If you read ebooks, it's a nice time to be a fan of good supernatural and horror fiction. There have been first-rate small presses devoted to the genre for a long time, and some of them are making backlist and new titles available in digital editions at reasonable prices.
Cemetery Dance is an excellent publisher of horror fiction; even if the house wasn't publishing good new material, such as their limited edition hardcover of Kealan Patrick Burke's Kin and the new ebook A Life in Cinema by Mick Garris, CD would deserve kudos for issuing the ebook edition of Kirby McCauley's 1980 anthology Dark Forces. Dark Forces was a big collection of original horror stories done by some of the field's top names along with entries by writers not usually associated with the genre at the time such as Isaac Bashevis Singer and Joyce Carol Oates. This collection contained the original appearance of Stephen King's "The Mist," and also included work by Theodore Sturgeon, Russell Kirk, and Dennis Etchison. It's an excellent collection and it's available at a bargain price -- only $6.99 in the Kindle store.
Also active in ebooks these days is Ash-Tree Press. Ash-Tree is a Canadian publisher specializing in the classic ghost story, epitomized by the work of M. R. James. One of Ash-Tree's offerings is A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings of M. R. James, which includes all of his ghost stories and his essays on supernatural fiction. Ash-Tree is also in the process of releasing six collections that will include all the ghost stories of E. F. Benson. If you've not read Benson's work, check out the text of his short story "Caterpillars;" after you've read that one, you'll want more. Ash-Tree is also offering work by H. Russell Wakefield, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others.
And publishers such as Necon, Samhain Publishing, and Macabre Ink have issued novels and short story collections by writers such as Alan Peter Ryan, Ramsey Campbell, Charles L. Grant, Jack Ketchum, Thomas Tessier, John Skipp and Craig Spector, Al Sarrantonio, Richard Christian Matheson and plenty more.
There are a number of good writers who are simply putting the work out there on their own. A nice example here is the series of Penny Dreadnought collections offering stories by James Everington, Iain Rowan, Aaron Polson, and Alan Ryker; three of these are out so far, and each contains a story by each of the four contributors.
There's plenty for the horror fan to choose from in the way of novels and short story collections. But what about the big anthologies? The ones that could serve as textbooks for a good classroom survey course in the genre? The best-known representative anthologies are probably the Modern Library anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural and David Hartwell's The Dark Descent. Both are excellent collections, and chances are any lover of the horror story owns one or both. A more recent representative collection is the big 2-volume The Century's Best Horror Fiction edited by John Pelan and published by Cemetery Dance; this one's expensive, priced at $150 for the set, but the selection of stories is terrific. None of these are available as ebooks, unfortunately.
If you want a good representative anthology of the weird tale in ebook form, your best bet at the moment is probably The Weird edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. This one isn't from a small press; it's published by Tor/Macmillan, and at first glance it may seem a bit pricey for an ebook at $14.99, but it includes stories selected from a century's work in the genre, like Pelan's two-volume collection (and while there's some overlap in the selections, there's not very much). Among the 110 stories are Fritz Leiber's "Smoke Ghost," Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good LIfe," Robert Bloch's "The Hungry House," Saki's "Sredni Vashtar," Charles Beaumont's "The Howling Man," George R. R. Martin's "Sandkings," and Harlan Ellison's "The Function of Dream Sleep." The lineup of authors includes Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Poppy Z. Brite, Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman, Jorge Luis Borges, Shirley Jackson, and more Pricey? For a package this nice, $14.99 is a steal.
Links to some of the titles recommended above (links are to the U.S. Amazon Kindle store):
The Weird
A Pleasing Terror: the Complete Supernatural Writings of M. R. James
Dark Forces
"Caterpillars, by E. F. Benson"
The Penny Dreadnought Collections
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Friday, January 13, 2012
A Writer Who Can Do It All
At KindleBoards.com in the Book Corner section, one of the denizens started a thread devoted to the question, "What are your top 5 books of all time?"
Normally, I hate that question, for a few reasons -- never been able to understand how anybody could actually rank his favorites in such a way to come up with an absolute top 5 of all time, never been able to understand why anybody could actually WANT to rank them that way, and (worst of all) never been able to NOT think about the question when it's asked. So instead of goofing off, or working, or doing battle with the novel-in-progress, I found myself thinking about my top 5 books of all time.
No, I don't have a solid now-and-forever top 5. Given enough time and skull sweat I might be able to come up with a top 10 list in a number of different categories: top 10 thrillers, top 10 science fiction and fantasy novels, top 10 horror novels, top 10 general/mainstream/literary/call-it-what-you-like. But I don't have those lists and I'm not going to clutter up the evening trying to build them -- an hour after I did so, I'd be kicking myself for leaving off this title or that one and then I'd have to build the lists all over again. That way lies madness.
But while thinking about the question, it did occur to me that there's someone who'd rank in the top 10 in multiple categories. Fantasy, thriller, mystery and suspense, general/literary, non-fiction. As far as novel-writing goes, he's fallen silent; he's devoted most of his time to screenwriting and script doctoring for quite a while now.
The writer is William Goldman.
You know his work. Even if you don't recognize his name (unlikely), you're bound to have seen at least one of the movies he's written. Adaptations of books by other writers (including Misery, Hearts in Atlantis, All the President's Men, Absolute Power, A Bridge Too Far), original scripts of his own (The Great Waldo Pepper, The Ghost and the Darkness, Year of the Comet, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), and adaptations of his own books (Marathon Man, Magic, and The Princess Bride).
Goldman's novels include: The Temple of Gold; Boys and Girls Together; No Way to Treat a Lady; Soldier in the Rain; The Thing of It Is...; Marathon Man; Magic; The Princess Bride; Heat; Control; Tinsel; Brothers; The Color of Light. And he's written non-fiction as well, including Adventures in the Screen Trade and Hype and Glory.
Look at that list (if you don't know the novels but only the movies look at the list of originals and adaptations of his own work) and think about the range of it. The Princess Bride is a wonderful comic fantasy. Marathon Man is, in my opinion, the finest thriller of the 70s. Magic is a chilling psychological horror story. Tinsel is a big Hollywood novel. Control and Brothers (a sequel to Marathon Man) are both thrillers with science fiction elements woven in. No Way to Treat a Lady is a nifty mystery/suspense story. And the others, like The Temple of Gold and Boys and Girls Together -- non-genre fiction of a high order.
How high an order? Let me put it this way: Salinger's Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye always struck me as too much of a literary construct; Goldman's Ray Trevitt from The Temple of Gold seemed far more real to me. Goldman could take a character like Aaron Firestone in Boys and Girls Together, a character who gets less sympathetic with every scene he's in, and make you cry for him. Goldman could write scenes that chill your blood and almost make you laugh out loud at the same time, in books like Marathon Man and Magic. (And if there's a novelist anywhere who can handle scenes involving insecurity or humiliation better than Goldman, I don't know who it is.) Some people said that some of his later novels didn't measure up to the earlier ones, and for me Heat and Brothers weren't in the same class as their predecessors -- but even those books were so engagingly written that I never once felt I hadn't gotten more than my money's worth (and I didn't wait for the paperbacks -- grabbed them in hardcover on the day of release). Some of Goldman's books may not have been in the same league as others of his titles, but that's the way it works for every writer -- Budd Schulberg once likened a writer's work to a mountain range and noted that not every peak is Everest. I can't recall ever reading a page of Goldman that I found dull; dull may just be the only thing Goldman can't write.
If you know William Goldman's work only from his screenwriting (dynamite though that is), treat yourself to some of his fiction. You won't be disappointed. You may find yourself with somebody to add to your own top 10 list.
UPDATE: Dec 20, 2012. On January 8, three of Goldman's best novels, The Temple of Gold, Marathon Man, and Boys and Girls Together, will finally be released as ebooks in Amazon's Kindle store. The ebook editions will be coming from Open Road Media, a house that tends to release all or most of its authors' available backlist -- here's hoping that the rest of Goldman's novels will soon follow.
Normally, I hate that question, for a few reasons -- never been able to understand how anybody could actually rank his favorites in such a way to come up with an absolute top 5 of all time, never been able to understand why anybody could actually WANT to rank them that way, and (worst of all) never been able to NOT think about the question when it's asked. So instead of goofing off, or working, or doing battle with the novel-in-progress, I found myself thinking about my top 5 books of all time.
No, I don't have a solid now-and-forever top 5. Given enough time and skull sweat I might be able to come up with a top 10 list in a number of different categories: top 10 thrillers, top 10 science fiction and fantasy novels, top 10 horror novels, top 10 general/mainstream/literary/call-it-what-you-like. But I don't have those lists and I'm not going to clutter up the evening trying to build them -- an hour after I did so, I'd be kicking myself for leaving off this title or that one and then I'd have to build the lists all over again. That way lies madness.
But while thinking about the question, it did occur to me that there's someone who'd rank in the top 10 in multiple categories. Fantasy, thriller, mystery and suspense, general/literary, non-fiction. As far as novel-writing goes, he's fallen silent; he's devoted most of his time to screenwriting and script doctoring for quite a while now.
The writer is William Goldman.
You know his work. Even if you don't recognize his name (unlikely), you're bound to have seen at least one of the movies he's written. Adaptations of books by other writers (including Misery, Hearts in Atlantis, All the President's Men, Absolute Power, A Bridge Too Far), original scripts of his own (The Great Waldo Pepper, The Ghost and the Darkness, Year of the Comet, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), and adaptations of his own books (Marathon Man, Magic, and The Princess Bride).
Goldman's novels include: The Temple of Gold; Boys and Girls Together; No Way to Treat a Lady; Soldier in the Rain; The Thing of It Is...; Marathon Man; Magic; The Princess Bride; Heat; Control; Tinsel; Brothers; The Color of Light. And he's written non-fiction as well, including Adventures in the Screen Trade and Hype and Glory.
Look at that list (if you don't know the novels but only the movies look at the list of originals and adaptations of his own work) and think about the range of it. The Princess Bride is a wonderful comic fantasy. Marathon Man is, in my opinion, the finest thriller of the 70s. Magic is a chilling psychological horror story. Tinsel is a big Hollywood novel. Control and Brothers (a sequel to Marathon Man) are both thrillers with science fiction elements woven in. No Way to Treat a Lady is a nifty mystery/suspense story. And the others, like The Temple of Gold and Boys and Girls Together -- non-genre fiction of a high order.
How high an order? Let me put it this way: Salinger's Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye always struck me as too much of a literary construct; Goldman's Ray Trevitt from The Temple of Gold seemed far more real to me. Goldman could take a character like Aaron Firestone in Boys and Girls Together, a character who gets less sympathetic with every scene he's in, and make you cry for him. Goldman could write scenes that chill your blood and almost make you laugh out loud at the same time, in books like Marathon Man and Magic. (And if there's a novelist anywhere who can handle scenes involving insecurity or humiliation better than Goldman, I don't know who it is.) Some people said that some of his later novels didn't measure up to the earlier ones, and for me Heat and Brothers weren't in the same class as their predecessors -- but even those books were so engagingly written that I never once felt I hadn't gotten more than my money's worth (and I didn't wait for the paperbacks -- grabbed them in hardcover on the day of release). Some of Goldman's books may not have been in the same league as others of his titles, but that's the way it works for every writer -- Budd Schulberg once likened a writer's work to a mountain range and noted that not every peak is Everest. I can't recall ever reading a page of Goldman that I found dull; dull may just be the only thing Goldman can't write.
If you know William Goldman's work only from his screenwriting (dynamite though that is), treat yourself to some of his fiction. You won't be disappointed. You may find yourself with somebody to add to your own top 10 list.
UPDATE: Dec 20, 2012. On January 8, three of Goldman's best novels, The Temple of Gold, Marathon Man, and Boys and Girls Together, will finally be released as ebooks in Amazon's Kindle store. The ebook editions will be coming from Open Road Media, a house that tends to release all or most of its authors' available backlist -- here's hoping that the rest of Goldman's novels will soon follow.
Friday, December 9, 2011
That's Not a Real Book and in a Few Years You Won't Be Able to Read It Anyway
Ray Bradbury finally in ebook? Well, not all of Bradbury, unfortunately, but at least a major title as opposed to a couple of short stories. Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury's classic of a society in which firemen burn books, has finally been made available for the Kindle. It's welcome news for those who, like me, saw his comment at the end of his Paris Review interview a while back -- as I recall, he said that he'd answered offers regarding ebook releases with an emphatic "Go to hell." -- and assumed that his major work would never be made available in digital editions.
Naturally, there have been disapproving comments in some circles, suggesting that the release of Fahrenheit 451 in ebook form is somehow a betrayal of the book. It isn't, of course; there isn't a reason in the world why there can't be both print and digital editions of Bradbury's work. Or anyone else's for that matter.
But one of the objections occasionally brought up regarding ebooks is that literary treasures would vanish if they exist only in digital format, that books cannot be entrusted to the computer.
Well, yes and no.
If an ebook never appears in a printed edition, is published only in digital form and then only in one or two formats, and is never migrated to new formats as new formats are developed, then that title runs the risk of being lost. But exactly how does that differ from the case of a print title released by its publisher to little fanfare and never reissued after the original printing is sold out or remaindered? Eventually the supply of used copies runs out, the libraries withdraw their copies if they aren't circulating quickly enough, and finally that title is facing oblivion just as surely as its digital counterpart.
There are the inevitable you-don't-need-to-recharge-a-real-book comments, the laments over the weight and feel and even the smell of the physical object. And no question, a well-designed and printed physical book is a delight. But not an unalloyed delight. Take Stephen King's 11/22/63; that's one good-sized item, and these days I find it difficult to hold a book that size, and I doubt I'm alone -- the Kindle edition is a godsend.
The notion that's inevitably raised, though, and in tones that suggest that THIS is the unanswerable argument, is the fact that so many old computer files are no longer readable. And for some files created in early operating systems, before there were computers on nearly every desktop in the known universe, that's true. But, for instance, on my desktop PC in my home I have files created 15 or 20 years ago on other machines, files that I moved with no difficulty as I upgraded, files created in software programs that I no longer use or own, files that I can now open in other programs if need be. I don't believe I'm unique this way, but I'm small-time, and not looking at trying to make sure my files survive for a century or more. Does anyone seriously think that as publishers go digital they won't consider storage of their titles in formats that can be easily migrated? That there will be no libraries or other archives working on automated migration procedures? (I'm assuming here that publishers are rational beings wishing to preserve valuable assets for the future, though a number of them still don't seem at all comfortable with digital material yet.) Or that writers won't do the same with their own work?
Take a look at Smashwords. Every ebook published there can be made available in multiple formats as specified by the author; those formats include plain text and rich text format, both of which can be read by any word processor, and HTML which can be read with any web browser. The ebooks created there can be run through conversion programs like Calibre and saved in other ebook formats as well. Unless the EMP attack happens (in which case we'll have more pressing problems anyway), there shouldn't be any reason to worry about those files. Copies should be available for as long as anyone cares to maintain them.
Now, that's Smashwords, where the authors publish their own titles, and no DRM is used. Most commercial publishers still insist on DRM, which is meant to make sure that you can't move your ebook to any but approved devices, to make sure that you don't take your copy of the file and run it through a conversion program to create a copy for your Kindle if you change from a B&N Nook or vice versa. The ebooks crippled with DRM are the ones you may not be able to read later if the seller goes out of business or you switch from one ebook reader to another -- that's not some unavoidable limitation of a computer-generated file, rather it's a deliberate attempt by the publisher to make certain the file can't be read elsewhere easily.
DRM strikes me as something that would increase the risk of digital extinction for the ebooks so burdened, most of which are from the same publishers who are happy to discontinue print versions that don't sell enough to justify keeping them available. But that's a subject for another time.
***
Elsewhere on the backlist scene:
While Fahrenheit 451 is the big news backlist ebook title recently, there are other publishers busily reissuing older titles as ebooks
Bloomsbury Reader has recently issued more than a dozen titles by V. S. Pritchett. Pritchett was probably best known for his short stories and reviews, but he also wrote biographies of Balzac, Turgenev, and Chekhov, travel books, novels, and two autobiographical works. Much of his work is out of print in the US and his reappearance in ebook formats here is good news. If you've not read Pritchett, you can get a nice sampling of his work in the Bloomsbury Reader edition of The Other Side of a Frontier or in Modern Library's The Pritchett Century (the latter a bit more pricey than the Bloomsbury title, though with some different selections -- this one is available both in print and ebook form). Bloomsbury is also reissuing titles by Ronald Clark, Storm Jameson, Alec Waugh, and others.
MysteriousPress.com is working with Open Road to reissue backlist titles by a number of mystery writers, among them James Ellroy, Donald Westlake, and soon, Brian Garfield. Garfield is probably best known for Death Wish; that title will be forthcoming along with other excellent thrillers like Hopscotch, Recoil, and Fear in a Handful of Dust. It'll be nice to see them back. Open Road has been very active on backlist over the past year, releasing titles by Stanley Elkin, Andre Dubus, Natalie Goldberg, Lawrence Block, and more.
Good stuff coming, but there's a lot more good material waiting for revival. Faster, please.
Naturally, there have been disapproving comments in some circles, suggesting that the release of Fahrenheit 451 in ebook form is somehow a betrayal of the book. It isn't, of course; there isn't a reason in the world why there can't be both print and digital editions of Bradbury's work. Or anyone else's for that matter.
But one of the objections occasionally brought up regarding ebooks is that literary treasures would vanish if they exist only in digital format, that books cannot be entrusted to the computer.
Well, yes and no.
If an ebook never appears in a printed edition, is published only in digital form and then only in one or two formats, and is never migrated to new formats as new formats are developed, then that title runs the risk of being lost. But exactly how does that differ from the case of a print title released by its publisher to little fanfare and never reissued after the original printing is sold out or remaindered? Eventually the supply of used copies runs out, the libraries withdraw their copies if they aren't circulating quickly enough, and finally that title is facing oblivion just as surely as its digital counterpart.
There are the inevitable you-don't-need-to-recharge-a-real-book comments, the laments over the weight and feel and even the smell of the physical object. And no question, a well-designed and printed physical book is a delight. But not an unalloyed delight. Take Stephen King's 11/22/63; that's one good-sized item, and these days I find it difficult to hold a book that size, and I doubt I'm alone -- the Kindle edition is a godsend.
The notion that's inevitably raised, though, and in tones that suggest that THIS is the unanswerable argument, is the fact that so many old computer files are no longer readable. And for some files created in early operating systems, before there were computers on nearly every desktop in the known universe, that's true. But, for instance, on my desktop PC in my home I have files created 15 or 20 years ago on other machines, files that I moved with no difficulty as I upgraded, files created in software programs that I no longer use or own, files that I can now open in other programs if need be. I don't believe I'm unique this way, but I'm small-time, and not looking at trying to make sure my files survive for a century or more. Does anyone seriously think that as publishers go digital they won't consider storage of their titles in formats that can be easily migrated? That there will be no libraries or other archives working on automated migration procedures? (I'm assuming here that publishers are rational beings wishing to preserve valuable assets for the future, though a number of them still don't seem at all comfortable with digital material yet.) Or that writers won't do the same with their own work?
Take a look at Smashwords. Every ebook published there can be made available in multiple formats as specified by the author; those formats include plain text and rich text format, both of which can be read by any word processor, and HTML which can be read with any web browser. The ebooks created there can be run through conversion programs like Calibre and saved in other ebook formats as well. Unless the EMP attack happens (in which case we'll have more pressing problems anyway), there shouldn't be any reason to worry about those files. Copies should be available for as long as anyone cares to maintain them.
Now, that's Smashwords, where the authors publish their own titles, and no DRM is used. Most commercial publishers still insist on DRM, which is meant to make sure that you can't move your ebook to any but approved devices, to make sure that you don't take your copy of the file and run it through a conversion program to create a copy for your Kindle if you change from a B&N Nook or vice versa. The ebooks crippled with DRM are the ones you may not be able to read later if the seller goes out of business or you switch from one ebook reader to another -- that's not some unavoidable limitation of a computer-generated file, rather it's a deliberate attempt by the publisher to make certain the file can't be read elsewhere easily.
DRM strikes me as something that would increase the risk of digital extinction for the ebooks so burdened, most of which are from the same publishers who are happy to discontinue print versions that don't sell enough to justify keeping them available. But that's a subject for another time.
***
Elsewhere on the backlist scene:
While Fahrenheit 451 is the big news backlist ebook title recently, there are other publishers busily reissuing older titles as ebooks
Bloomsbury Reader has recently issued more than a dozen titles by V. S. Pritchett. Pritchett was probably best known for his short stories and reviews, but he also wrote biographies of Balzac, Turgenev, and Chekhov, travel books, novels, and two autobiographical works. Much of his work is out of print in the US and his reappearance in ebook formats here is good news. If you've not read Pritchett, you can get a nice sampling of his work in the Bloomsbury Reader edition of The Other Side of a Frontier or in Modern Library's The Pritchett Century (the latter a bit more pricey than the Bloomsbury title, though with some different selections -- this one is available both in print and ebook form). Bloomsbury is also reissuing titles by Ronald Clark, Storm Jameson, Alec Waugh, and others.
MysteriousPress.com is working with Open Road to reissue backlist titles by a number of mystery writers, among them James Ellroy, Donald Westlake, and soon, Brian Garfield. Garfield is probably best known for Death Wish; that title will be forthcoming along with other excellent thrillers like Hopscotch, Recoil, and Fear in a Handful of Dust. It'll be nice to see them back. Open Road has been very active on backlist over the past year, releasing titles by Stanley Elkin, Andre Dubus, Natalie Goldberg, Lawrence Block, and more.
Good stuff coming, but there's a lot more good material waiting for revival. Faster, please.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
A Few Treats for Halloween
Halloween's less than a week away. Turner Classic Movies has been running a nice selection of horror films on Mondays this month, and on Halloween the channel will run a day of Hammer horror films and top off the evening with the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, THE HAUNTING, and THE INNOCENTS, as well as an hour with Stephen King talking about horror films.
But there's plenty of horror to be found on the printed page too. In case you've missed them, you might want to check out some of the following short story collections. Why short stories? Well, we drop bite-size treats into the kids' Halloween bags when they come to the door -- same principle.
There's no real need to remind anyone to check out the work of Stephen King or Ray Bradbury or Shirley Jackson this time of year. If you've missed King's collection NIGHT SHIFT or Bradbury's THE OCTOBER COUNTRY, or Jackson's THE LOTTERY, you're cheating yourself. But unless you're a devoted fan of horror year-round and not just on Halloween, you may have missed some of the following.
NIGHT'S BLACK AGENTS, by Fritz Leiber. The first collection by the writer who brought the tale of supernatural horror into the modern urban setting. Try for one of the later editions that includes the classic chiller "The Girl with Hungry Eyes." The later collections SMOKE GHOST and THE BLACK GONDOLIER include several of the stories from NIGHT'S BLACK AGENTS as well as newer and equally chilling pieces.
DUEL, and NIGHTMARE AT 20,000 FEET, by Richard Matheson; and THE HOWLING MAN, by Charles Beaumont. You know their work even if you don't recognize their names. Matheson is the author of I AM LEGEND, SOMEWHERE IN TIME, THE SHRINKING MAN and others. Beaumont and Matheson were responsible for many of the original TWILIGHT ZONE's most memorable episodes, and these three collections are perfect Halloween reading for any fan of that series.
Classic supernatural fiction can be found free in ebook form these days. M. R. James's GHOST STORIES OF AN ANTIQUARY, for instance, or stories by E. F. Benson, Oliver Onions, Algernon Blackwood and others are available at the Kindle store or at sites like horrormasters.com.
There are several excellent treasuries of horror stories available; anyone looking for terrific Halloween reading should find a copy of the Modern Library collection GREAT TALES OF TERROR AND THE SUPERNATURAL, and David Hartwell's THE DARK DESCENT. Both are nice survey collections, spanning the history of short horror fiction from its early days through modern times, and Hartwell's (the newer of the two) offers work by contemporary writers such as Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, and Charles Grant.
I've mentioned Kealan Patrick Burke and James Everington in this space before; their collections THE 121 TO PENNSYLVANIA and THE OTHER ROOM (by Burke & Everington respectively) are highly recommended for the season as well. In particular, Burke's "Empathy" is one of the most frightening short stories I've read in years.
Enjoy.
Brief commercial:
I've put five short stories into a collection called FIVE OF THE HAUNTED. The stories ("The Point," "The Old Neighborhood," "The Back Row of the Balcony," "Passenger," and "Anonymity") are all available separately at Amazon's Kindle store, Smashwords, and other retailers at 99 cents each. FIVE OF THE HAUNTED gathers them into one ebook at the bargain price of $1.50. Give it a look if you get a chance.
But there's plenty of horror to be found on the printed page too. In case you've missed them, you might want to check out some of the following short story collections. Why short stories? Well, we drop bite-size treats into the kids' Halloween bags when they come to the door -- same principle.
There's no real need to remind anyone to check out the work of Stephen King or Ray Bradbury or Shirley Jackson this time of year. If you've missed King's collection NIGHT SHIFT or Bradbury's THE OCTOBER COUNTRY, or Jackson's THE LOTTERY, you're cheating yourself. But unless you're a devoted fan of horror year-round and not just on Halloween, you may have missed some of the following.
NIGHT'S BLACK AGENTS, by Fritz Leiber. The first collection by the writer who brought the tale of supernatural horror into the modern urban setting. Try for one of the later editions that includes the classic chiller "The Girl with Hungry Eyes." The later collections SMOKE GHOST and THE BLACK GONDOLIER include several of the stories from NIGHT'S BLACK AGENTS as well as newer and equally chilling pieces.
DUEL, and NIGHTMARE AT 20,000 FEET, by Richard Matheson; and THE HOWLING MAN, by Charles Beaumont. You know their work even if you don't recognize their names. Matheson is the author of I AM LEGEND, SOMEWHERE IN TIME, THE SHRINKING MAN and others. Beaumont and Matheson were responsible for many of the original TWILIGHT ZONE's most memorable episodes, and these three collections are perfect Halloween reading for any fan of that series.
Classic supernatural fiction can be found free in ebook form these days. M. R. James's GHOST STORIES OF AN ANTIQUARY, for instance, or stories by E. F. Benson, Oliver Onions, Algernon Blackwood and others are available at the Kindle store or at sites like horrormasters.com.
There are several excellent treasuries of horror stories available; anyone looking for terrific Halloween reading should find a copy of the Modern Library collection GREAT TALES OF TERROR AND THE SUPERNATURAL, and David Hartwell's THE DARK DESCENT. Both are nice survey collections, spanning the history of short horror fiction from its early days through modern times, and Hartwell's (the newer of the two) offers work by contemporary writers such as Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, and Charles Grant.
I've mentioned Kealan Patrick Burke and James Everington in this space before; their collections THE 121 TO PENNSYLVANIA and THE OTHER ROOM (by Burke & Everington respectively) are highly recommended for the season as well. In particular, Burke's "Empathy" is one of the most frightening short stories I've read in years.
Enjoy.
Brief commercial:
I've put five short stories into a collection called FIVE OF THE HAUNTED. The stories ("The Point," "The Old Neighborhood," "The Back Row of the Balcony," "Passenger," and "Anonymity") are all available separately at Amazon's Kindle store, Smashwords, and other retailers at 99 cents each. FIVE OF THE HAUNTED gathers them into one ebook at the bargain price of $1.50. Give it a look if you get a chance.
Saturday, October 1, 2011
The Digital Divide Just Got a Bit Narrower
Much of the buzz surrounding the announcements of Amazon's new Kindle devices is understandably focused on the tablet device, the $199 Kindle Fire. Overlooked a bit is the low-end model, a bare-bones wi-fi ready, e-ink screen Kindle that can be had for as little as $79. A decent pair of Nikes will set you back more than that.
For as little as that, you get an electronic bookcase that can hold more than a thousand ebooks.
Of course, there's still the matter of content. Getting the books to put in the bookcase will cost plenty, though, right? Well, that's true if the content you want consists of new books. But think for a minute about content that isn't current.
One of the country's premier liberal arts colleges is St. John's, with campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe. It's known as The Great Books College -- every student goes through the same curriculum, and the reading list is a demanding one. For a look at the list go to http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/academic/readlist.shtml
The education you'd get at a college like St. John's will come from class discussion of the readings as well as from the books themselves, but the readings form the heart of it.
Just for fun, pick some titles from the reading list and search for them in the Amazon Kindle store; sort the results of your searches by price-low-to-high. You'll find that there are free editions available for quite a few of these titles. If you search for the contents of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World set (54 volumes in its earlier edition, and 60 volumes in the more recent incarnation; for a list of titles included go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World), you'll find a number of the titles included in that set also have free editions available in the Kindle store. A search for many of the books listed in titles like How to Read a Book or The Lifetime Reading Plan, or included in sets like the Harvard Classics, will also show a number of free editions.
Not that long ago, building a home library of the classics would mean shelling out for sets like the Great Books, or purchasing a large number of paperbacks from the Penguin Classics (or Signet, or Bantam, or Modern Library), or scrounging for the titles you wanted in used book shops and library sale tables. The process would still set you back hundreds of dollars, and maybe a thousand or more, or cost you a long time searching for your books in second-hand sources. It's possible now to gather a lot of that material in a weekend with an under-$100 ebook reader.
We've hit the point where almost anyone who really wants to can have available for study at his own pace most of the core titles of western civilization, for about what you'd pay for a pair of running shoes. That's not the same as actually getting the reading done, of course, but the material just became even more widely accessible than it already was. A few weeks back, I posted some comments about Cornelius Hirschberg's book on independent learning The Priceless Gift; Hirschberg's account of his own self-education is must reading for the lifelong learner, and the methods he used (as well as quite a few of the books he used) are still appropriate for use today. If memory serves, Hirschberg died in 1995 so he didn't live to see the ebook revolution really get under way, but I'd bet he would have loved it.
Brief commercial: I've put another short story, "Passenger," up at Amazon and Smashwords (from where it should find its way to Sony, iBooks, and Barnes & Noble some time soon). Give it a look if you get a chance.
For as little as that, you get an electronic bookcase that can hold more than a thousand ebooks.
Of course, there's still the matter of content. Getting the books to put in the bookcase will cost plenty, though, right? Well, that's true if the content you want consists of new books. But think for a minute about content that isn't current.
One of the country's premier liberal arts colleges is St. John's, with campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe. It's known as The Great Books College -- every student goes through the same curriculum, and the reading list is a demanding one. For a look at the list go to http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/academic/readlist.shtml
The education you'd get at a college like St. John's will come from class discussion of the readings as well as from the books themselves, but the readings form the heart of it.
Just for fun, pick some titles from the reading list and search for them in the Amazon Kindle store; sort the results of your searches by price-low-to-high. You'll find that there are free editions available for quite a few of these titles. If you search for the contents of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World set (54 volumes in its earlier edition, and 60 volumes in the more recent incarnation; for a list of titles included go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World), you'll find a number of the titles included in that set also have free editions available in the Kindle store. A search for many of the books listed in titles like How to Read a Book or The Lifetime Reading Plan, or included in sets like the Harvard Classics, will also show a number of free editions.
Not that long ago, building a home library of the classics would mean shelling out for sets like the Great Books, or purchasing a large number of paperbacks from the Penguin Classics (or Signet, or Bantam, or Modern Library), or scrounging for the titles you wanted in used book shops and library sale tables. The process would still set you back hundreds of dollars, and maybe a thousand or more, or cost you a long time searching for your books in second-hand sources. It's possible now to gather a lot of that material in a weekend with an under-$100 ebook reader.
We've hit the point where almost anyone who really wants to can have available for study at his own pace most of the core titles of western civilization, for about what you'd pay for a pair of running shoes. That's not the same as actually getting the reading done, of course, but the material just became even more widely accessible than it already was. A few weeks back, I posted some comments about Cornelius Hirschberg's book on independent learning The Priceless Gift; Hirschberg's account of his own self-education is must reading for the lifelong learner, and the methods he used (as well as quite a few of the books he used) are still appropriate for use today. If memory serves, Hirschberg died in 1995 so he didn't live to see the ebook revolution really get under way, but I'd bet he would have loved it.
Brief commercial: I've put another short story, "Passenger," up at Amazon and Smashwords (from where it should find its way to Sony, iBooks, and Barnes & Noble some time soon). Give it a look if you get a chance.
Monday, September 5, 2011
News on ebooks in Richard Stark's PARKER series, by way of Terry Teachout
One of the niftiest arts blogs around is Terry Teachout's About Last Night. It's always a source of good recommendations and commentary on books, movies, music and theater. The current post on that blog, "Top of the Barrel," includes the following little tidbit of news regarding the University of Chicago Press reissues of the Donald Westlake/Richard Stark Parker novels:
"If you haven’t yet jumped on the Stark/Parker bandwagon, I have good news, which is that the University of Chicago Press is giving away free copies of the e-book version of The Score, the fifth novel in the Parker series, throughout the month of September. You can download your copy by going to the U of C Parker page, and you can also order it directly from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. (If the $0 price hasn’t shown up yet on these sites, come back later today or tomorrow.)"
Mr. Teachout's post provides links to the U of Chicago's page where The Score can be downloaded. The $0 price has shown up at Amazon. The good news doesn't stop there -- ebooks of three early novels in the series, The Hunter, The Man with the Getaway Face, and The Mourner, are currently priced at just $2.66 each at Amazon. If you love lean, mean crime fiction and haven't discovered this series yet, treat yourself to these. You won't be disappointed. The two most recent releases, Flashfire and Firebreak, are also available -- Mr. Teachout provided an introduction to these titles, and if you're one of those people who never bothers with the intro, make an exception this time.
And if you're not already following Terry Teachout's blog and articles in Commentary and the Wall Street Journal, check them out -- you won't be disappointed there either.
Bests to all,
--tr
"If you haven’t yet jumped on the Stark/Parker bandwagon, I have good news, which is that the University of Chicago Press is giving away free copies of the e-book version of The Score, the fifth novel in the Parker series, throughout the month of September. You can download your copy by going to the U of C Parker page, and you can also order it directly from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. (If the $0 price hasn’t shown up yet on these sites, come back later today or tomorrow.)"
Mr. Teachout's post provides links to the U of Chicago's page where The Score can be downloaded. The $0 price has shown up at Amazon. The good news doesn't stop there -- ebooks of three early novels in the series, The Hunter, The Man with the Getaway Face, and The Mourner, are currently priced at just $2.66 each at Amazon. If you love lean, mean crime fiction and haven't discovered this series yet, treat yourself to these. You won't be disappointed. The two most recent releases, Flashfire and Firebreak, are also available -- Mr. Teachout provided an introduction to these titles, and if you're one of those people who never bothers with the intro, make an exception this time.
And if you're not already following Terry Teachout's blog and articles in Commentary and the Wall Street Journal, check them out -- you won't be disappointed there either.
Bests to all,
--tr
Friday, September 2, 2011
Mass Market Paperback Blues
I started spending a lot of my time haunting paperback book racks around 1963. I've worked in public and college libraries, and worked in the paperback department of the main Kroch's & Brentano's book store in downtown Chicago from the end of 1976 to late 1985. For a long time, I had a fairly good idea of what sort of material you could expect to find on mass market paperback racks..
This probably isn't an original observation, but the mass market selection used to be a LOT wider.
Look at the mass market racks these days -- unless you're in a large bookstore (and probably even there), mostly what you'll find is romance, crime fiction, science fiction and fantasy, horror, some general fiction, a few classics depending on how close to the start of classes we happen to be, some non-fiction dealing with you-name-the-hot-topic-of-the-day. That's not surprising -- it was always this way. There was always a lot of display space devoted to the hottest sellers. But...
First, a few things that strike me as more than a little weird, and then a brief trip down mass market memory lane.
John D. MacDonald -- probably the king of the paperback original in the 50s and 60s. Frequently reprinted. Probably best known for his Travis McGee series and for the excellent suspense novel THE EXECUTIONERS, aka CAPE FEAR. Following his death, most of his work went out of print; today there's not much MacDonald out there except the McGees and THE EXECUTIONERS, aka CAPE FEAR. Time was, Fawcett kept a lot of his work available at any given moment, and if you looked at a paperback rack chances were you'd find at least one MacDonald title; he was almost as much a fixture as the rack itself. The last major run of MacDonald reprints was in the mid 80s.
Ross MacDonald -- author of the Lew Archer series, which has been called the finest series of detective novels by an American. Bantam went through I don't know how many printings of all the books in this series. The Lew Archers are back in print again -- but not from Bantam and not as mass market paperbacks. Trade paperbacks, at twelve to fifteen bucks each.
When a writer put out a new book, the publishers holding the paperback rights to his backlist used to reissue backlist titles so that they'd be purchased by readers who hadn't discovered him until the new title came out. Take Elmore Leonard, author of numerous excellent crime novels and westerns. If you were looking for the definitive example of a high-quality-and-mass-appeal writer, a writer made for permanent mass-market availability, it would be hard to find better than Leonard. He'll publish a new novel, RAYLAN, in January, and this fall a number of his books will be reissued in new paperback editions. Not mass market editions, though, if I'm reading the Amazon listings right -- trade paperback editions, at twelve to fifteen bucks each.
And now that fast trip down mass market memory lane.
Among the books I remember seeing (and in some cases owning) in mass market paperback editions:
John O'Hara's novels and short story collections
Irwin Shaw's novels and short story collections
Isaac Bashevis Singer's novels and short story collections; his non-fiction too
All twelve novels in Anthony Powell's A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME
About a dozen novels by Brazilian writer Jorge Amado (Avon books had quite the line of Latin American fiction in mass market for a while. In addition to Amado, the novelists whose works were published in this series included Mario Vargas Llosa, Manuel Puig, Julio Cortazar, G. Cabrera Infante, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)
A few titles by Jorge Luis Borges, including THE ALEPH, THE BOOK OF SAND, and A BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS.
Novels and non-fiction by Anthony Burgess, including RE:JOYCE, his book-length work on James Joyce.
Novels and short story collections by Saul Bellow.
Novels and short story collections by Jack Finney, Gerald Kersh, James M. Cain, Graham Greene and Shirley Jackson
Malcolm Lowry's UNDER THE VOLCANO
Leon Edel's 5-volume biography of Henry James
Science titles by Isaac Asimov, not just his science fiction
Most of the novels of Don Robertson, Thomas Williams, Thomas Pynchon, and Vladimir Nabokov.
THE COLUMBIA ENCYCLOPEDIA -- yes, there was a mass market paperback of this, in one volume; I carted it around in my book bag for reference use through most of my time in high school. A very bulky item, and pricey too -- around two or three dollars as I recall, which was steep for a paperback around 1964.
Granted, most of these writers were still active at the time (though they weren't all permanent fixtures on the best-seller lists and this was well before the Nobel committee gave the nod to Singer, Vargas Llosa, Marquez or Bellow), but during that period it was also possible to find mass market editions of work by writers who were no longer actively publishing and work by writers who were never going to achieve the kind of popularity enjoyed by current heavyweights like Stephen King, Nora Roberts, or Lee Child.
And while I saw many of these books at Kroch's and Brentano's and other large book stores, I should point out that I saw work by O'Hara, Shaw, Burgess, Powell, Asimov, Bellow, Greene, Jackson, both MacDonalds, Nevil Shute, Joyce Carol Oates, Nabokov, and that encyclopedia on the paperback racks at Penner's Drug Store at 62nd and Kedzie in Chicago in the early and mid-1960s. (Penner's had a decent amount of rack space for paperbacks, but the place was primarily a neighborhood pharmacy, not a bookstore.) Mass market publishing and distribution of the day was putting titles like those in front of casual browsers in general outlets. But not now.
Outside of used book shops, I don't believe you'll find many of these in mass market editions any more, except perhaps for Marquez's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE and Burgess's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, and in some cases it's been over twenty years since publishers issued them in formats meant for mass distribution.
When I was still working in libraries and the bookstore, and still reading magazines like PUBLISHERS WEEKLY and LIBRARY JOURNAL, I thought I understood at least a little of the rationale for some of what went on in the bookbiz. These days -- well, I don't get it any more, and most of what I thought I knew then was probably wrong. But it's still the case that the paperbacks that get seen in the most places are the mass market editions; trade paperbacks will be placed almost entirely in bookstores -- people who get their books from the racks in the local WalMart will see only a few of these, and people who buy their books from the local supermarket racks won't see them at all. Perhaps even trade paperback editions of some titles wouldn't be profitable at all without online sales.
But I can remember a time when publishers used to aim books like the ones I mentioned, and many others, at the mass audience, and the distributors servicing the racks displayed those titles in a lot of places where they could be seen by casual browsers who didn't often go to large bookstores.
And I miss, more than I can say, looking at the mass market paperback racks and finding the range of material I used to see at the neighborhood pharmacy in the 60s.
This probably isn't an original observation, but the mass market selection used to be a LOT wider.
Look at the mass market racks these days -- unless you're in a large bookstore (and probably even there), mostly what you'll find is romance, crime fiction, science fiction and fantasy, horror, some general fiction, a few classics depending on how close to the start of classes we happen to be, some non-fiction dealing with you-name-the-hot-topic-of-the-day. That's not surprising -- it was always this way. There was always a lot of display space devoted to the hottest sellers. But...
First, a few things that strike me as more than a little weird, and then a brief trip down mass market memory lane.
John D. MacDonald -- probably the king of the paperback original in the 50s and 60s. Frequently reprinted. Probably best known for his Travis McGee series and for the excellent suspense novel THE EXECUTIONERS, aka CAPE FEAR. Following his death, most of his work went out of print; today there's not much MacDonald out there except the McGees and THE EXECUTIONERS, aka CAPE FEAR. Time was, Fawcett kept a lot of his work available at any given moment, and if you looked at a paperback rack chances were you'd find at least one MacDonald title; he was almost as much a fixture as the rack itself. The last major run of MacDonald reprints was in the mid 80s.
Ross MacDonald -- author of the Lew Archer series, which has been called the finest series of detective novels by an American. Bantam went through I don't know how many printings of all the books in this series. The Lew Archers are back in print again -- but not from Bantam and not as mass market paperbacks. Trade paperbacks, at twelve to fifteen bucks each.
When a writer put out a new book, the publishers holding the paperback rights to his backlist used to reissue backlist titles so that they'd be purchased by readers who hadn't discovered him until the new title came out. Take Elmore Leonard, author of numerous excellent crime novels and westerns. If you were looking for the definitive example of a high-quality-and-mass-appeal writer, a writer made for permanent mass-market availability, it would be hard to find better than Leonard. He'll publish a new novel, RAYLAN, in January, and this fall a number of his books will be reissued in new paperback editions. Not mass market editions, though, if I'm reading the Amazon listings right -- trade paperback editions, at twelve to fifteen bucks each.
And now that fast trip down mass market memory lane.
Among the books I remember seeing (and in some cases owning) in mass market paperback editions:
John O'Hara's novels and short story collections
Irwin Shaw's novels and short story collections
Isaac Bashevis Singer's novels and short story collections; his non-fiction too
All twelve novels in Anthony Powell's A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME
About a dozen novels by Brazilian writer Jorge Amado (Avon books had quite the line of Latin American fiction in mass market for a while. In addition to Amado, the novelists whose works were published in this series included Mario Vargas Llosa, Manuel Puig, Julio Cortazar, G. Cabrera Infante, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)
A few titles by Jorge Luis Borges, including THE ALEPH, THE BOOK OF SAND, and A BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS.
Novels and non-fiction by Anthony Burgess, including RE:JOYCE, his book-length work on James Joyce.
Novels and short story collections by Saul Bellow.
Novels and short story collections by Jack Finney, Gerald Kersh, James M. Cain, Graham Greene and Shirley Jackson
Malcolm Lowry's UNDER THE VOLCANO
Leon Edel's 5-volume biography of Henry James
Science titles by Isaac Asimov, not just his science fiction
Most of the novels of Don Robertson, Thomas Williams, Thomas Pynchon, and Vladimir Nabokov.
THE COLUMBIA ENCYCLOPEDIA -- yes, there was a mass market paperback of this, in one volume; I carted it around in my book bag for reference use through most of my time in high school. A very bulky item, and pricey too -- around two or three dollars as I recall, which was steep for a paperback around 1964.
Granted, most of these writers were still active at the time (though they weren't all permanent fixtures on the best-seller lists and this was well before the Nobel committee gave the nod to Singer, Vargas Llosa, Marquez or Bellow), but during that period it was also possible to find mass market editions of work by writers who were no longer actively publishing and work by writers who were never going to achieve the kind of popularity enjoyed by current heavyweights like Stephen King, Nora Roberts, or Lee Child.
And while I saw many of these books at Kroch's and Brentano's and other large book stores, I should point out that I saw work by O'Hara, Shaw, Burgess, Powell, Asimov, Bellow, Greene, Jackson, both MacDonalds, Nevil Shute, Joyce Carol Oates, Nabokov, and that encyclopedia on the paperback racks at Penner's Drug Store at 62nd and Kedzie in Chicago in the early and mid-1960s. (Penner's had a decent amount of rack space for paperbacks, but the place was primarily a neighborhood pharmacy, not a bookstore.) Mass market publishing and distribution of the day was putting titles like those in front of casual browsers in general outlets. But not now.
Outside of used book shops, I don't believe you'll find many of these in mass market editions any more, except perhaps for Marquez's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE and Burgess's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, and in some cases it's been over twenty years since publishers issued them in formats meant for mass distribution.
When I was still working in libraries and the bookstore, and still reading magazines like PUBLISHERS WEEKLY and LIBRARY JOURNAL, I thought I understood at least a little of the rationale for some of what went on in the bookbiz. These days -- well, I don't get it any more, and most of what I thought I knew then was probably wrong. But it's still the case that the paperbacks that get seen in the most places are the mass market editions; trade paperbacks will be placed almost entirely in bookstores -- people who get their books from the racks in the local WalMart will see only a few of these, and people who buy their books from the local supermarket racks won't see them at all. Perhaps even trade paperback editions of some titles wouldn't be profitable at all without online sales.
But I can remember a time when publishers used to aim books like the ones I mentioned, and many others, at the mass audience, and the distributors servicing the racks displayed those titles in a lot of places where they could be seen by casual browsers who didn't often go to large bookstores.
And I miss, more than I can say, looking at the mass market paperback racks and finding the range of material I used to see at the neighborhood pharmacy in the 60s.
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