I’m going to let other people remember David Bowie for his cultural importance — his brave and liberating embrace of sexual ambiguity, his clever shape-shifting, his sophistication as an actor, his sharp sense of pop art’s relationship to rock and roll.
He was truly great in all of these ways. … Read the rest
Tom McCarthy is a popular British avant-garde novelist with a forbidding public image. He writes technological dystopian fiction that looks at the world with the same cold sinister stare as that of Chuck Palahniuk or William Vollmann, and he physically resembles Dwight Schrute from “The Office”. He doesn’t come across … Read the rest
Update, March 13 2015: Daevid Allen has died, according to a message from his son.
Daevid Allen, a brilliant songwriter and archetypal hippie prog-rocker who co-founded Soft Machine in 1966 before reaching his peak as the mad visionary genius of Gong, has announced that he is dying of cancer… Read the rest
Sure, every other obituary of 86-year-old Brooklyn novelist Daniel Keyes is going to talk about Flowers for Algernon. And, yeah, that was his best book. But I’m going to talk about The Touch
The shaded cobblestone streets of Garden Rest are lined with shops, cottages, a pub, a boarding house near the town square, and of course, something nefarious lurking in dark hinterlands. John Shirley’s Doyle After Death
First, it … Read the rest
I’ve never been sure how to reconcile the fact that I’m a pacifist with the fact that I’m a major American Civil War geek.
Though I’m a major geek, I’m not a Major — that is, I don’t participate in any Union or Confederate reenactment brigade. But I’ve been to … Read the rest
Here’s something unusual: a 1955 appearance by science-fiction author Ray Bradbury on Groucho Marx’s famous TV game show “You Bet Your Life”.
Stocky and hearty, the 35-year-old author is at this time already a successful writer, but not yet a famous one. He cites his accomplishments to Groucho: stories in … Read the rest
1. The classic science-fiction author Ray Bradbury has died. I never really kept up with his work, but when I was a kid I thought Illustrated Man had the coolest book cover in the universe. “The Veldt” was my favorite story from that collection. Here’s more on Ray from Boing … Read the rest
Taking advantage of a Hollywood vacation my wife won at her office Christmas party this past December, I decided to visit a few West Coast indie bookstores with copies of my novel, Tamper