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     |  At the time, my reading consisted of sports books (“Screwball” by Tug McGraw), war books (“The Longest Day”) and books read on the sly because they might contain sex or adult content (“Fanny Hill”, Lenny Bruce’s “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People” — both of which also profoundly changed me, albeit in non-literary ways). Continue reading When We Fell In Love – James P. Othmer  As a kid I tended to be contemplative, and later, in my teens, brooding – usual triggers for creating a reader. Yet my inclination toward introspection was generally satisfied by listening to The Wall and playing guitar in my basement. But by my late teens I was beginning to sense that rocking out wasn’t going to fulfill every intellectual and emotional need. Continue reading When We Fell In Love: David Zweig
Wherefore Print On Demand? by Marc Schuster The turkey Panini came highly recommended, but nobody mentioned that the man who operated the Panini press had a girlfriend who happened to be a writer. This latter fact came out while the Panini was cooking and the man behind the counter asked what I did for Continue reading Wherefore Print-On-Demand by Marc Schuster  I hitchhiked and Eurail-passed the length and breadth of the continent, from East Berlin to the west coast of Ireland, from the tip of Sicily to just inside the Arctic Circle. With all that traveling, of course, I often had time on my hands, and always needed something to read, and therefore engaged in avid and active book swaps with anyone who happened to have something in English I hadn’t already burned through. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – John Vorhaus  She talks about the craft of writing a novel, and she sets down a simple set of rules for writing, at least how she writes. Talking about past tense, first person, and how she always comes back to third person past tense, but it takes her forever to get there. How there are micro and macro writers, (read it, and find out which one you are) some start in the middle and other start at the beginning, she’s a first sentence gal, and works to the end, but she doesn’t know the end until she gets there. Continue reading Zadie Smith and Her Craft  I was reading American crime fiction long before I started shaving, but it was a book by Richard Stark (the pseudonym of Donald E. Westlake) that really turned my head: The Hunter /AKA Point Blank(1964). I still have it, a dog-eared little paperback with a plain silver cover sporting a bullet hole and a one-liner: a novel of violence. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Roger Smith “Frank. It was an unfortunate mistake. She did it without asking. Now we have someone out there in the world that thinks we employ thieves. Do you see the perception this creates?” Marlo tried to keep her voice steady; this was Frank’s problem now. She didn’t discipline hourly employees; she just made phone calls to store managers when complaints came into the home office. It was a coincidence that she was dealing with this. Continue reading Offender by Jason Rice  I was raised in a household where reading mattered. There were a lot of things we didn’t have when I was a kid, including a television or even consistently running water—this was rural British Columbia, an island on the coast—but we did have books, in increasingly spectacular numbers. At first just a wall of bookshelves in the living room, with encyclopedias and dictionaries spilling out into the hallway; later, the books accumulated in number til they demanded their own room. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Emily St. John Mandel  Here’s how much I like Walter’s voice: Though “The Financial Lives of the Poets” has a slow fuse, much of the coming-of-middle-age turf is well-worn, a few of the plot points feel like warmed over television fare, the poetry is irritating at times, and the resolution feels a little forced, Walter’s voice is flat out unstoppable—the guy could write about pneumatic tools and I’d be on the edge of my seat. Continue reading The Financial Lives of the Poets – Jess Walter  From the time I could walk I accompanied my father on his visits to the Brooklyn Public Library branch a mile from our home. The old man loved libraries, had worked in one at the University of Warsaw during his bohemian days when, in the months before the Nazis onslaught –he escaped on the last ship out of the free port of Danzig—he wrote poetry and tried to get on at one of the Polish capital’s Yiddish papers. Though he was fluent in half a dozen languages, literary English was not one of them. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Hesh Kestin  He had a series of illustrations created based on some of the book’s stories, including a Kindergartener who thinks he’s French, a puddle of ketchup shaped like Elvis and something called, “Chicken Soup for the Kidnapper’s Soul.” While the coloring contest sounded like fun, Wensink added a little excitement by offering an autographed stack of his favorite books from 2009 to the winner. Continue reading Sex Dungeon Coloring Celebration  I was one of those high school students who thought reading was bullshit. And books like “Red Badge of Courage”, “Ethan Frome”, and “Pride and Prejudice” weren’t helping my opinion that literature was pretentious and stuck up. I didn’t want any part of the canon, if it was comprised of stilted and boring narratives. Or as Bukowski put it in his introduction to John Fante’s “Ask the Dust”: “…nothing I read related to me or to the streets or to the people about me.” Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Joshua Mohr Since we’re in holiday mode, you may be walking into a lot or rooms that you don’t ordinarily visit. I’ve been thinking about what’s most interesting to an autistic temperament like mine about such experiences: the background, the part that you don’t quite notice: the height of the ceiling, the quality of light, the footfall in the next room (Are there dishes clattering in the kitchen?), whether the room feels crowded or spacious, the ambience awkward…I’m-trying-to-be-a-good-host-but-I’m-not-quite-making-it, or, full-tilt, these are such cool people! Continue reading Midnight in Dostoevsky by Don DeLillo |  | ||
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JC: Usually when readers have something to say to us, they put it in the comments or send us an email. Marc Schuster, however, has a lot to say. He’s the author of The Singular Exploits on Wonder Mom and Party Girl, and the editor of excellent site Small Press Reviews. Here’s an essay he sent about Print On Demand:
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