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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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Fiction
“Want a lick?” Leonard smiled broadly as he strolled up to Baldwin. He was holding the Book of Ash in one hand, a lemon wedge in the other. For a moment, Baldwin saw something attractive in his stepfather’s face, not a traditional masculine beauty, although he did have a firm jaw line, solid cheekbone structure, and symmetrical nose and eyes,…
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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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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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Fiction
Alone in the house with his wife’s Peruvian maid, his emotions get the better of him. The sun is setting in the kitchen, its last rays illuminating the fading yellow wallpaper. She sits across him at the breakfast table, listening attentively as he discusses his upcoming divorce. “Is terrible,” she says, thoughtfully scratching her chin with her index finger, “is…
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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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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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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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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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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
Douglas Light is rolling, and not just on his Triumph. His first novel, East Fifth Bliss, a coming of age story about a man (Morris Bliss) who should have come of age years ago, has been made into an upcoming feature film starring Michael C.…
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Interviews
KGB sat down with Howard Kogan, a social worker and psychoanalyst, who is directing his energies of late on poetry and creative writing. His new book of poems, Indian Summer, recently released by Square Circle Press, is garnering high praise. Without charging anything for the…
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Interviews
Jackie Corley is on a literary roll – founder of a growing online journal and out with a short story collection (The Suburban Swindle) that has been compared to Denis Johnson’s iconic Jesus’ Son. KGB sat down with the busy writer and indie publisher to…
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Everything starts with voice. I spent the first few months just following it wherever it wanted to go, trying to pre-edit as little as possible.
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Book Reviews
Whenever a big test match bubbles up to the international sports headlines, I start to get uncomfortable. As a sports fan, I want to like—or at least understand—cricket, but I’ve never been able to make sense out of its mysterious scoring, languid pace, and baroque,…
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Book Reviews
In Kevin Barry’s new novel City of Bohane (Graywolf Press), it is easy to be swept under by the sheer inventiveness of his writing and the deeply imagined shape of the world he’s created. Bohane, a fictional town surrounded by the Big Nothing on the…
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Book Reviews
Certainly no one would be able to capture him in a story the way that Nescio, a businessman-cum-writer did in “The Freeloader.” The multitalented Dutchman went by the pen name Nescio but was really J.H.F. Grönloh, a successful director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company, who created what many consider some of the greatest Dutch modern writing of the early 20th century.
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Book Reviews
Set against the backdrop of Russian history from the time of Peter the Great to the post-Soviet collapse, Stephan Eirik Clark‘s debut collection of short stories Vladimir’s Mustache () invokes a remarkable series of history’s ghosts. Each builds shuddering momentum, like a…
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Book Reviews
Recently, there was a major news story about Russian scientists in Antarctica who, after drilling down through over two miles of ice, had reached Lake Vostok, the largest sub-glacial lake in the world. They were looking for what life, if any, they might find there,…
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