Steve Laube gives this list of reasons some writers may never see their work in print:
“The bottom line” he says, “is that if you do the work, have a teachable spirit, are fully prepared, and with a unique idea…number five on the list shouldn’t be a problem.”
Statue of Alfred the Great at Wantage. Photo credit: DJ Clayworth.
News from England is that archaeologists think they’ve found a piece of Alfred the Great… or his son.
Preliminary tests suggest that a pelvic bone found in a museum box is either Alfred, or his son, King Edward the Elder. The bone was among remains excavated some 15 years ago at an abbey in Winchester, England, but they were never tested. Instead they were stored in a box at Winchester Museum until archeologists recently came across them.
“The bone is likely to be one of them, I wouldn’t like to say which one,” Kate Tucker, a researcher in human osteology from the University of Winchester told Reuters. Researchers say that, given the historical record, bones that old could only have come from Alfred or his family.
I hope they find more, especially the skull. Can’t get enough of those forensic reconstructions.
In the absence of a skull, the only way to find out what Alfred looked like would be to clone him. And I don’t think anybody over there really wants that. The first thing he’d want to do would be to drive all the foreigners out. Beginning with the Normans.
Come to think of it, I’m going to have an extraneous piece of hip bone available myself in a couple weeks. I wonder if there’s any market for it as a relic. Invest now, before I’m canonized.
This is funny and a totally appropriate spoof on a recent movie you may have seen. If you haven’t seen it or read any criticism of it, then you will miss half the jokes.
Dude, was I right or what?
Dennis Lehane, best known for superlative contemporary mysteries, takes on a historical tale in Live By Night, the story of a Boston gangster who becomes a bootlegger king in Tampa. It’s a very good novel. I’m not entirely sure what it’s about thematically, and I’m fairly sure I disagree with the subtext. Still, a worthy read.
Joe Coughlin is a cop’s son, but chooses to become a gangster (he prefers the term “outlaw”). He first sees Emma Gould while robbing an illegal poker game, and he starts dating her even though a mob boss is obsessed with her. One thing leads to another, and Joe ends up doing five years in prison while Emma ends up in a wrecked car in a river.
Joe can never forget her, though he’s sure she’s dead. In prison he gets close to a mob leader who, on his release, sends him down to Tampa to run the rum running operation there. This leads him to great wealth and success, and marriage to a beautiful Cuban woman. He tries to do his job in his own way, showing mercy to people when he can, but gradually he realizes he’s a gangster, not an outlaw. And his longing for lost Emma haunts him until he achieves at last a painful clarity.
I think author Lehane recognizes, and wants us to understand, that Joe is not without his self-delusions. The title of the book, Live By Night, is a reference to his belief that there are day people and night people, and that the night people are more glamorous and more honest, because they’re not hypocrites like the day people. This is of course a rationalization; the only choices in life aren’t between being a corrupt cop or an open criminal. One could, for instance, be a dirt farmer. The work might kill you, but you’d have small scope for corruption.
No, Joe’s real motivation is an addiction to risk-taking, and Lehane admits as much.
All in all, I suspect the real message of the book is essentially Marxist. The Americans are bad because they’re racist and rich. The Cubans, though Lehane admits they’re just as racist, are poor and therefore pure in some sense. The book ends before Castro shows up, so Communism is only addressed in an oblique way.
There is an running theme of religious aspiration, but Lehane doesn’t seem to see much hope in it.
But it’s not a heavy-handed book. Anything but. Live By Night is a well-written, moving story. Cautions for language and adult themes.
Dennis Lehane, best known for superlative contemporary mysteries, takes on a historical tale in Live By Night, the story of a Boston gangster who becomes a bootlegger king in Tampa. It’s a very good novel. I’m not entirely sure what it’s about thematically, and I’m fairly sure I disagree with the subtext. Still, a worthy read.
Joe Coughlin is a cop’s son, but chooses to become a gangster (he prefers the term “outlaw”). He first sees Emma Gould while robbing an illegal poker game, and he starts dating her even though a mob boss is obsessed with her. One thing leads to another, and Joe ends up doing five years in prison while Emma ends up in a wrecked car in a river.
Joe can never forget her, though he’s sure she’s dead. In prison he gets close to a mob leader who, on his release, sends him down to Tampa to run the rum running operation there. This leads him to great wealth and success, and marriage to a beautiful Cuban woman. He tries to do his job in his own way, showing mercy to people when he can, but gradually he realizes he’s a gangster, not an outlaw. And his longing for lost Emma haunts him until he achieves at last a painful clarity.
I think author Lehane recognizes, and wants us to understand, that Joe is not without his self-delusions. The title of the book, Live By Night, is a reference to his belief that there are day people and night people, and that the night people are more glamorous and more honest, because they’re not hypocrites like the day people. This is of course a rationalization; the only choices in life aren’t between being a corrupt cop or an open criminal. One could, for instance, be a dirt farmer. The work might kill you, but you’d have small scope for corruption.
No, Joe’s real motivation is an addiction to risk-taking, and Lehane admits as much.
All in all, I suspect the real message of the book is essentially Marxist. The Americans are bad because they’re racist and rich. The Cubans, though Lehane admits they’re just as racist, are poor and therefore pure in some sense. The book ends before Castro shows up, so Communism is only addressed in an oblique way.
There is an running theme of religious aspiration, but Lehane doesn’t seem to see much hope in it.
But it’s not a heavy-handed book. Anything but. Live By Night is a well-written, moving story. Cautions for language and adult themes.
The Steve Laube Agency has purchased Marcher Lord Press (MLP) (link defunct), “the premier publisher of Science Fiction and Fantasy for the Christian market.” Follow the link for answers to a handful of questions about the acquisition, especially if you didn’t know there was a publisher of SF/F for the Christian market.
Steve Laube has not purchased the MLP imprint Hinterlands, which is defined this way: “to publish science-fiction and fantasy stories with mature content and themes (i.e. PG-13 or R-rated language, sexuality, and violence).” This is the imprint that published A Throne of Bones, which Lars reviewed last year. Apparently, that title raised the ire of a writer’s group that issues a prominent award, which was the motivation for starting the imprint–like zoning a red-light district, I guess.
With the purchase of the press but not the imprint, another publisher could buy Hinterlands or the rights could revert to their authors. Mike Duran asks, does this “signal the end of Christian publishing’s ‘mature-content experiment’?” He suggests that it may be, but two things point away of it:
What do you think? You may already read books with this kind of content anyway. Have you read any of these titles (I’m having trouble identifying them).
Here’s a very weird little video, featuring a couple of fellows, one of whom is apparently speaking Old Norse authentically. The other may be doing the same, but I’m not sure. There’s obviously some humor going on here, probably crude in view of the “grabbing” gag.
But it’s fun to hear Old Norse done in an impressive voice.
Let me take this opportunity to apologize for posting so much about my hip problem lately. That’s not what you come here for, and I appreciate your patience. My most recent discovery has been that using crutches instead of a cane punishes my body a whole lot less, so I’m now in considerably less pain than I was. Thanks for the prayers.
As a reward, here’s a book review: Time Release, by Martin J. Smith.
It’s hard not to compare Time Release to Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware novels. Like the Delaware stories, this one centers on a psychologist summoned by a policeman friend to help him investigate a series of murders. But the differences are numerous too. The setting here is Pittsburgh and its grim environs, rather than Los Angeles, and Smith’s characters, psychologist Jim Christensen and detective Gary Downing, are a lot more damaged by life. Christensen is still recovering from the loss of his wife, on whom he “pulled the plug” after brain death, and Downing’s career has never recovered from the way he botched a drug poisoning case, reminiscent of the Tylenol murders. He lost his objectivity because one of the victims was his secret lover, something he has never shared with anyone.
Now the poisonings seem to have resumed after ten years. Downing thinks the surviving son of his chief suspect may have repressed memories that would help his case. Would Christensen talk to the young man and see?
Christensen reluctantly agrees, not realizing that in doing so he is putting his remaining family in mortal danger. Some secrets are almost too hard to face, and some people would kill the innocent rather than face them.
Time Release is an adequate thriller. I never thought that it soared, and the relentless grimness of the story wore me down a bit. Religion is not a major theme, but is always in the background. Christensen, who has become an atheist, takes a cheap shot at the Bible at one point, but he still prays when desperate, and we’re given no reason to think that’s a stupid thing to do.
The price of the book is low, and I didn’t hate it. Worth reading if you like this sort of thing. Cautions for language and adult themes.
“If men read fewer books on manhood and more really good stories they’d be much better for it,” Barnabas Piper tweeted sometime last year. He fleshes out his reasoning in this post, saying stories make you want to be better, show you role models and anti-heroes, and get under the surface. If it’s true, he says, that we learn more by what we catch than what we are taught, then good stories are the places where we will catch what we want to learn.
In a post, reviewing a 1991 book called The Cipher
Loren had high hopes for The Cipher, but found it a bit thick and dismal. “I guess the crux of the matter is this: Horror should seem horrifying, but you need to feel that something worthwhile could be lost during the story for it to become so. Such a sense is completely absent in The Cipher. Things start out badly. They grow marginally worse by the end. In between is 350 pages of mostly senseless, self-inflicted suffering.”
In the comments, a few names and titles are kicked around.
For context on his perspective, Loren discusses all he learned about H.P. Lovecraft in 2013.