Loren Eaton refuses to review Megan Abbott’s Bury Me Deep. “Can’t talk about how Abbott walks a tightrope over the chasm between the literary and genre worlds, every sentence showing her knowledge of the writer’s craft while the subject matter stays committed to delighting the reader,” he says, leaving us to wonder what could possibly be in this book.
Jonathan Rogers talks about the origins of one of his books. “When I sat down to write The Charlatan’s Boy
CHAPTER I
The Lifestyle Services case worker seemed friendly and genuinely interested in him. Tom Galloway wasn’t entirely pleased about that. The case workers he’d dealt with in the Twin Cities had all seemed overworked and time-pinched. The desks in their cubicles had been piled with file folders and official bulletins, and they themselves had exhaled an institutional miasma that seemed to say, “Don’t show me any red flags and we won’t ask too many questions.”
But Megan Siegenthaler seemed to have all the time in the world, and was cordially curious about everything having to do with Tom and his family. Her small office had been painted a cheery mint green, and a tasteful landscape print hung on one wall. No family pictures though. He supposed those might be stressful for some of the case subjects. Or just as likely she had no family.
She herself was a honey-haired woman who must have been very attractive once and was still comfortably good-looking. Her green eyes were especially remarkable. She smoked a long thin cigarette, as was her right in all places except for hospital ICUs ever since the passage of the Smokers’ Re-enfranchisement Act. She’d offered Tom a breathing device, in accordance with the provisions of the Act, but he’d turned it down. Tobacco smoke had never bothered him much.
“I suppose it’s pretty dull here in Epsom compared to life in the Cities,” she said.
“I like it dull,” said Tom.
“Does Christine like it dull too?”
Tom adjusted his mouth in something like a smile. “No. She’d like to move back.”
“What do you think about that?”
“I don’t care what she’d like. I’m trying to keep her alive.”
Megan picked up the Galloway file and flipped through it. She had very long fingernails, enameled in red. Tom had always wondered why anyone who had to work with paper or keyboards would bother with such a self-inflicted handicap. “I think we ought to talk about this,” she said. “Your last case worker made a note about your attitude. You realize that, in the long run, you can’t keep your daughter alive, don’t you?”
Tom kicked himself in a mental shin. He should have learned to keep his mouth shut by now. He didn’t want to have this discussion again.
“I know what the law says,” he grunted.
“Then you know that if Christine decides to end her life, you have no legal power to stop her. The Constitution’s on her side. If she complains to us that you’re interfering, she can be taken from you and escorted to the Happy Endings Clinic by a Lifestyle Services worker. The law is very explicit.”
That’s just a snippet from Death’s Doors, my newly released e-book (by the way, Orie says it’s non-DRM, which means you can convert it to your e-reader’s format using the Calibre utility, even if you don’t have a Kindle). I thought I’d just take a few moments to talk about this book, and what I think it means (I could, of course, be wrong). Continue reading ‘Death’s Doors’: a snippet and an apologia
“One of the joys of reading late Auden is the pleasure he takes in rare words used correctly,” Patrick Kurp reminds us. “Like his friend Dr. Oliver Sacks, he loved trolling the Oxford English Dictionary for good catches.” Catches like dapatical, for which you’ll have to read his post for context.
Alexander McCall Smith wrote a piece last year about the importance of Auden with a few personal anecdotes. “When I started to write novels set in Edinburgh, the characters in these books – unsurprisingly, perhaps – began to show an interest in Auden. In particular, Isabel Dalhousie, the central character in my Sunday Philosophy Club series, thought about Auden rather a lot – and quoted him, too. A couple of years after the first of these novels was published, I received a letter from his literary executor, Edward Mendelson, who is a professor of English at Columbia University in New York. . . . I then wrote Professor Mendelson into an Isabel Dalhousie novel, creating a scene in which he comes to Edinburgh to deliver a public lecture on the sense of neurotic guilt in Auden’s verse.”
Dateline: Minneapolis
My new novel, Death’s Doors, is now available for download for Amazon Kindle.
In the near future, suicide is a constitutional right. Tom Galloway is an ordinary single father, just trying to keep his rebellious and depressed daughter from going to the Happy Endings Clinic.
The last thing he needs is a ninth-century Viking time traveler dropping into his life.
But Tom is about to embark on the adventure of his life. One that will change the world.
…you can see Phil Wade in the background.
Have a good weekend.
Due to the immediate, overwhelming response to the photo in our last post, our executives have decided to post another one. Here we see the gorgeous Myrna Loy serving Navy sailors in an canteen during WWII. This wasn’t a one time stint for her. She stopped acting to support the war effort and worked closely with The Red Cross. Learn more about her in this review of her biography, Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl In Hollywood.
1. A Colorado coffee shop, located in an housing development for the homeless, is attempting to help the people around them as well as change their community’s perspective on the capabilities of homeless people.
“People don’t know who’s behind the counter when they stop here,” Kelly Kelley said. “It could be any one of us in that low-income or homeless category. We want to make a positive experience for people.”
2. 10 reason why fair-trade coffee doesn’t do what it claims, and plenty of pushback in the comments. “Fairtrade is not a one time, cure-all, it provides a framework. It’s a tool and if applied well, producers move up the value chain, negotiate better terms, and strengthen their communities.”
I remember a coffee roaster saying he saw little value in fair trade certification, because he knew a farm received certification on only half of its crop because they couldn’t afford the price. No difference in the coffee they grew. They just could not afford to pay for the fair trade label for the second half of what they produced.
3. Costa Coffee, United Kingdom’s largest coffee chain, has replaced its club card for an app.
4. Starbucks has gone to Colombia, and the Colombian national chain Juan Valdez is expanding in response. “In downtown Miami, a new Juan Valdez cafe feels like a slice of Colombia: traditional floor tiling, warm wood details, woven baskets, fresh arepas, and pictures of Colombia and its coffee. A poster of a smiling coffee farmer hangs near the entrance, greeting customers with the company’s key new message: ‘Carlos is one of the 500,000 coffee growers who owns this coffee shop.'” Leaning on their history has proven profitable so far.
5. A young Lauren Bacall with coffee. (I believe this photo would be rated PG-13 because it depicts smoking. Steel yourself.) Continue reading Coffee Week Selections
“It’s voguish to say poems are about the making of poems, but the good ones normally engage something out there in the big bad world beyond the classroom,” write Patrick Kurp.
In the last post, we linked to Fast Company’s Danielle Sacks’ piece on third wave coffee producers. Food Republic asks her about her experience researching that article, whether her drinking tastes have changed, and how she believes Starbucks will respond to this bit of competition.
As I write in the story, Starbucks doesn’t like anybody infringing on its turf. They want it both ways — they’ll do as little as possible to gain street cred in the third wave coffee community, but they still want to appeal to the masses, which is the much bigger market. On one hand Starbucks is increasingly pushing its single origin “Reserve” line (brewed on Clover single cup precision brewers), yet its investments and acquisitions of late feel like a coffee company that’s leaning more towards fast food (fizzy drinks, drive-thrus). At the end of the day, if they felt like third wave was a gnat worth swatting, they could just purchase Stumptown or Blue Bottle, both of which have investors that will want to monetize their investment at some point. It’ll be interesting to see which of these players might end up part of the big green giant.
A third wave of coffee connoisseurs is washing over America. Artisan coffee producers, such as Stumptown, Intelligentsia, Counter Culture and Blue Bottle, have pored over their beans, roasts, and brews to steep the most awesomest coffee drink you will ever taste. Fast Company’s Danielle Sacks describes the reaction some coffee evangelists received somewhere in New York.
Staffers begin wandering over to taste coffees with names like Brazil Samambaia and Three Africans. A few are coffee snobs, and for them it is a moment of vindication. A thirtysomething in a chambray shirt expresses delight at the prospect that his company might ditch the pods in the office kitchen in favor of Stumptown, which he brews at home. For others, the experience is more like an awakening, when they taste the refined brew for the first time. “I’m a coffee guy,” declares a silver-haired exec in khakis. “I drink Dunkin’, Starbucks, Tim Hortons–not the deli stuff,” he says, echoing the sentiments of many of America’s 100 million coffee drinkers. The woman from Joyride hands him something he never orders: a cup of black coffee. “It’s pretty smooth,” he says, surprised by how good a naked cup of coffee can taste when it’s made with artisanal care. “This is really good,” he confesses, taking another swig, “even without milk.”
I believe I almost had a great cup of coffee like this once, but I didn’t want to spend the money on it. This article says these wonderful coffee lovers want us to spend $7/drink. It may be awesome, but they aren’t going to knock out K-cups at that price. (They probably wouldn’t approve of my home brewing anyway.)