Vigorously Lazy

I got these guys to print up some post cards for me for this. If you show up this weekend (we’re at booth #146) I will give you one of each of these extremely limited edition postcards. For FREE. That’s right Chicken Little. The sky is falling.

Been a little boring on the blog this week, I know. Life got the best of me. What am I gonna do? Blog about my life? Yeah, right. The internet don’t care about that. All they care about is this. You know it’s true. Admit it.

While trolling the webs for a good (or really shitty) book cover for this week’s BBCDW I came across The Book Design Review which seems to be an extension of the NY Times Book Review. They stole my idea to review book covers about 4 years before I came up with it and compiled the best designs into an annual list. Check them out here.

Not sure if anyone who reads this blog is the same type of person who submits to the magazine. Regardless, figured I’d give this a shot anyway.

ANNALEMMA NEEDS CREATIVE NONFICTION

If you or anyone you know is in possession of any kind of CNF (essays, memoir, interviews) that you’re willing to have published send it ASAP to chris@annalemma.net.

The submissions department is currently drowning in short stories and we need some nonfiction to balance it out. Tell your story people! Your real story. It’s not hard. You’re already doing it. You’re just changing the names and calling it fiction. Keep them names in there! Dish about that time you and your cousin ot stuck in the UN and ended up as Chancellors to Belgium and subsequently caused an international incident when it was learned you only knew how to say, “Where is the H&M?” in German.

Let’s be honest. Your family was going to disown you at some point anyway. May as well make it happen on your terms.  Click here for more details.

Are you going to be in the greater Los Angeles area this coming weekend (25th-26th)? Do you like books? Do you like festivals? Do you like book festivals?

If you said yes to any of these questions then you need to come out to the LA Times Festival of Books where myself and a special mystery guest will be holding court and making friendship bracelets all weekend at the Annalemma booth # 146. Come check us out!

Never reluctant to flaunt star power, La La Land is pulling out the big guns for this event. Ever heard of a little author called Tori Spelling? How about Tom Bergeron? Hello?! It’s called AFV and it’s the funniest program on television.

Here’s a new feature that I’ll try to cram in every Friday wherein I talk about some hot new books I’ve got my hands on. So hot they are steaming. And there’s a lot of them and I’m unorganized so they’re in a pile. Here we go!

The Lost City of Z by David Grann

This book is fucking sick. It’s all over the place right now and there’s talks that Brad Pitt is turning it into a movie so I’m sure you’ve been bombarded with it on your most recent trip to Boarders. Don’t be try to be cool and pretend that you only go to the independant bookstore. We all know you’re a fiend for Barnes and Noble and their infinite racks of magazines. Anyway, I’m only 40 pages into this book and I’m hooked. It’s a real life Indiana Jones story of Percy Harrison Fawcett, one of the last Victorian explorers who was bound and determined to find El Dorado, the lost city of Mayan gold, deep in the Amazon rain forest. He disappeared and was never heard from again. Grann recounts Fawcett’s journey and even takes one himself, trying to find out what drives men to explore and why that drive can lead them to obsession and madness. Creative nonfiction book of the year, so far.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

I started a book club with some friends a few weeks back. We’re called the Hard Covers and I’ll talk more about that in a few weeks. We chose this as our first book. Why? Not sure. There was a list of books that we all wanted to read and this one had the coolest cover. Also, Bolano is credited with being one of the creators of Mexican literature and some of us in the club habla espaniol, so it seemed like the right fit. Bolano’s got an interesting story. According to the introduction in the hard cover edition he was one of those possessed writers who did nothing but read, travel the world on a shoestring budget and write his gosh darn dong off. And that’s really what this book is about. Travel, poetry (I know, I know), Mexico and writing. It starts off real good with steady pace and interesting narrator, but 125 pages or so in he switches to an unconventional form that can come off as annoying at first but once you sink into it, you kind of get what he’s doing, but it doesn’t make the form any more interesting once you know what that form is. Guess you just kind of have to stick with it. Kind of hard to explain. Just read it. It will teach you how to live.

Everything Raved, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

I first came across this dude after reading one of his stories in the most powerful lit mag in all the land. It was a good’n of his that they published so I bought his recently released debut collection. Lemme tell you. If you’re a story writer and you’ve been trying to get your stuff published for a long time to no avail, pick this book up. This is how modern short stories are written. Tower’s main strength is his characters. They’re real, fully-drawn people, not caricatures propped up by disingenuous quirks. Most of them are males careening into a mid-life crisis, coping with the stunted growth of their 20’s and 30’s and waking up to realize that they are nowhere close to where they thought they would be at this age. That, and vikings, apparently. I don’t know, I haven’t read that far. Long story short: good stories, this guy will win awards, hop on the bandwagon early.

That concludes this edition of A Big Steaming Pile of Books. Hope you enjoyed. And if you’ve got your own steaming pile nestled next to your bed or in between the couch and the end table, feel free to share in the comments below.

While the question of “why?” in regards to the Columbine tragedy may seem like kind of a duh question to you and I, author Dave Cullen and anyone else over 40 during the time of the incident were left scratching their heads to the skull and blaming the playstations and the Marlyn Mansons and trenchcoat mafias and other trivial distractions.

Kelbold and Harris weren’t exacting revenge on a society that scorned them. They were fucking crazy. End of discussion. It would seem in the light of even the most preliminary of evidence that this is a logical conclusion. Not so, says Cullen, who spends 432 pages explaining that the Columbine killers did it because they were (gasp) “psychotic”. No fucking doye, dude. What other breathtaking revelation are you gonna lay on us next? Michael Jackson has had plastic surgery? Bruce Willis’ character at the end of Sixth Sense was actually a ghost?

Anyway. This books seems, at best, a waste of time and money and, at worst, an exploitation. In spite of all that, the cover is still pretty cool.

I’d go so far as to say boarderline groundbreaking. Most big publishing house releases, when they try to go for stark and profound end up fucking it all up by putting a big ugly blurb on there or placing the authors name and credits in a conspicuous place. Not so for this one. Helvetica font floating like a ghost above a photo of the infamous school on an overcast day. A perfect execution of understatement, proving that not much is needed to solemnly remind the average American of the chilling and horrific act that took place that day.

Check out the wicked creatures created by Omar Arcega Morales.

Australian artist Melissa Haslam draws pictures of gorgeous females accompanied by exotic animals. So, naturally, I’m a fan.

I’m a bit of a late-comer to Chris Onstad’s Achewood-verse. I got turned on about six months ago with The Great Outdoor Fight and have been hooked to the weekly strip ever since. So the announcement of a new Achewood book made my mind boner perk up. (Clarification: few weeks back we decided that boners didn’t have to just be used to describe sexual arousal i.e. “The smell of that bar-b-que sandwich is giving me a stomach boner,” or “That new Macbook is giving me a technology boner”).

In a grand execution of the old adage, “Keep it simple, stupid” Onstad (a graphic designer himself) reveals nothing to the casual passerby and relies only on the devoted fans to get hyped on it. Well done, Chris.