HEY DO WE HAVE SOME GREAT ANNOUNCEMENTS COMING UP IN THE FUTURE
Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Now Available: Howard Chaykin: Conversations
faked by Professor Fury Monday, March 21st, 2011New Jack Butler! Practicing Zen Without a License
faked by Professor Fury Monday, February 28th, 2011All! I’m here to spread the word that there is a brand new Jack Butler book out right now: Practicing Zen Without a License. Here’s some of what the publisher’s website has to say about it:
Like zen, whatever you expect Practicing Zen to be, it will be different. Think of a source-book on the origins of zen, like the scholarly source-books that we use today to study zen’s origins in Chinese Buddhism and its coming to full flower in Japan. Such source-books are necessarily fragmentary, since much of the original writing has been lost. Now translate that source-book to the 25th century, and replace the fragments from China and Japan with fragments from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the only remaining records of how a version of zen (called Easy) took over the U. S. Throw in a wildly humorous and semi-science-fictional version of history, and spice it up with anecdotes about and utterances by fictional zen masters, who quarreled among themselves.
You can get it at Amazon right now. My copy is wending its way Baton Rouge-ward and I’m looking forward to diving in to a book that is sure to be strange and disorienting—in the very best ways.
Self-promotion: “Randall Kenan Beyond the Final Frontier” in new SLJ
faked by Professor Fury Tuesday, February 15th, 2011Infantile Gestures and Indescribable Highs
faked by Professor Fury Friday, October 22nd, 2010Happy Vampire A Go-Go Day!
faked by Professor Fury Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009Yes, I realize it’s not an official holiday yet. But it will be. And don’t you want to be able to say you were ringing in the season back before it got all commercialized, back when people remembered the real reason for Vampire A Go-Go Day? That is, celebrating the release of PrettyFavorite Victor Gischler’s new novel Vampire A Go-Go, which you can read more about here and which you can purchase here or at your local seller of quality books about, among other things, “gun-toting Jesuit priests”?
Local folk: All the Baton Rougeans of good taste and discerning judgment will be at the Citiplace Barnes and Noble on Thursday night at 7:00 for a reading, signing, and exorcism by Gischler. FIRST TWO ROWS WILL GET WET.
Don Harington Alert
faked by Jack Butler Monday, June 1st, 2009Don Harington, the great novelist, is in the hospital with pneumonia and a broken hip. If you’ve read his novels and admired them (and I frankly do not see how you could read them and not admire them), you might wish to send him a note at kimharington at sbcglobal.net. Kim is his wife and will deliver the messages. If you don’t know what to say, put yourself in his place: You suffer from diabetes, in the last ten years you’ve had throat cancer, a broken ankle from a disastrous auto accident, a broken hip, pneumonia twice, you can’t eat or drink (because of the throat surgery), but have to take glucerna several times a day, and although you are one of the most brilliant and beautiful writers this country has ever had, all your life you have been routinely neglected in favor of fakes, frauds, wannabes, also-rans, incompetents, and suck-ups.
Not that you have to address all of that. Hell, one line will do. Just tell the man what his writing means to you. Just say something, anything.
This culture is so obsessed with the new that we neglect the true achievers. Harington’s not just some factory process to produce stories. He’s a human, and right now a human in pretty serious trouble. He could use a bit of encouragement.
PULP BOY: Emerson LaSalle Gets What He Deserves
faked by Professor Fury Wednesday, February 25th, 2009This is the news and it is good: As reported on EmersonLasalle.com, the good people at Explosive Entertainment Motion Pictures will be producing the stranger-than-fiction Emerson LaSalle biopic PULP BOY, from a screenplay by Victor Gischler and Anthony Neil Smith.
Victor Gischler offers more details about the development of the screenplay here, and Anthony Neil Smith provides his take here. Other links of interest:
The official PULP BOY web site.
Emerson LaSalle on Wikipedia.
In Last My Heart is Murder: The Emerson LaSalle Blog
Emerson LaSalle on Pretty Fakes:
Modem Mama
Never Again, Forever
“Remembering Emerson LaSalle, Novelist”
Let’s just breathe it in: Emerson LaSalle biopic. EMERSON LASALLE BIOPIC. Okay, I stopped breathing it in and started huffing it there at the end. So pure. So sweet. So mucous-membrane dissolving.