Showing posts with label book of the day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book of the day. Show all posts

Monday, June 10, 2013

BOOK TOUR 2013!


 Here are the dates, times and places where I'll be shocking young, old and in between: 

6/13 Square Books  
  160 Courthouse Square
Oxford, MS 38655
662-236-2262
5 p.m.
     
6/15 Murder by the Book 1 p.m.
  2342 Bissonnet
Houston, TX 77005
713-524-8597
 
     
6/16 Mystery People 7 p.m.
  Noir at the Bar
With Jedidiah Ayres and Jesse Sublett for a night of music & noir at Opal Divine's Austin Grill.

3601 South Congress Avenue
Austin, TX 78704
512-707-0237
 
     
6/18 Nightbird Books 6 p.m.
  205 W Dickson St.
Fayetteville AR 72701
479-443-2080
 
     
6/19 Watermark Books 7 p.m.
  4701 East Douglas
Wichita, KS 67218
316-682-1181
 
     
6/20 The Raven BookStore 7 p.m.
  6 East 7th Street
Lawrence, KS 66044
785-749-3300

Monday, February 25, 2013

Carole Mallory Exorcises "Picasso's Ghost"

Those of you who know me well know that I don't like the e-tail behemoth named after a certain South American river. But today and today only (this is the third day, I just didn't think of doing this until now, so sue me) you can get my friend Carole Mallory's memoir Picasso's Ghost on your e-reader for free via this link!

http://www.amazon.com/Picassos-Ghost-Love-Story-ebook/dp/B00BEP6R4S

She's a real sweetheart. If Woody Allen's Zelig had been a beautiful woman, she would have been Carole Mallory. Model, actress ("the Stepford Wives," "Looking for Mr. Goodbar"), novelist ("Flash"), now memoirist, she tells the story of her amazing trajectory through Paris, New York and Hollywood, her engagement to Picasso's son Claude, and her liaisons with Peter Sellers, Rod Stewart, De Niro, Mailer and others, as well as encounters with Princess Grace, Jack Nicholson and more. 

If you miss the free e-reader, you can still but it cheap. Or better yet, go order a hard copy from your local independent bookseller!

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

The Gods Hate Kansas!

 My friend Lisa,also known as Ms. A, sent me a book this week I've known only from its cover being used as a snarky post card.


The description sounds like something by my friend and protegé Troy Cutcross:
 The Astrophysicist's enslaved Girl Friend ! Temple gasped aloud! Whither Joseph Millard?
I have to say I really love the fact that some long-ago owner of this copy (presumably not Lisa) used the cover to practice his or her paper punching skills.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

New Book! And Trailer!

My newest book comes out in France today:
That's my eye on the cover, taken right in my publishers' office. It's part of a series of thirteen novels, all set in Paris and all taking place in part on Friday the 13th. (Nothing to do with the series of horror movies of the same name, although my friend Scott Phillips of New Mexico wrote a Jason tie-in novel a few years back, so this is really going to confuse the shit out of people.)

Three of the novels are already being turned into TV movies, and I'm hoping this will be the fourth. It's loosely based on a period in the early nineties when my friend Lane Davies and I were running around Paris trying to raise money for a movie. Lane was the star of a soap opera, "Santa Barbara," that was broadcast with great success during prime time in France, and was such a celebrity there that we were certain we could get this thing made. We didn't but hijinks ensued and when les Éditions la Branche asked me to write something for the series I asked Lane if he'd object to me depicting him as a murdering psychopath (in the novel, things go slightly more haywire than they did in real life).

Hell, no, I don't mind, he replied, can I play myself in the TV movie?

We just got done shooting a book trailer and are just starting to edit. Here's a shot of one of the sets, showing tireless cinematographer/editor Jenna Marguerita with indefatiguable grips Tony and Nathan, and seated at the bar, Anita Romero, playing Esmée, the femme fatale:
And here's the lovely Anita in character:
The book will be out in July of 2013 from Counterpoint Books under the title "RAKE," with one of the best covers I've ever had. Until then, you can get the French version here: http://www.furet.com/nocturne-le-vendredi-2084107.html

Monday, October 15, 2012

Noir at the Bar 2--the Anthology!

There's a trailer for the second Noir at the Bar anthology, edited by Jedidiah Ayres and, nominally, by me. Featuring a whole bunch of terrific writers and filthy stories!


Unfortunately Blogspot won't let me upload the video itself for reasons I don't quite understand. The music is by Modern Silent Cinema, also known as Cullen Gallagher! Here's the cover by Erik Lundy:
And it's available at Subterranean Books at 6275Delmar in St. Louis MO, or from the link below:

http://store.subbooks.com/product/noir-bar-volume-2


Thursday, October 11, 2012

A WHATload?

My friend Jedidiah "Noir Bar" Ayres has just released a very dirty book of short stories entitled A Fuckload of Shorts, or to please the prudes who police American bookstore shelves looking for msut and foul language, A F*ckload of Shorts.
There's necrophilia and murder and all kinds of wrong types of intercourse, social and sexual, in this here collection, for which I penned a rather excellent introduction. Two of the stories have been adapted into films, including "Viscosity" and "A Fuckload of Scotch Tape," which is every bit as brilliant as its title, which is my favorite short story title ever. You can get the book here:


If you don't buy it, you won't be "In the Know" like the cool kids on the playground who smoke and swear!

Monday, August 6, 2012

Pepsi Beats the Others Cold

 Here's a beautifully painted and reproduced Pepsi-Cola 39th Anniversary brochure from 1939. Click to enlarge! This is some nice four-color printing, here.
 The Romance of Pepsi-Cola!
 The labs and the cola-nut department!
 These storage tanks look like something by Bruce McCall.
 Raw sugar!
How many men drowned in those giant syrup vats?

MORE TO COME!

Monday, July 23, 2012

The Temporary Sex-Change Conundrum, starring Colonel Charlie "Doughnuts" Duncan!

Another excerpt from my gifted protegé Troy Cutcross's sci-fi/espionage/erotic masterpiece, "The Conundrum Enigma: a Colonel Charlie 'Doughnuts' Duncan Sexy Thriller by Troy Cutcross." This is the end of chapter nine and the entirety of chapter ten. At this juncture "Doughnuts" learns from his superior officer (and jealous girlfriend) Tammi, that he's going in undercover in Pendarvis Correctional Penitentiary––in a very special disguise!

         “This prison—it’s in Russia?”
         “No—here in the US. But that works in our favor. You see––you’re going in undercover.”
         “Doughnuts” nodded. “I like it,” he proferred, imagining himself hitting prisoners on the head with a nightstick, like when he was a rookie spy on the streets of Des Moines, what seemed like a lifetime ago. “As a guard?” he asked, just to make sure he hadn’t misunderstood.
         “No,” she smiled. “As an inmate!”
         “I get it,” Charlie snarled. “It’s jealousy. You’re mad because you think I have more of a crush on Svetlana than on you, so you’re sending me into the general population of a penitentiary. How long do you think I’ll last in there, with a face like this?”
         She laughed, a laugh with a cruel sound in it that Duncan hadn’t heard before. It made his butthole clench a little. “It’s true, you’ve been called one of the handsomest men in the world. And guess what? Your back story is you’re halfway through one of those Swedish-type of sex-change operations!”
         “Wha-a-a?” Charlie exclaimed, so shocked he couldn’t even finish the simplest of one-syllable words.
         “That’s right. We want you to get the attention of the Cosmonaut right away, so you’ll be going in there with a surgically altered face and cleavage, to make you look like a pretty lady.”
         “That’s where I draw the line, lady! I won’t be part of your sick revenge scheme! In fact, I may even have to break up with you and resign from the agency and go back to Major League Baseball. You need to see a brain specialist and get to the bottom of your sick need to get revenge on me for a perfectly innocent space ride with a sexy spy whose advances I heroically resisted!”
         “It’s not my plan, ‘Doughnuts,’ it was Mad Dog’s.”
         “Wha-a-a-a?” Charlie said, again frustrated by his tendency to leave words unfinished when he was stupefied, or really surprised.
         “That’s right. He was killed right before he was going to tell you ‘Phase Three’ of the plan, which is if the Cosmonaut escapes you go into the prison undercover dressed as a lady so you can get close to him and kill him after finding out all about his operation.”
         Charlie thought about it. He was an extremely handsome fellow, and many people had told him he would make a beautiful lady. If it was Mad Dog’s idea, and in the best interests of the Agency and of the United States of America, who was he to say no?
         “Would they….” His voice got a little higher because of the fright, but he continued his query. “Would they cut off my little man?”
         “Your little man?”
         “My dinky.” Tammi still didn’t understand, because she had grown up in a house full of ladies with no father or brothers using vulgar “slang” terms for their male members such as “wiener” or “dinky.” “My penis,” he finally uttered, using the latin or medical term for the organ.
         “Of course not. And the boobs will come right off as soon as you terminate the mission. And your old face will be grafted back onto your skull using the same technology as when that lady the chimp tore the face off of that one time got her face back surgically.”
         “All right, then,” Charlie opined. “Let’s get this ‘show on the road.’”
CHAPTER TEN
        
         “Prisoner Number X-209907-J,” the warden bellowed. “You are hereby imprisoned in Pendarvis Maximum Federal Penitentiary for the Crimes of Armed Robbery, Mass Murder and Trafficking in Illegal Weapons such as Bombs and Ninja Swords. You will be here for ninety-nine years to life. Do you understand your sentence?”
         Colonel Charlie “Doughnuts” Duncan shrugged, an entirely different experience, he found, when lifting the shoulder also involved lifting a bra strap and a good five pounds of voluptuous bosom, in an effort to seem thuggish. “Whatever, screw,” he yawned, using prisoner slang for guard, even though technically the Warden wasn’t one of the guards.
         “I know a perfect place for you,” the warden sneered sadistically, which, Charlie thought, was probably the only way he ever shrugged. “In with the maximum security goons!”
         That was perfect, he thought. The Warden had no idea Charlie was a federal spy on an undercover mission, just in case he was “in cahoots” with Toborsky, which was prison slang for working with him on the sly. “Coolio,” Charlie said, trying to sound bored.
         “But maybe we can come to some sort of accommodation, or agreement.” The Warden came around the desk and sat on the arm of “Doughnut”’s chair and put an arm around his shoulder. “You’re very pretty, and I like your swell chest. If you’d like to stay in the Warden’s quarters, that could be arranged, along with a soft job in the prison library….”
         Just then he reached for one of Charlie’s brand-new bosoms, and with lightning reflexes the intrepid spy had grabbed the warden’s index finger and snapped it back until it broke with an unmistakeable sound of breaking!
         The Warden lay writhing, or wiggling, on the floor, and “Doughnuts” stood up.
         “Sorry, Warden Frenger, these boobs aren’t for playing with. I’ll be heading for Maximum Security now to take my chances with the goons.”

         He felt bad using his considerable martial arts skills on a wimpy guy like the Warden, but he knew that any sign of weakness on his part would be perceived as an invitation to touch his breasts without permission, and he didn’t intend to let that happen under any circumstances. These bosoms were for display only, and for Charlie’s own and only his own personal enjoyment!
         So when he first appeared with his knapsack and bedroll at the door of the Maximum Security wing, he looked around at all the chess-playing oafs in the rec room and wondered which of them would make a crack about his rack first. It was a good thing that it was a three-hundred pound guy with a broken nose and cauliflower ears like an old boxer who made a vulgar suggestion and invited “Doughnuts” to share his cell for what he clearly intended as “romantic” purposes! He also had a tattoo on his forehead of the bully character from the movie “Edward Scissorhands,” which just went to show what a big bully he was in the “yard,” or prison grounds.
         “Come and get me,” Charlie cooed seductively, and when the big ape stood up from his chess game Charlie kicked him in the face, cutting his nose with his spike heel. Then, when the goon went down, Charlie lifted him up with one hand and hurled him across the room so that everyone would know that even if Charlie was a beautiful lady on the outside, he was still a lethal killing machine!
         Everybody else went back to their chess games and Charlie strutted his way to his cell, which was about as comfortable as his barracks had been back in the army––which means not at all! He tossed his duffle bag in a manly way onto the cot and started filling the drawers of the armoire, or dresser. Top drawer was for wigs (because there had been no time to grow enough hair for lady-hairstyles), second for lingerie, third for makeup and perfume and bottom for shoes, which he had five pairs of, all high heeled. The dresses he hung from a waterpipe that ran the length of the cell and he wondered if he had overpacked, but then who knew how long this most unusual mission would last?
         A skinny little fellow approached his cell, carrying a flower. “A-hem,” he said, clearing his throat because you could tell he was nervous. “I see you’re new here.”
         “Yeah?” “Doughnuts” growled, forgetting to make his voice high like a lady’s, because unlike a real sex-change person he hadn’t had the hormone chemical treatments that would have grown real bosoms and raised his voice up and made him stop having to shave.
         “Sorry. It’s just that—well, I noticed you walking in and I thought, that must be someone with a sex-change, because why else would a…” He swallowed a big gulp of saliva because he was nervous. “A beautiful lady be assigned to a men’s prison?”
         This time Charlie remembered to raise his voice up high. “That’s correct, sir. I don’t like it one bit but here I am, little old me in here with all these brutish men, thinking of nothing but ways to fondle my breasts. I assume that’s why you’re here.”
         “Gosh, no, ma’am, I have no desire to be the consort of such a lovely lady, because my life would be in constant danger and I’d always be looking over my shoulder, worried about some tough lug stabbing me with a ‘shiv,’ which is prison slang for a homemade knife, in hopes of winning your love away. No, I just had a question.”
         “All right. What’s your question?” Charlie asked.
         The little fellow was sweating something awful. “Did they cut your little man off?”

Friday, July 13, 2012

Another French Book Poster

CLICK TO ENLARGE!

















I picked this up already framed in Paris a few years back for about fifty Euros. It's a lithographed advertisement for "La Porteuse de Pain," a popular novel of the 1880s by Xavier Montépin. A huge bestseller in its day, it's still in print, and as Montépin's French Wikipedia entry points out, it's been adapted for stage, screen and television. The ad is for the first installment of the book's serialization.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_de_Montépin
(If you don't read French, one interesting fact in the article is that one secret of his phenomenally prolific output was the extensive use of ghostwriters.)

I don't know how many copies of this there are floating around, but here's one from the Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée, and I know that the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris has one also:
http://www.photo.rmn.fr/cf/htm/CPicZ.aspx?E=2C6NU07A8UCT
This one is unique (as far as I know), though, in that it has had addenda pasted onto it stating that the first installment is free. (Shades of modern viral marketing campaigns.)


Get a load of this beautiful litho:

(Sorry about the glare. That's some cheap glass on there and I'm too thrifty to get it reframed.)

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

BECAUSE YOU DEMANDED IT! More "Conundrum Enigma!"

More literary genius from my protegé, Troy Cutcross. Troy has generously given me permission to publish Chapter Four in its entirety! Previously, "Doughnuts's" boss at the spy agency had been assassinated by a Russian known as "The Cosmonaut." At the end of Chapter Three, Charlie arrived at the International Space Station only to find its entire crew dead, including his old friend Major Jacques LaVie.
And now.....
 
THE CONUNDRUM ENIGMA: A Charlie "Doughnuts" Duncan Sexy Thriller

by Troy Cutcross

CHAPTER FOUR
        
         Attached by a Laurel and Hardy-shaped magnet to the door of the crew refrigerator––reminding him of the nickname those jerks back at the agency had for Tammi––was a note.
       SORRY ABOUT ALL YOUR DEAD FRIENDS
       ––THE COSMONAUT
         He was a fiend, And now he had a head start to Europa! Who even knew what his plan was when he got there? A lesser man would have given up. But Colonel Charlie “Doughnuts” Duncan was not that lesser man.
         The first order of business after fixing himself a nutritious snack of Tang and Space Food Sticks was to get rid of the astronauts’ corpses. This was because the heavier the ship was the more fuel it used, even though they were in zero gravity, and if they weren’t alive, they were just “dead weight.” “Doughnuts” suddenly realized that the phrase he had just used was full of terrible irony of the sort that made him known as a great wit. This time his wit was tragic and not funny, he reflected.
         Standard protocol, or operating procedure, for removing cadavers, or dead bodies, from the International Space Station called for Duncan to wait until the Station passed over the dead astronaut’s home country and then shoving the former space hero out the hatch so that he or she would burn up in the atmosphere over his or her homeland. It so happened that just as he finished the last of his Tang he was passing over France.
         “So long, Jacques,” he said as he dragged Major LaVie by his boots across the floor to the trash expulsion hatch. “You were anything but trash, in my opinion––from now on I’m going to call this the ‘trash and heroes expulsion hatch’!” He was sniffling a little as he shot his old friend into space and toward the earth, and he didn’t even have to pretend it was allergies since there was no one to see him. Or so he thought.
         Next was a Captain Swierczinski, who came from Poland, which as near as Charlie could tell they would be passing over pretty soon. Not for the first time he wondered why the Poles, about whom jokes used to be told called Polack jokes which were anything but funny if you were one, used so many consonants in their names. Since he didn’t know the Captain he didn’t say anything, just stuck him into the hatch and blew it. There were two crew members from China, so he shot them down together, hoping that in life they’d been friends and that he wasn’t just making an assumption to save himself some time. Then there was a Korean Colonel, but since “Doughnuts” didn’t know for sure whether he was from North or South Korea he did his best to aim him toward the Demilitarized Zone between the two divided halves of the nation as a gesture toward international peace. As he watched the colonel burst into flames in contact with the earth’s atmosphere Charlie couldn’t help smiling at memories of the TV show M*A*S*H, which was set in Korea and always made him chuckle, even when there was a serious element as there often was in its best episodes, like the last one, “Goodbye Forever Amen.”
         Next there was a Lieutenant Nummelin, and since he didn’t know what kind of name that was he dropped him over the Pacific. There was only one astronaut body left, that of a beautiful woman. When he looked at her nametag he was surprised by two things: One, she was Russian, and he’d already passed over Russia! He cursed the fact that he’d have to wait until the Station got all the way over to that side of the world before he could relax and do his zero gravity exercises, which he would perform by turning off the artificial gravity. The second thing that surprised him was the size of her bosoms, which were quite large by western standards. Almost without thinking he put his hand on the left one, which is when he got his third surprise: she let out a loud gasp and slapped him in the face!
         “You’re alive,” he deduced.
         She squinted as though she were trying to place his face. “And you’re Charlie ‘Doughnuts’ Duncan!” she exclaimed, surprising Charlie, because he had no idea how she knew that.
         “How did you…” he began, intending to ask how she knew his face.
         “I recognized you from the pictures Major Jacques LaVie kept showing us all the time,” she said. “You are as handsome in person as in your photos, but that doesn’t mean you get to ‘cop a feel’ without permission!”
         “I’m very sorry. I thought you were dead.”
         “No harm done,” she said, and extended her hand. “Svetlana Skikorskova,” she said. “Where are my crewmates?”
         “All dead, I’m afraid.”
         “Murdered by that villain Toborsky! He’s a disgrace to the Cosmonaut program,” she spat.
         “I just got finished shooting them through the trash hatch toward their various native lands. I was going to do the same thing to you before I realized that you were alive.”
         “It’s a good thing you decided to get ‘fresh’ with my corpse, or I might have burned up alive! You don’t suppose…” She hesitated.
         “What?”
         “Nothing. I was just wondering if any of the others were just unconscious when you jettisoned, or shot, them out of the station.”
         “Doughnuts” thought about it really hard. No, he was pretty sure they’d all been dead, and he said so.
         “So,” she deduced. “Two questions: One, do you want a passenger on your trip to Europa, which Major LaVie told us all about?”
         “I guess I could use some company. Especially a pretty girl who speaks the Cosmonaut’s native ‘lingo,’ or language! Just in case we have to use his ship to get back and the controls are all marked in Russian, like in that one Star Trek movie whose number I can’t remember. Now what’s the second question?”
         She grabbed hold of her right bosom, the one Duncan hadn’t touched yet, and gave him a catlike smile of seduction. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

Monday, July 2, 2012

THE CONUNDRUM ENIGMA


I have recently had the good fortune of receiving a manuscript from a brand new thriller writer by the name of Troy Cutcross! Troy's novel, "The Conundrum Enigma, a Charlie 'Doughnuts' Duncan Sexy Thriller," is not yet available in any format, but here's a small excerpt from Chapter Two:
“Dammit, ‘Doughnuts!’ I can’t have you putting my sexiest operatives at risk!” the Boss barked, which was why his nickname was Mad Dog, though his real name was Luther Burbank, named by his mother after the famous seed catalogue man, though they didn’t really know if they were related to him or not. She had been the sort of gutsy old dame who liked to play pranks like that.

Colonel Charlie “Doughnuts” Duncan just sat and took the guff Burbank was “dishing out,” knowing that the senior spy was just blowing off steam, or “venting.” “The whole nurse and patient thing was her idea, ‘Mad Dog.’ I just went along for the ride, to keep her safe.”

“And a fine job you did of it,” he snapped, using sarcasm as verbal jiu-jitsu on Charlie.

“She’s resting comfortably, anyway,” Duncan clamored, omitting the fact that he’d fondled her luscious breasts during her crisis, and at her own request! He was so excited about the make-out session that would surely ensue—perhaps leading to marriage—upon her release from the agency’s top secret hospital unit that he started getting another erection right there in the Boss’s office, one which he had to stifle with thoughts of atrocities in order not to be embarrassed by getting aroused at work, the kind of event that might lead to years of teasing from his colleagues.

“That’s true, and while she’s laid up you’re on your own. Which means I need you to get ready for Phase Two of Operation Cosmonaut.” 

What could that be, Charlie wondered to himself? “What’s Phase Two, Burbank?”

“You’re going into space!” Charlie could barely contain his incredulity, or inability to believe what he’d just heard. “You’ve got to be kidding, Luther!” he droned, though he knew that his boss never kidded. “I never kid, you know that!”

“So he’s really a cosmonaut,” “Doughnuts” murmured, pondering the concept, “in addition to being aknown drug kingpin.”

“Of course he is, that’s how he got his ‘nom de guerre,’ or nickname!”

“I should have known. That poison dart hit Tammi square in the left nipple, and I should have known it wasn’t mere luck. His mastery of the blowdart can only have come from hours of ‘zero-grav’ training,” opined Duncan, by which he meant weapons practice in the weightless conditions of space.

“Exactly. And since with Tammi out of commission, you’re our only current operative with astronaut training….” the Boss began.

“Now hold on a New York minute,” Charlie interjected, “I haven’t been in space in eight long years.”

“Not since you became the last man to walk on the moon.” As the Chief said this he lit his pipe of fake ivory carved to look like a pirate’s head which he had bought in a tobacconist’s, or tobacco shop, while on vacation.

“Yes, only the world can never know about that,” Duncan exhaled with a trace of bitterness that he would have regretted except that he really was bitter about the fact that everyone thought the last moonshot had taken place in the 1970s, rather than in 2004.

“Someday, the world will be told, ‘Doughnuts.’ But for the moment, you’ll have to be content with me knowing.” “And Tammi. I was thinking I’d tell Tammi, just to ‘seal the deal.’”

“No. Not even Tammi can know! I’m sorry, old chum, I know how badly you want to have carnal knowledge of her. But look at it this way: if she’s only willing to give you a taste of her sweet meatflower if you’ve walked on the moon, what kind of values does she really have anyway? And you know something, Duncan? When I see her look at you, I see a light in her eyes that’s not there otherwise. Something almost maternal. Caregiving. Nurturing. I was reminded of that when I saw the official report that mentioned that she was disguised as a nurse when she was hit by the poisoned blow dart.”

“Doughnuts” was a little dejected again when he remembered that the dart had poisoned her in such a way that sexual intercourse would be “Off the Menu” for at least six months, because of the particular toxin the Russian had used, one derived from the mucous glands of a terribly venomous South American beetle and that affected the vagina glands of any woman unfortunate enough to be struck by a dart dipped in it. But then the talk about the nurse’s uniform reminded him that he had squeezed those magnificent mounds right through that costume and he felt prettty good about that.

If you like this, you can "FRIEND" Troy on the Facebook! http://www.facebook.com/troy.cutcross

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

The Grandfather Paradox

http://jacketupload.macmillanusa.com/jackets/high_res/jpgs/9780312363406.jpg

Duane Swierczynski has written a number of hard-to-classify books that straddle various subsections of the crime, science fiction and thriller genres, all of them well worth your hard-earned dimes. His new one, Expiration Date, comes out March 30, and it's not only the best of the bunch, it's also planted square in the tiny, hard-to-hit intersection of science fiction, crime, horror, fantasy and probably a genre or two I'm forgetting right now. When I recommended it to a bookseller friend here in St. Louis I told her it reminded me of Joe Hill's "Horns" in its determined shotgun wedding of nuts and bolts quotidian reality and psyched-out gonzo fantasia, and it deserves to have that kind of commercial success.

Here's the gist of the thing, though it's impossible to do justice to it justice in this short space:

Mickey Wade is a recently terminated reporter for a Philadelphia alt-weekly who ends up in his grandfather's dilapidated apartment in the run-down neighborhood Mickey grew up in. Suffering from a blistering headache Mickey takes what he thinks is a handful of Tylenol from Grandpa's medical cabinet, and what happens next is either the most wacked-out time-travel story ever or the worst trip in the history of psychedelic medications. Duane is a lifelong Philadelphian, and one of the book's pleasures is the changing portrait of the town's lesser-known neighborhoods from the seventies up to the present.

So on the 30th head on down to your local independent bookseller and buy it. Duane's always-entertaining blog can be found here:

http://secretdead.blogspot.com/

Maybe someday he'll reveal the secret behind his nickname: Duane "Three-balls" Swierczynski.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Book of the day


Tutor from Lesbos, baby. A.P. Williams, Beacon Books. A Novel that will Astonish you with its Revelations about Warped Women!
Picked up in the Erotica section of Spivey's in Kansas City. Christa, are you salivating yet?

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Book of the day


Since I haven't posted in a while I've got a lot of new stuff. I'm in Wichita at the moment, and here's one of the books I got on the road. "Strip for Murder," from Kozy Books. Adult Reading! "Kozy Up with Kozy Books." Klassy.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Book of the day


It's an English translation of Le Pétomane, the story of Joseph Pujol, the man who farted his way onto the French music hall stage in the late nineteenth century. He headlined at the Moulin Rouge for more than twenty years with his musical flatulence. No kidding. The book is a slim volume, written by Jean Nohain and F. Caradec, translation by Warren Tute, Sherbourne Press, Los Angeles, 1968.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Book of the day


Here it is--a 1943 reprint of a 1931 smutfest called Impatient Virgin by Donald Henderson Clarke (Triangle Books, June 1943, twenty-first printing). Its dedication page reads "TO GLADYS Another Ex-Virgin."