Tag Archives: the floating library

Books

For its 48th installment, The Floating Library embarks on a journey back in time — several journeys actually — to the deaths of every signer of The Declaration of Independence in Damien Ober’s debut novel: 

It seems that a swift and terrible plague known as “The Death” is sweeping through the colonies and killing two out of every three people. Though no one knows for certain how the disease is spreading, the doctors racing from signer to signer to stop the devastation suspect the Internet is to blame. Yes, thatInternet.

The easiest way to pigeonhole Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America is to call it a work of counterfactual fiction—a story that takes the facts as we know them (the names of the signers) and mixes up a few things (Internet plague). In other words, Ober has written a “What if?” story for the ages. 

Books, , , ,

The hardboiled universe of Richard Stark:

Donald Westlake, who died in 2008, was born in 1933 and struggled for many years as a short-story writer before becoming a prolific writer of short novels in many genres, mostly crime, though he did pen a few dozen soft-porn titles. During the course of his career, he wrote more than 100 books, using at least 15 different pen names. 

Westlake had a knack for writing tight plots, believable characters and fresh dialog—qualities valuable in any genre but particularly useful in crime novels that rely on plot-driven story mechanics and characters who are tight with their words and seldom make their true intentions known. 

Books, , ,

The Floating Library takes a look at an arresting and unputdownable biography of pulp novelist David Goodis, author of Dark Passage, Cassidy’s Girl, Black Friday and many, many others. Piece begins with my introduction to Goodis via Barry Gifford’s Black Lizard series. While doing research for the review, I was sad to learn that when Vintage bought Black Lizard they let most of the crime novels fall back out of print. Also, Barry Gifford (Wild at Heart, Lost Highway) published a new book last fall that got almost no media attention. This aggression will not stand.

Books, , ,

image

Deep Ellum by Brandon Hobson is a slender novel of less than 150 pages but one of my early favorites of 2014.

“Snow on the roofs of buildings gleamed in the moonlight. From the rear fender of a parked car along Elm hung little icicles that sparkled. I walked past the store windows, past small mounds of dirty snow along the street. A dog was barking from somewhere above me, in one of the apartments, but besides that there was no traffic and little noise. Deep Ellum in the winter was asleep.”

Read the rest of the review in The Floating Library.

Books, ,

Three recent novels by Stephen Graham Jones, Attica Locke and Michael Farris Smith through the lens of Repo Man and True Detective:

There’s a scene in Repo Man where a car-lot attendant explains to a young repo man how the world operates, a worldview he calls the “lattice of coincidence.”

“Suppose you’re thinkin’ about a plate of shrimp,” he says. “Suddenly someone’ll say, like, ‘plate’ or ‘shrimp’ or ‘plate of shrimp’ out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin’ for one, either. It’s all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.”

Lately, my plate of shrimp has been True Detective. It’s been at least six weeks since the season finale and I can’t stop thinking about the show. I see it everywhere—even in the books I read. But is it me, or is it the “cosmic unconsciousness”? Because the last three books I read all contained uncanny echoes of True Detective.

Just read it.