Fiction
The Sleeper
Fiction
The sleeper was put on leave from his work. Several days later, he decided to see how long he could remain unconscious. He went to the bathroom. He went back to bed and slept all day and all night. At the end of the following day, he began to receive urgent body messages. He dreamed he was discarded for another man or else behooved to step aside in favor of a kindly ideal. He sadly acquiesced, charitably acknowledging the way of the world before urinating in a potted plant.
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The Institute of Joy
Fiction
In 1988, to see Humberto Pacheco in his homeless man’s attire, overgrown coat sleeves and no undershirt, a knotted rope tightening his waist band, bare unshaven balls in the shadow of his opened zipper, is to confuse the abandoned basement where he slept, and the purpose the larger building had formerly embodied, with the ever-deepening well of destitution it had…
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Boys In Blue
Fiction
There ain’t shit on TV on a Saturday afternoon. My buddy Lyle and I come in here after our morning shifts and knock back a couple and bitch about how there’s nothing to look at except the girl serving us drinks and the guys arm wrestling on television. Lyle runs his own industrial parts store and I work most of…
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The Sickness Unto Tuesday
Fiction
According to Danish philosopher, Bernard Claw, gimcrack corncrake and give the dog a bone, the self is the self when the self is not being the self, assuming, of course, the self is entirely selfless when the self is selfsame or, at least, selflessly the self, all things being the self. Then again, this may be incorrect since this is,…
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Many Islands
Fiction
On our island, no woman may cook on a fire that was lit by a man. No one may touch the foot of a chief. “Who made these rules?” asked our chief’s son, while we sat cross-legged around the kava bowl, watching the green-bottomed clouds drift monotonously across the lagoon. “Why may I not sit with a woman who is…
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Columns
No Way Out: Jason Starr’s “Fake I.D.”
Columns
By now, fans of Hard Case Crime’s brand of pulp crime fiction already know Jason Starr. Along with the delightfully cynical crime writer Ken Bruen of Ireland, Starr co-authored Bust, Slide, and The Max—a wicked trilogy reveling in dark humor, gratuitous sex & violence, and…
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Christa Faust’s Money Shot Cashes In
Columns
Hard Case Crime recently turned 50. The independent publishing house dedicated to all things pulp has published over 50 titles since it opened for business in 2005. And what a business for lovers of crime fiction: HCC not only reissues out of print classics by…
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Doing It Right: Interview with Gregg Hurwitz
Columns
Los Angeles. The city of (fallen) angels has lured many crime fiction writers over the years, its truths often stranger than fiction. From Hollywood to Echo Park, L.A. is a siren song of corruption, racial tension, drugs, and silicone implants. Perfect grist for a writer’s…
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Easyreeder
Columns
WEEK 1 UNRELIABLE NARRATOR Do you want a reliable narrator? An unreliable narrator? If there is any first-person element to your narration, there’s one answer: all people lie to themselves, all people are unreliable. The question is of degree. While extremely unreliable narrators are fascinating…
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[CRIME CORNER] Lawrence Block: Romance of the Ordinary Life
Columns
Lawrence Block, Hit and Run 304 pages, $24.95 Published by William Morrow Keller is back. This spring, Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Lawrence Block rolled out the latest exploits of Keller, full-time assassin and amateur philatelist. Block’s newest novel in 3 years, Hit and…
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Interviews
To Be Sure Of Things That Are In Fact Quite Mistaken: Ken Kalfus Interview
Interviews
Ken Kalfus’s last novel, the National Book Award-nominated A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, opens with a husband and wife on 9/11, each wondering about the other’s fate. You might have heard that story before; the difference is that here the husband and wife are…
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STILL ALIVE TO TELL THE TALE: An Interview with Don Bajema, Author of Winged Shoes and a Shield
Interviews
Last October, City Lights Books published Don Bajema’s collection of 46 stories, Winged Shoes and a Shield. These luminous, closely-connected stories follow the coming of age of Eddie Burnett, who survives his violent San-Diego-military-family childhood only by learning to land a punch as artfully as…
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The Influence of Perception: Jesse Prinz interviewed by Evdokia Sofos
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Interviews
Artists create worlds, but the world we live in is also a creation.
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KGB Interview: Richard C. Morais
Interviews
Richard C. Morais, author of the international bestseller The Hundred-Foot Journey, is the Editor of Barron’s Penta in New York. An American raised in Switzerland, he was Forbes’s European Bureau Chief in London for 18 years. Buddhaland Brooklyn, his second novel, is being published by…
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KGB Interview: Jill Dearman
Interviews
To borrow a baseball phrase (the season is upon us, you know, and the Yankees AND the Mets are winning!) Jill Dearman is the “triple threat” of the literary world – acclaimed author, innovative editor and dynamic writing coach. Oh, she also can see into…
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Book Reviews
*****ORIGINAL MESSAGE***** by Matthew Frazier
Book Reviews
*****Original Message***** (Hunt & Light) exists precisely at the place where people write forlorn Facebook statuses instead of diary entries. The title, stylized with five asterisks on either end, suggests an email thread—a representation of new definitions words have taken on in the past two…
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THE WHISPERING MUSE, FROM THE MOUTH OF THE WHALE, and THE BLUE FOX by Sjón
Book Reviews
Works in translation occupy a strange, pleasing limbo for well-rounded readers. Typically they enter public notice after the first cycle of literary prizes abroad has rained down on the head of the author, but before foregone conclusions and assumptions precede the books themselves. Each novel…
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LET THE DARK FLOWER BLOSSOM by Norah Labiner
Book Reviews
Billed as an “existential murder mystery,” Norah Labiner‘s fourth novel, Let the Dark Flower Blossom (Coffee House Press), will subsume you. It’s a protean universe—lush with scandal, violence, and perverse glamour—where everything and nothing is true. All of the tantalizing ingredients of a solid mystery…
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SPEEDBOAT by Renata Adler
Book Reviews
In fifteenth century Italy, the zibaldone appeared. A new type of book, the zibaldone collected bits and pieces of various texts according to its compiler’s taste, adhering to no other discernible order. Quotations from literature, personal reflections, scientific observations, aphorisms, philosophical insights, philological investigations, and…
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DAVAI! The Russians and Their Vodka by Edwin Trommelen. Translated by David Stephenson.
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Book Reviews
Edwin Trommelen’s Davai! The Russians and Their Vodka (Russian Life Books) is as comprehensive a book as one could hope to find on the six-hundred year love/hate affair between Russia and vodka, the sacred and profane ‘little water,’ a name which almost seems to denote…
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