It is the first time I can remember buying Playboy magazine and actually being able to say that it was for research. I’ve heard rumblings that James Ellroy had completed the third volume in the American Underworld Trilogy that started with American Tabloid, and The Cold Six Thousand, which are both eviscerations of the late 50’s and early 60’s American political scene and brilliantly extruded through the rusted steel mesh colander Mr. Ellroy calls his own. But sadly, my son was having a complete fit about the great injustice I was forcing on him when I said “No” to a bag of candy at 10 in the morning. So I mistakenly picked up the November issue, which didn’t have the huge excerpt of Blood’s a Rover, but did have a piece of fiction from J. Robert Lennon, who has a new novel coming out soon called Castle, and if you’ve been following his work over time then you know this novel is long overdue. Blood’s a Rover excerpt is in Playboy’s December issue, which should be on stands today.
In the meantime we here at the blog are giving the full treatment to Sam Taylor, whose novel’s, The Republic of Trees, Amnesiac, and the soon to hit shelves, The Island at the End of the World will be discussed along with an interview with Mr. Taylor who has been very generous with his time. The last book was touted on Mediabistro.com when the competition came around to design the jacket for that post-apocalyptic tale. Then of course I heard about the John Irving novel which might resonate with some readers, but I’m still recovering from Until I Find You, which was, well, too long, to say the least. The only morsel I have is a title, Last Night At Twisted River. All I can say is that I hope it’s free of tattoos and wrestling, and is under 400 pages.
Of course page length is nothing to worry about when you’ve got something to say. I think Glen David Gold should be able to follow up his debut, Carter Beats the Devil with the whopper Sunnyside; it weighs in at 640 pages, a historical romp that might have magic and some other strangeness between its covers. I did hear that it was originally a huge book, much longer than 2666, which Jonathan Lethem seems to think can save literature, from what, I don’t know. Finally, a screenwriter pal turned me onto Matthew Pearls (Dante Club, Poe Shadow) new book called The Last Dickens, which is a historical novel of suspense that tries to discover the ending to Charles Dickens’s unfinished final novel. Oh, wait, one more thing, Jay McInerney has a new and selected collection of short stories called How it Ended coming from Knopf in April 09. And I meant to tell you about Ablutions, a frank and personal novel from the rising star Patrick deWitt, to be published by Houghton Mifflin in February 09.
Recent Comments