J.T. Posted March 29, 2017 Share Posted March 29, 2017 I now know what book I want to get for Father's Day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaedmc Posted March 29, 2017 Share Posted March 29, 2017 I want to read it, but I also want to wait for you to read it, and let me know if it's full of shit. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OSJ Posted March 29, 2017 Share Posted March 29, 2017 I just received this and if y'all like offbeat fantasy and just plain brilliant writing, you should get this. Go to nonstoppress.com to order, they still have copies of Vol 1. too! If you're of a collector mentality, the announced signed run of the hardcover was cut from 100 to 50 copies. Best $100 I've spent lately. THE COLLECTED STORIES OF CAROL EMSHWILLER, Vol. 2 Hardcover, trade paper and limited signed edition available. For more details or to see a complete table of contents click here. CAROL EMSHWILLER was born in 1921 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She Graduated from the University of Michigan in 1949, after serving in the Red Cross during World War II. She met Ed Emshwiller in a life drawing class at the University. After their marriage she spent a year studying fine art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in France under a Fulbright scholarship. In 1950 the pair toured postwar Europe on a motorcycle before moving to Levittown, a newly created, planned suburb to New York City. She sold her first story in 1954. In 2002 she won the Nebula Award and Philip K. Dick Award. Carol received a second Nebula and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2005. The dust jacket portrait is a painting done by Ed Emshwiller in the late 1960s. Carol was the primary female model for his illustrations for books and magazines. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Roman Posted April 9, 2017 Share Posted April 9, 2017 I read a second short story collection by Richard Gavin, called At Fear's Altar. It wasn't as good as Sylvan Dread, but I assume that's because this is one of his earlier collections and Gavin has sharpened his skills as a writer since then. It was still enjoyable, but I think my expectations were a little high after having started with Sylvan Dread. I'll make it a point to read his other collections in chronological order. Some of these stories were little more than Gavin's take on Lovecraft and Blackwood atmosphere, but you could definitely see his own voice in those, and he's very good at combining that type of creepiness with the mysteries of nature and, in some stories, quotidian problems. Again, a bit underwhelming after Sylvan Dread, but I'll certainly get all his other books in time. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OSJ Posted April 9, 2017 Share Posted April 9, 2017 @Roman: Gavin improved mightily from At Fear's Altar as you point out, he really needs a nice hardcover collection from someone like Fedogan & Bremer to really put him on the map. Someone I've enjoying tremendously is Adam LG Nevill, the man's been writing close to twenty years and I've only recently discovered him. Definitely one of the UK's best, and that covers a lot of ground. I'd start with his story collection Some Will not Sleep and go from there. He has a ton of sample stories and other cool stuff on his website, which unsurprisingly is www.adamlgnevill.com. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marty Sugar Posted April 10, 2017 Share Posted April 10, 2017 Haven't been in this thread in a while... Recently finished Coldbrook by Tim Lebbon, which adds a sci-fi spin to the classic "Zombie Apocalypse" concept. I liked it quite a bit, but it felt at times like they were cramming two stories into one. Both were good, but I think cramming them together hindered the book a little. A good one, regardless. Also read the Wild Cards I anthology, which was so fucking good. Super heroes and mutants struggle enough in their own comic universes...but if they had to live in our actual reality? Yeah...that's no picnic, either. Looking forward to slowly collecting others once I get caught up on my current Christmas/Birthday pile of books. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OSJ Posted April 12, 2017 Share Posted April 12, 2017 On 4/10/2017 at 1:02 PM, Marty Sugar said: Haven't been in this thread in a while... Recently finished Coldbrook by Tim Lebbon, which adds a sci-fi spin to the classic "Zombie Apocalypse" concept. I liked it quite a bit, but it felt at times like they were cramming two stories into one. Both were good, but I think cramming them together hindered the book a little. A good one, regardless. Also read the Wild Cards I anthology, which was so fucking good. Super heroes and mutants struggle enough in their own comic universes...but if they had to live in our actual reality? Yeah...that's no picnic, either. Looking forward to slowly collecting others once I get caught up on my current Christmas/Birthday pile of books. Tim Lebbon is one of my best buddies, I'll admit that I haven't gotten around to Coldbrook yet, but it IS here. Check out his short story collections, we call him "Grim Tim" and not without reason. Wild Cards (the original) is all kinds of fun for about six books than it starts running out of steam. I haven't checked out the re-boot, but since GRRM had his hands all over it, it's probably pretty darn good. BTW: You need one of my books, dude! ;-) 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marty Sugar Posted April 13, 2017 Share Posted April 13, 2017 10 hours ago, OSJ said: BTW: You need one of my books, dude! ;-) I need to stop buying books for a bit as I'm moving at the end of May and need to downsize/rethink what I'm taking. Rental prices in Kelowna keep going up, and square-footage keeps going down... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OSJ Posted April 13, 2017 Share Posted April 13, 2017 5 minutes ago, Marty Sugar said: I need to stop buying books for a bit as I'm moving at the end of May and need to downsize/rethink what I'm taking. Rental prices in Kelowna keep going up, and square-footage keeps going down... Understood. Having lots of books is a wonderful thing. Moving them, not so much, (we're talking close to 10,000 hardcovers and probably three/five times that in paperbacks.) From Seattle to Rio Rancho is not an exercise I would care to repeat. Rio Rancho to Gallup wasn't too bad as we had a storage unit so we could plug away at our own speed as opposed to having to load up a U-Haul with the clock ticking. I'm at the point now where I pretty much try to adhere to the rule of "books come in, an equal number of books need to go out". This means more time spent on listing stuff on eBay than I would like, but I'm not about to make the trip to Albuquerque to sell stuff for pennies on the dollar. In Seattle, I knew all the major players in the used-book biz to where they weren't going to screw me as I was a source of good stuff and the understanding was 50% of what they were going to sell for, which is quite fair when you factor in overhead and so on. Well, since I just ordered the new John Langan novel, The Fisherman and got caught up on the last three by Laird Barron, off to eBay to list some stuff before calling it a night... ;-) (eBay ID is chrismorris927 for anyone interested). Chris is my nephew, who upon seeing me get a couple of nice-sized checks decided he wanted to be a bookseller like Uncle John. That lasted until he discovered that there's a bit more to it than just having nice people send you checks... ;-) Seeing how we already had a few dozen in good feedback, I just kept the ID. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cliff Hanger Posted April 13, 2017 Share Posted April 13, 2017 I'll avoid talking too much about it to avoid crossing political lines, but Gabriel Sherman's THE LOUDEST VOICE IN THE ROOM is utterly fascinating. Roger Ailes starts off as a surprisingly sympathetic character with great talents and great flaws, but by the time he launches Fox News he's started drinking his own Kool-Aid, and by the time Obama gets elected he's clearly deeply troubled in ways not related to politics. The book ends in 2013, so his meteoric fall isn't yet chronicled, but the book as a whole was utterly engrossing. My next fiction read is probably Chinua Achebe's THINGS FALL APART, which I've been meaning to get to for years. Next non-fiction is as yet undecided, but unless Jon Ronson has something he's about to drop on us it'll probably be less related to modern politics than basically everything I've read in the last 18 months. Next graphic novel or comic reprint will probably be the X-Factor Epic Collection; X-Factor from the Mutant Massacre thru Muir Island was my defining experience with X-books growing up, but aside from the Fall of the Mutants collection (which was mis-named and contains nearly a full year leading up to that arc) I haven't re-read any of it since about 1998. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Unholy Dragon Posted April 13, 2017 Share Posted April 13, 2017 12 hours ago, Marty Sugar said: I need to stop buying books for a bit as I'm moving at the end of May and need to downsize/rethink what I'm taking. Rental prices in Kelowna keep going up, and square-footage keeps going down... This is pretty much my exact situation a few months ago except I was moving in with my in laws because Toronto area housing is nonsense if you don't have 4-6 roommates. tl;dr the Canadian housing market near major cities is the WORST right now. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CSC Posted April 14, 2017 Share Posted April 14, 2017 Just finished The Hike by Drew Magary - there was something so familiar about his writing but didn't realize until I finished that he's the dude that does the Why Your Team Sucks articles for Deadspin. The book itself is fantastic. I think I finished it in like three sittings and the last third I legit couldn't put it down. And thank God I finished the book before realizing he was also THIS guy so I didn't have to see this in my mind the whole time... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shane Posted April 17, 2017 Author Share Posted April 17, 2017 Started listening to New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson today. Not sure I've read anything by him before. Probably not the best starting point, either. Not really digging the narrators much, but I'm into the story enough that I'll give them a chance to grow on me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OSJ Posted April 18, 2017 Share Posted April 18, 2017 17 minutes ago, Shane said: Started listening to New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson today. Not sure I've read anything by him before. Probably not the best starting point, either. Not really digging the narrators much, but I'm into the story enough that I'll give them a chance to grow on me. @Shane, hate to say it, but you're probably starting at the worst possible place for Robinson. Obviously, his Mars trilogy (Red, Green, & Blue) remains a classic in the genre, but if you're not ready to tackle a trilogy about terra-forming, (which isn't really a fair description, there's a hell of a lot more going on than that), give his early novel, The Wild Shore a try. Let me go off on a tangent, if I may... The ACE SF Specials... However, there's a "buyer beware" attached, the first and third series were selected and edited by Terry Carr, as fine an editor who has ever worked in the field. The second series was the business as usual, the books selected by random hacks in the office. Some are good, some aren't, but the absolute magic worked by Terry Carr just isn't there, however, series one and series three, now we're talking... Series One ran 39 books with not a clinker among them, this was followed by 8 books purchased for the series, but not used until after the series had officially. All eight are worth your time, every bit as much as the original series: Brian W. Aldiss - Barefoot in the Head D. G. Compton - The Missionaries Gordon Eklund - A Trace of Dreams Fritz Leiber - You're All Alone Barry N. Malzberg - The Falling Astronauts Tom Purdom - The Barons of Behavior Bob Shaw - Other Days, Other Eyes Theodore Sturgeon - The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon Then Terry Carr came back as a freelance to give us the third and final series, which may just be the best of all: Kim Stanley Robinson - The Wild Shore (1984, 88870) Carter Scholz and Glenn Harcourt - Palimpsests (1984, 65065) Lucius Shepard - Green Eyes (1984, 30274) Howard Waldrop - Them Bones (1984, 80557) William Gibson - Neuromancer (1984, 56956) Nebula Award and Hugo Award winner Michael Swanwick - In the Drift (1985, 35869) Jack McDevitt - The Hercules Text (1986, 37367) Loren J. MacGregor - The Net (1987, 56941) Richard Kadrey - Metrophage (1988, 52813) Ted Reynolds - The Tides of God (1989, 80894) Claudia O'Keefe - Black Snow Days (1990, 06689) Gregory Feeley - The Oxygen Barons (1990, 64571) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marty Sugar Posted April 29, 2017 Share Posted April 29, 2017 Just the other day I finished WHAT THE #@&% IS THAT?, which is a collection of short stories edited by John Joseph Adams and Doug Cohen, where every story has to include the line, "What the [blank] is that?" in it. My youngest daughter bought it for me for my birthday, because he knew what the #@&% meant in the title, and found it amusing. As I sat down to read it, the first story by Laird Barron was pretty bad, and the second one by Amanda Downum started off rather poorly...when at work I told an interested customer that I was going to read this apparently shitty book anyway, because my daughter specifically picked it out for me for my birthday... ...and then the second story finished strong, and the book was a fucking hit after that. Tons of really good short stories that spanned the humorous, to the disturbing, to the outright gross. Something for everyone, dare I say...and a lot of fun once you get past that first 15 pages, and the pretentious forward that just oozes literary douchebaggery. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AxB Posted May 5, 2017 Share Posted May 5, 2017 On 23/03/2017 at 8:26 AM, CreativeControl said: @AxB Yeah pretty much, the basic gist of the trilogy IMO is 'we were so close to getting it right but the prejudice and greed of Hoover and the mafia et al fucked it up for everyone'. I just finished Blood's A Rover and really enjoyed it for what it was but I do have some issues with it. Will wait til you're done before discussing anything though. Finished it last week. It took a while to sink in... I think that having American Tabloid climax with the JFK assassination, and then Cold 6000 with MLK and RFK, he really had a problem if he didn't want to climax Rover with Watergate (and even then, which bit of it - the break in itself, or the investigation, or Nixon's resignation...), there's no climactic event to build to. So he had to manufacture the non-assassination of J Edgar Hoover (even though he died of natural causes) as his climax. But the really jarring thing to me is that it's weirdly more personal to Ellroy than even My Dark Places was. Because I'm pretty sure that right before he wrote Blood's a Rover, his grey haired, left wing wife left him. And every major male character in the book is in some way or other tragically in love with (at least one) grey haired left wing woman. And they will not keep quiet about it. It was really jarring. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BurningBeard Posted May 5, 2017 Share Posted May 5, 2017 Ha, yeah I think he said as much in interviews @AxB like it was a character assassination of her or something. My main issue with it was the way the 'important' stuff (IE things the previous two books built up) was abruptly dropped two thirds through - the mafia stuff, government collusion, the characters having a hand in historic events, backroom machinations, which was what the preceding books were all about. It was good to see everything from Six Thousand catch up with Holly and Tedrow and them try to make amends though. I loved Crutch, I loved the mystery around the armoured car robbery, I loved Big Scott, but it could have easily been its own standalone book tangentially related to the trilogy. As a fitting end to it? Didn't really do it for me. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BurningBeard Posted May 9, 2017 Share Posted May 9, 2017 Oh @AxB and the most glaring omission outside of Watergate - I can't believe they didn't tackle or mention the whole Jimmy Hoffa disappearance. Don't know how it lines up timeline-wise but just abruptly dropped along with the mafia thread Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OSJ Posted May 10, 2017 Share Posted May 10, 2017 Well, since my Laird Barron and John Langan stuff hasn't arrived yet, I've delved a bit further into the dark world of Adam L.G. Nevill and am digging the hell out of it. This man can write horror, and how I've missed him for ten years is a mystery that I can't answer, (I have dozens of horror-writing friends in the UK and for some reason Nevill has never come up, guess folks figured I knew all about him?) Anyway, he's got a terrific website and will send you a free book just to check him out, if you like horror, visit http://www.adamlgnevill.com/ I'm also dipping into two massive collections by Lucius Shepard, probably the greatest writer that I have ever or ever will meet. His work defies genre, though he's certainly written things that can be pigeon-holed as "horror", "fantasy", or "sf", he's also written things that have much more in common with magic realism or combine elements of all three or perhaps none of them... Simply indescribably brilliant and was from his first short story and first novel on, they just don't get any better than Lucius Shepard. Pick up any of his collections, you'll be glad you did. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AxB Posted May 12, 2017 Share Posted May 12, 2017 On 09/05/2017 at 9:34 PM, CreativeControl said: Oh @AxB and the most glaring omission outside of Watergate - I can't believe they didn't tackle or mention the whole Jimmy Hoffa disappearance. Don't know how it lines up timeline-wise but just abruptly dropped along with the mafia thread Looked it up. Hoffa wasn't disappeared until 1975. BUT he was released from prison on December 23rd 1971, due to some sort of deal with President Nixon (in exchange for the Teamsters supporting Nixon in 1972, plus assorted rumoured shadiness vis a vis Million Dollar bribes to the President). Which is exactly the sort of thing that should have been in the book - in Ellroy's version of history, it makes sense for Pete Bondurant to have been the bagman for that. But Rover really misses Bondurant, especially considering there's no real reason for him not to be there. He killed off all of his main characters except the most interesting (and least likeable) one, who just retired to a small town and was forgotten. You'd think Tedrow would have tried to get Bondurant back when things started going hairy for him, but nope. Shame. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BurningBeard Posted May 12, 2017 Share Posted May 12, 2017 Yup, just strange. Like I said, on its own merits its a great read but as a fitting and comprehensive end to a trilogy it misses its mark by a long shot Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.T. Posted May 12, 2017 Share Posted May 12, 2017 The Imagineers of War was okay. If you're interested in the science, the text will strike you as a bit glib and superfluous. I'd still recommend reading this over The Pentagon's Brain, though. I'm reading this collection of horror short stories from this guy named Old School John and it is fucking king sized. It is like reading the naughtier cousin of a really good Tales From The Crypt collection. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OSJ Posted May 12, 2017 Share Posted May 12, 2017 With your kind permission, I will so fucking use that as a blurb... "It is like reading the naughtier cousin of a really good Tales From The Crypt collection." That's the coolest review I've had since Lance Levine gave Goon an AEIOUY* in Chokehold back in the day. *For those not around then, Chokehold was like the Wrestling Observer Newsletter if the WON were written by Dave Chappelle and Jim Jeffries. Just for starters, instead of throwing snowflakes around to rate matches, movies, books, etc. Lance used vowels; so obviously an AEIOUY would be like the proverbial six-star match. ;-) Oh yeah, this is the tome being referenced, a mere $30.00 postpaid via PayPal to [email protected]. If so desired, I will even scribble something clever by way of personalization. ;-) 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.T. Posted May 12, 2017 Share Posted May 12, 2017 Borrow away, my friend. My opinion is sincere! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marty Sugar Posted May 14, 2017 Share Posted May 14, 2017 Finished the third book my daughters' got me for my birthday: DEAD RINGERS by Christopher Golden. It deals with doppelgangers, but not in an "Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers" way. A fast-paced little horror story, although the last five lines of the book...I dunno, maybe they weren't necessary. My daughters made some awesome book choices, though. Proud of them. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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