This was my dream job when I was four years old. Hell, it still is. #San Diego
Category Archives: Books
Veteran Writers in Oceanside
On Saturday, December 6, I’ll have the honor of sharing the stage with veteran writers from the San Diego community at the Oceanside Library. It’s part of So Say We All’s Veteran Writers program and the event will be taped by KPBS. Check out the Facebook invite for details.
I’ve always been drawn to stories of crime and mystery, but lately I’ve been reading more books shelved in those categories. Beware Beware by L.A. writer Steph Cha is a classic mystery inspired by Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe with a feminist twist.
Much like her fictional forebear, Philip Marlowe, Song drinks heavily, smokes like a chimney and calls Los Angeles home. Unlike Raymond Chandler’s famous private investigator, Song is young, female and Korean-American. In other words, she’s not like Marlowe at all.
I don’t want to say too much more than what’s in the review, but I will say this: the ending really flattened me. I don’t read a lot of series fiction, but I’m definitely looking forward to Juniper Song’s next adventure.
Tumbleweed at rest.
A little Sunday night punk rock with OFF! (at The Epicentre)
Meet the author. #BNDiscovery Weekend at B&N Trolley Square Santee.
Forest of Fortune at Barnes & Noble
I’ll be participating in Barnes & Noble Discovery Weekend with a Forest of Fortune book signing on Saturday November 22 at 2pm at the Barnes Noble at Trolley Square in Santee. The bookstore is bringing in a ton of great local writers, including Matt Coyle, whose book Yesterday’s Echo won the Best Debut Novel award at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach last weekend. Also, immediately before my signing at 2pm, there will be a puppet making workshop and holiday singalong in case your nightmares needed more material to work with this holiday season.
Downloading the Declaration
I had the pleasure of interviewing Damien Ober, author of Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America for The Rumpus. Readers of The Floating Library know that I thought very highly of this groundbreaking book. Here are a few words from my introduction to the interview:
When I first heard the concept for Damien Ober’s novelDoctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America—a series of vignettes about each signer of the Declaration of Independence at the moment of his death—I thought,Great concept, but how the hell is he going to pull that off?And that was before I learned that in Ober’s version of early America the main threat wasn’t the British, the Spanish, the French, or even the Native Americans—it was a deadly plague contracted through the Internet.
Yes, Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America is one of those experimental hybrids: part historical novel, part speculative mind-fuck. But after reading a few chapters I was hooked. Unlike many high concept novels, Dream America isn’t constantly winking at the reader. In fact, it doesn’t wink at all. Nor does it bury the reader in an avalanche of “bet you didn’t know this about our Founding Fathers” ephemera.
No, Dream America is a wildly imaginative, deftly plotted, gorgeously crafted novel with astute things to say about an America that might have been and an America we’re in danger of becoming.
Blake Butler’s 300,000,000
Blake Butler isn’t for everyone. His work is at the front of a particular subset of indie lit marked by dark, masculine, unsentimental, unapologetically experimental prose. His latest book, 300,000,000, is a vertiginous decent into a nightmarish America.
[His] influences read like an encyclopedia of depravity: Dennis Cooper’s teen killers, the cryptic blather of “True Detective’s” Reggie Ledoux, Harmony Korine’s unscripted portraits of freaks and weirdos and the remorseless cruelty of Jim Goad’s serial killer zine, Answer Me!
I read the book during one feverish, unseasonably warm week in San Diego. I didn’t have a fever, I wasn’t sick per se, but this book changed me. While I was reading it I felt like Blake’s dark vision was serving as a kind of conduit for all of America’s many sicknesses. I felt polluted and provoked. One thing that concerns me about the book is that I think that it could prove to be exceptionally troubling for individuals with less than optimal brain health, i.e. I believe that for some troubled readers this book could trigger a psychotic break. I can’t imagine what it cost Butler to write prose like this:
And with each failure, the same reversal of electricity came sucking through me, evacuating, leaving marked back in my blood another hope I’d given away in the name of nothing.
You can read the rest of my review in the Los Angeles Times.
Popping bottles with @tyrusbooks #Bcon2014