Generation A, by Douglas Coupland

In 1991, Douglas Coupland published Generation X. The novel defined–and parodied–my generation: people who reached adulthood in the late 80s and early 90s. The book is about three young people who live together in California’s Mojave Desert. As in classics like The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales, they share stories, some fictional and some about [...]

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State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

Road trip! Well, the literary kind, anyway.
Editors for the Paris Review and McSweeney’s have assembled the usual suspects and then some for this interesting assortment of essays about the fifty states and District of Columbia. The goal is an homage to the New Deal’s Federal Writers Project, a WPA program that created an even wider [...]

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Crystal Rain, by Tobias Buckell

John deBrun has two problems with his past. The first is that 27 years before the action of Crystal Rain, he was washed up on the shore of the island nation of Nanagada. He can’t remember anything prior to those events. He spent a few years rising through the ranks of sailors and eventually led [...]

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Little Girl Lost, by Richard Aleas

I have to confess, part of my love for libraries came from unsavory habits in my youth.
I spent many hours roaming library shelves in my early teens. Was I looking for the great books? Hardly. For the best and most entertaining genre fiction? Not usually. For great young adult literature? No, that category was just [...]

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Best Served Cold, by Joe Abercrombie

Can violence be justified? Can we commit acts of righteous vengeance without being poisoned, perverted by our own violence?
These are the questions considered at depth by Joe Abercrombie’s new fantasy standalone novel Best Served Cold. As the novel opens, Monza Murcatto, a mercenary general, and her brother Benna go to a meeting with their employer [...]

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City of Thieves, by David Benioff

As City of Thieves opens, an American screenwriter is paid to write an autobiographical essay. He can’t find anything of interest in his immediate background, but he has always suspected that his Floridian grandparents have more to tell about their experiences in Leningrad during WWII. When he asks them, they’re finally ready to tell. So [...]

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Lankhmar: Swords and Deviltry, by Fritz Leiber

This is a re-issue (minus one story) of a collection of novellas and stories that were written in 1962 and 1970 as prequels to SFWA Grandmaster Fritz Leiber’s popular Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series. Confused? Trying to track the history of these stories, I am too.
But never mind all that. Forget that this is [...]

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Touch Me, I’m Sick: The 52 Creepiest Love Songs You’ve Ever Heard, by Tom Reynolds

Have you listened closely to the words of your favorite love song? Listen again…
“Every Breath You Take,” that rock classic by The Police is among the top 10 songs played at weddings and funerals. Whoops! It’s about Sting’s bitter reaction to the end of his first marriage, and if you listen closely, it sounds like [...]

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Already Dead, by Charlie Huston

Charlie Huston is not the first writer to blend vampires into crime fiction, but he may be the wisest in how he melds the two genres. Casting a vampire as detective in the hard-boiled noir tradition makes a surprising amount of sense. Let’s consider how the two traditions overlap:
A hard-boiled detective keeps late hours and [...]

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A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute

Australia has come up several times in recent reviews here on Blogging for a Good Book and it’s got me thinking about the land Down Under in fiction and on film.
I loved Tim Winton’s Breath, a coming-of-age story about Australian surf culture in the 1970s. Peter Carey is another great Aussie novelist: try The True [...]

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