Otto Penzler is a well-known editor of mystery fiction in the United States, and proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, where he lives. Located in Tribeca, The Mysterious Bookshop is one of the oldest and largest mystery specialist bookstores in America. Penzler is the author of 101 Greatest Movies of Mystery and Suspense (2000). For the New York Sun, he wrote The Crime Scene, a popular weekly mystery fiction column that ran for several years. He has worked with several outstanding authors including Elmore Leonard, Nelson DeMille, Joyce Carol Oates, Sue Grafton, Mary Higgins Clark, Robert Crais, […]
BOOKS: Atlas Mugged
BY SAINT JOHN BARNED-SMITH FOR OBIT.COM During her life, Ayn Rand created a shrouded, larger-than-life myth about herself. She credited only Aristotle as an inspiration for her beliefs and insisted that her philosophy, Objectivism – which conceived of man “as a heroic being with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute” – was a wholly original system. (Never mind that she read Nietzsche along with other philosophers and political theorists.) Ayn Rand changed her name (Alisa Rosenbaum) and home. The novelist and philosopher had […]
Asterix & Obelisk Turn 50, Still Kicking Roman Ass
TIME: For 50 years, the small but cunning warrior Asterix and his podgy stonemason pal Obelix have been battling the armies of Julius Caesar in their remote village on the Brittany coast — the only part of ancient Gaul never conquered by the Romans. The latest episode in the pair’s comic-strip adventures will be released in France on Thursday to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the first Asterix story, written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo for the magazine Pilote in 1959. The highly anticipated new book, The Birthday of Asterix and Obelix, is the 34th in […]
BOOKS: Q&A With Author Ali Eteraz
BY PHILLYGRRL Twenty-eight year old Ali Eteraz’s Children of Dust: A Memoir of Pakistan was hardly in bookstores a week before the November issue of Opraha’s O Magazine featured it on its fall reading list. But before he was a published author, Eteraz was a Philadelphian, writing in cafés around the city, albeit one with a reputation for a now-inactive, popular reformist Muslim blog. And now Eteraz has come back to Philadelphia for a reading from his book at the Free Library tomorrow night. In the book, Eteraz narrates his transformation from a young boy attending a madrassa in Pakistan […]
SHERIFF: Charges Pending In Balloon Boy Saga
ASSOCIATED PRESS: The sheriff of Larimer County, Colo., said late Saturday that charges will be filed in the case of the 6-year-old boy who vanished into the rafters of his garage for five hours while the world thought he was zooming through the sky in a flying-saucer-like helium balloon. The boy’s father, Richard Heene, met with sheriff’s officials earlier in the day amid lingering questions about whether he perpetrated a hoax. Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden didn’t say Saturday night what the charges would be, but he did say the parents, Richard and his wife, Mayumi Heene, aren’t under arrest. […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
[CLICK TO ENLARGE] FRESH AIR While most record companies of the 1940s and 1950s made money in one genre, Cincinnati-based King Records spread the love to R & B, rockabilly, bluegrass, western swing and country. Jon Hartley Fox tells the story in his new book King of the Queen City. Combining archival research with contemporary interviews, Fox describes the company by focusing on the people who made up the culture, including executives Sydney Nathan, Henry Glover and Ralph Bass, as well as artists like Red Foxx, Johnny “Guitar” Watson and James Brown. A Dayton resident now based in California, Fox […]
John Hodgman Is NOT A PC, He Just Plays One On TV
PHAWKER: So just to be up front, your new book, More Information Than You Require, just showed up this morning, so I have barely even skimmed it. But my favorite endorsement is from Justin Long, the guy who plays the Mac dude in your Apple commercials, who says “I love this book so much I almost read it!” But seeing as how I am completely unprepared to discuss your book, we will have to do this on the honor system. Is your book any good? JOHN HODGMAN: I think my book is ‘any good’, yes. I would categorize it as […]
BOOKS: Glorious Bastard
ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH: The compact biography deftly recreates the scenes of Barney Ross’s life, of a striver “intoxicated by the clouds of cigar smoke hovering over the men in fedoras; the fists mummified in billiard cloth and tape; the mineral jelly smeared on gashed eyebrows; the tattoo of leather on leather….” Century moves from Ross’s early years in Chicago to his place in the history of Jewish prizefighting. More interesting to me, though, was the author’s ability to convey a life defined by strife, one that seemed to embody that of a generation. From the very beginning, “Life was a […]
RAWK TAWK: Q&A With Rock Critic Jim Derogatis
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Jim Derogatis is the pop music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, co-host of public radio’s rock talk show Sound Opinions, the definitive Lester Bangs biographer and author of five books, including the just-published and altogether beautiful The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side. Derogatis got his start in the rock crit biz back in 1982 when Lester Bangs agreed to sit for an interview to satisfy Derogatis’ high school journalism class assignment requiring him to interview one of his heroes. Two weeks later, Bangs was dead at the ripe old age […]
BOOK REVIEW: Undiscovered Gyrl
BY SYDNEY SCOTT Pretty much everyone on the planet, it seems, has a blog. Sharing your ideas, opinions, and life stories with millions of anonymous Internet users is now commonplace. Allison Burnett blurs the lines between blogging and book-writing with her novel Undiscovered Gyrl. This book surprised me. What looks like an annoying chick lit novel is the surface turns out to be anything but: Katie Kampenfelt is a seventeen-year-old high school graduate who decides to start an online journal chronicling her life and sexual escapades. She posts stories of her first job, an affair with a married man and […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Edward M. Kennedy, who died Aug. 25, 2009 after serving 46 years in the U.S. Senate, kept careful notes and journals about his life for nearly 50 years. Now, in his posthumously published memoir True Compass, Kennedy reflects on the controversies, successes and tragedies of his famous family. The book, which was co-authored by Ron Powers, is published by Twelve Books. Jonathan Karp, editor-in-chief and publisher of Twelve, speaks with Terry Gross about his experiences working with the late senator in the final year of Kennedy’s life. RADIO TIMES Hour 1 According to the most recent Department of […]
DOOMSDAY: Libraries To Close October 1st If State Legislature Is Still Dicking Around With Budget Fix
INQUIRER: The Free Library of Philadelphia has posted notices at its branches and on its web site advising users that all libraries will close at the end of business on Oct. 2 if the state Legislature does not act on the city’s budget request. The notices also say that all material will now be due Oct. 1 and that nothing can be borrowed after Sept. 30. Besides closing libraries, the Nutter administration’s so-called Plan C doomsday budget includes eliminating court-system funding, shutting down all recreation centers and laying off up to 3,000 workers, including police and firefighters. MORE PHILLY CLOUT: […]
RIP: Basketball Diaries Author Jim Carroll Dead At 59
NEW YORK TIMES: Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud and Burroughs who chronicled his wild youth in “The Basketball Diaries,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60. The cause was a heart attack, said Rosemary Carroll, his former wife. As a teenage basketball star in the 1960s at Trinity, an elite private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Carroll led a chaotic life that combined sports, drugs and poetry. This highly unusual combination lent a lurid appeal to “The Basketball Diaries,” the journal he kept during […]