, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, compiled by a former executor of the PKD estate, and certainly the most sympathetic of his advocates, Paul Williams, who wrote the exemplary piece on PKD for Rolling Stone. much darker than The Golden Man collection, and more …
just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s novel Clans of the Alphane Moon. the lunatics have taken over the asylum; actually a rock in the Alpha system has been abandoned, the inhabitants all certifiable psychotics, left to fend for themselves and become a viable community. the satellite becomes a chit in an intergalactic supremacy battle, each …