I could go into a whole didactic breakdown of why this is a bile-inducing book cover, but this shithead who’s responsible for decades of shitty music and even shittier people who follow his career religiously doesn’t even deserve that much. All he gets in terms of a critique is this: Given the choice, I’d rather barf up all the cheese burgers and margaritas that ever existed than read this book.

Short Story Month is peaking right now and none are more emphatic about its peakingness other than Dan Wickett over at EWN. Still keeping his promise almost to the point of absurdity. According to Dan (new this Wednesday on ABC!), lots of other sites are getting in on the action. Good ol’ VigLaze has yet to pop up on EWN’s radar, though. Ahem. UPDATE: Booyah!

Anyhoozle, here’s a story from Sam Lipsyte over at Failbetter.com. It’s called Flashback or Why Nobody Won the Fight Between Our Fathers in Walt Wilmer’s Toolshed. I could be totally wrong but I think this is from his novel-in-stories collection Venus Drive. If you’ve never read Lipsyte before you’re missing out on one of the most brilliant living writers. Not only is dude funny beyond description, he has this beautiful way of showing the savage intensity of his characters. Heres a little snippet from the story that I like:

“So,” we heard my father say, “I guess the rocks really needed some trimming, huh? Figured the yard’s all done, might as well mow the rocks while I still have the guy’s machine.”

“Look, I didn’t mow no rocks, Charlie,” said Mr. Cudahy. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for? You said you didn’t mow any rocks. Or no rocks, rather.”

This last was so shameless, so shameful, the fop’s swipe, the nerd’s gnaw, so laced with the venom of soft men, that I looked to my friend there beneath the sill, beseeched forgiveness, but I don’t think Boy Cudahy even caught the slight to his father’s speech, or maybe he had, of course he had, it just wasn’t the terrible rent in his world I thought it to be, or that maybe my father intended. I saw it a dirk sunk to hilt in the meat of decency, equality, common cause. But to a Cudahy it probably had the same power “four-eyes” would to my bi-focaled father. Big whoop. Specs. What else you got?

Click on through and read the story. He’s never written a boring sentence in his life.

Harper Collins wishes they had the balls to release a book cover like this.

Last week Keith Phipps of the AV Club posted this review of Theodor Sturgeon’s classic sci-fi novel More Than Human. Before you click through I will forecast your reaction: You will shake your head and whisper, “Damn, if sci-fi novels from back in the day didn’t have the tightest covers.”

So now I’m obsessed with these things. One google search and few clicks later and I unearthed a goldmine of the illest book covers ever drawn.

A few favorites:

Tales of the Cthulu Mythos

The Bull and the Spear

The Beast the Shouted Love at the Heart of the World

Those were the days. All it took to have the sickest job was to have some drawing and painting skills and a shitload of LSD.

After spending a good half an hour browsing these things, the book shelf at your local Borders will look about as stimulating as the pamphlet rack at the doctors office.

And the cyber ink continues over at BOOOOOOOM! Jeff posted the web debut of the story Office Girl by Joe Meno, originally appearing in issue #4. If you haven’t read this story yet, do yourself a favor and take advantage of this magical piece appearing for free on the internet. And don’t forget to take in the amazing accompanying images by Raquel Aparicio.

As mentioned last week, Dan Wicket over at EWN is whooping much ass in the name of short fiction everywhere. He started claiming he was gonna post one story a day for the entire month of May. Now EWN, the unnofficial headquarters for Short Story Month, has morphed into an avalanche-like showcase for short fiction all over the web. Guest posts have even started cropping up from writers of all stripes and even former Annalemma contributor John McNally.

So, like last week, in an effort to support the cause, I’m posting an old favorite of mine. Miracle by Judy Budnitz is the story of a young white couple who have a black baby. I probably don’t need to lead you into it anymore than that.

p.s. What ever happened to Judy Budnitz? Haven’t heard much from her after Nice Big American Baby. Someone send out a search party.

ABSPB started out with great ambitions. A chronicle of my extensive, ongoing reading list. Then I remembered I read slower than a stoned turtle. So we’re changing it up a bit. Welcome to Friday Failure Book Pile, a chronicle of books started but not finished. This is in no way reflective of the engaging abilities of the books reviewed here (as you’ll see most of the books listed are modern classics, critical and financial successes). This is merely a record of my inability to focus on anything for more than 50 pages. Let the laziness begin!

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.

The real reason I picked up this book in the first place was out of some rebellious fascination. I was raised Presbyterian, so the Dark Prince has held a sort of tantalizing mystique going as far back as I can remember. Don’t get me wrong, I was never into the Ozzy Osbourne, fire and brimstone, Tim-Curry-in-Legend style devil. No, I was more into the Alister Crowley, top hat and tails, Al-Pacino-in-Devil’s-Advocate style of devil. Evil incarnate, the devil made man.  So when this book started out with a couple of angels falling out of the sky my mind started to wander pretty quickly. Another reason I don’t think I could have gone all the way with this one is Rushdie’s voice. I love Rushdie’s style, but I feel like he spawned a bajillion mediochre imitators. Just the thought of all those people out there butchering the language in hopes of having an original voice made me sad. So I shelved this one.

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

Sometimes I feel obligated to read books. Like if there’s an author who is considered one of the greatest living American novelests and publishes a book a year and has won countless awards, and then there’s little old me who’s never read sentance one from said author, I feel put-upon to read said author. Like how could you even consider being a fiction writer if you’ve never read Mark Twain, or Nabokov, or Toni Morrision, or J.D. Salinger, or Hemingway, or any of the other giants? This is the guilt that surrounds me when I walk through the book store. And this is the guilt I went into with Philip Roth and The Human Stain.  Lemme say this: You should never feel like you have to read a book. Reading novels should be an overwhelmingly pleasurable experience. And if they’re not, they should at least help you wallow in your delicious misery for a little while, offer you a little light in the darkness. I know in my case, if I have to do something, I’m never going to get it done. That’s the reason I never finished this book. And it’s a shame cause it seemed like a pretty good story. I guess I also got a little bored of the real-to-life drama of Roth’s characters. Soemtimes it’s hard to force yourself to read about someone’s crippling problems.

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

Sometimes you feel obligated to read a book and sometimes a book thrusts itself upon you, cosmically putting you in a submission hold until you tap out and agree to sit down with it for a few hours. There was about a month period where I kept seeing this book popping up everywhere. Library windows, DVD commentaries, random conversations. This book is speaking to me, I thought, Surely it must contain some well polished aphorism somewhere within its 224 pages that has been traveling across the earth from Chandler’s brain for decades only to find me and bore its way into my being. So I bought the book. I got about a third of the way through it and then watched The Big Sleep (an adaptation of another Phillip Marlow book by Chandler) and I felt like I got a pretty good bead on what Chandler’s al about. So I quit. Don’t judge me.

So that’s a current list of my failures. I know you’re thinking, “You know, you could just pick them up and start reading them again.” And that is true. I could pick them up and start reading again…

I could do a lot of things…

Full disclosure: This weeks BBCDW entry comes more out of an interest in the material itself than an interest in the accompanying design, which, as will soon be explained, is not all that great.

I’ve been sitting at my desk all this week (plopped in front of my desk, really) contentedly chipping away at a new issue. Yesterday, though, something hit me all the sudden. Holy Shit. I’m a 27-year-old healthy young man. What the fuck am I doing whiling away my days at a fucking desk when I could be out breaking laws and jumping my motorcycle over gorges. Or at the very least, introducing myself to random women on the street and having long drawn out conversations about life and love, a la Before Sunrise. Taking some sort of risks, I guess, instead of being cautious and careful all the time.

That’s why William Gurstelle’s new book struck a chord with me. Living dangerously reminds you that you’re alive, not a worker drone  toiling away for dubious reasons. Kind of an idealistic, college kid notion, but the truth nonetheless.

The cover design, on the other hand, is nothing special. It aspires to greatness, something along the whimiscal lines of The Dangerous Book for Boys, but falls shamefully short. The little flamethrower man is an almost embareassing example of poor Adobe Illustrator skills and the knives in the lower left almost look like cooking cutlery, not anything truly menacing, like so. It appears they were going for the turn-of-the-century Almanac aesthetic but just ended up with a design hodge podge straight out of Stuff magazine. Hopefully they can get it together for the paperback. What’s that?  This is the paperback? Yikes.

So this thing just came in hot off the wire. The second I saw that it had an MSRP of $489.00 I was pretty livid and was all ready to write some tirade about how Amazon is totally out of touch with the modern reader and that this product could, in no way, be the future of books and how I got my hands on an original Kindle a couple years ago and was not that impressed and found it to be a middle piece of technology on the road to something better (iPhone reader? When is this going to happen? Hello?) and how it should be reserved for late 40’s techies who want to get in early on some hot new piece of gear but feel too old to Twitter. Some angry bullshit like that.

But then I looked at the specs.

This thing is 1/3″ thick and has a 9.7″ screen that can show a shitload more detail than the first Kindle. It holds 3500 books and Amazon is now in league with a handful of major colleges to provide this new gadget to students for all their textbook uses. Dare I say it: this thing is kind of cool.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to go out and buy one. $500 for an ebook reader is fucking stupid, I don’t care how much money you have. But if you’re a student getting one for free and you don’t have to pay an ungodly amount for heavy textbooks that you will use once and store on your bookshelf for the rest of your life in hopes that it will serve you at some later date, well, then you’re stoked.

The concept of an ebook is a ways off from being revolutionary. Nothing will replace a real, perfect bound, paperback book. Nothing will replace the ability to dog ear, make notes in the margin, underline. Not to mention a paperback is never subject to battery failure, blunt trauma and if you spill a beer on it all you do is stick it out in the sun for a while. Sure it’s gonna be all puffy and stinky when it dries out, but it will technically still function.

This whole Kindle experiment whiffs of desperation to me: An ailing company trying way too hard to maintain relevancy in an advance technological age. Something tells me Jeff Bezos thinks so too.

The book is not broken, Amazon. Johannes Gutenburg got it right the first time. Quit trying to fix it.

Thanks Gallycat.

Dan Wickett over at EWN has been promoting the shit out of the month of May being Short Story Month. In an effort to support the cause I’m providing a link to the best story I’ve read most recently.

“Leopard” by Wells Tower. It isn’t the greatest story in his new collection Everything Raveged, Everything Burned, but it’s still a hum dinger. A young boy, tormented by his stepdad, stays home from school and revels in the idea that there may or may not be a jungle cat prowling around his woodland home. If you’re not the reading type I’d wager it’s because you’ve just never read anyhting good before. Do yourself a favor and change that.

Ha. So looks like ABSPB might have to be a bi-weekly thing seeing that I still haven’t finished any one of the 3 books I first showcased. Looks like I’m not as quick a reader as I thought I was! Heh Heh! Looks like I’m not as smart either! Looks like I bit off more than I can chew! Ha Ha! Looks like I’m a complete failure at everything I do and I fail to finish the things that I start! HA HA HA! Haha, hah, whoo (whiping tear from eye), heh heh, ha… (sigh).

Anyway here’s the cover for Mark Twain’s “Who is Mark Twain?” A collection of unpublished journals, letters and lectures. A beautiful and playful little cover. Though I’m not sure what all that top hat business is about. I don’t remember him being known for that. A head of billowy white hair maybe, but top hat? Maybe Harper Collins saw how much Slash’s memoir was selling so they threw Samual Clemmins on the top hat bandwagon. Or maybe the answer to the titular question is right here.