We have this great little library around the corner, which is very convenient. In London, there are lots of libraries, but it’s such big city geographically that it’s not always the case that there’s a library just around the corner. It’s a nice library—it’s right next to The Keats House, where John Keats lived next door to Fanny Brawne before heading off to Italy and an untimely death. The trees at the edge of the Keats House grounds hang over the path that leads to the library doors, and in Spring there are lovely blossoms dropping petals on the path. The building itself is that curious medley that one often encounters in England, a combination of a bit of old grandeur with some 1960s crap thrown in to make the interior more “functional.” But it’s comfortable, it has a good collection of books and newspapers, an attractive children’s room, and a bunch of PCs that people use for internet access, and it used to have a neighbor’s cat, Moggy, who would wander in and sleep all day before she died last Spring, much to the dismay of the regulars. Full Story »

Zombie: Don’t worry. Only people with brains
get eaten. You’re safe.

They aren’t sexy. They aren’t romantic. They aren’t tragically doomed.

In fact, they’re ravenous, violent, and virtually unstoppable. They ooze all sorts of bodily fluids. And they want to eat your brains.

So how come zombies are getting such mainstream media treatment?

As a culture, we love and loath things that go bump in the night. We have to have boogeymen, for all sorts of reasons. Because they touch deep psychological fears in profound ways, our boogeymen serve as a kind of moral check on behavior that laws and rules just sometimes can’t. At the other end of the spectrum, we seem to have a lot of fun being scared. Boogeymen do that for us, too. Full Story »

Got zombies on the brain? Well, it’s better than having them eat your brain, so that’s a plus.

Zombies are a hot pop-cultural property these days. Woody Harrelson’s buddy movie Zombieland has been eating up theaters. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies brought Jane Austen back from the dead to become one of the year’s publishing phenoms. Marvel Comics is now on their umpteeth iteration of a Marvel Zombies franchise that, pardon the pun, doesn’t want to die.

While zombies don’t have the long literary tradition of, say, vampires, there’s been plenty of recent zombie-lit out there to feed your brain. Here are a few recent favorites: Full Story »

October 30 is Frankenstein Friday.

Like a lot of kids, I could not get enough of monster movies. On Saturday afternoons, I would hunker down on my living room couch to watch Creature Double-Feature on our small black-and-white TV.

I loved Godzilla, Gorgo, the giant ants of Them!, War of the Worlds, and those delightful shock-fests from England’s Hammer Studios with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

But none were better than Universal’s classics: The Creature from the Black Lagoon; Bela Lugosi as Dracula; Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man; and of course, Boris Karloff as Frankenstein. Watching Colin Clive scream, “It’s alive! It’s alive!” remains one of the most thrilling moments of movie magic ever filmed.

Those movies were so creepy because, unlike today’s horror films, they left almost everything to my imagination—and my imagination can be a whole lot scarier than anything Hollywood can dish out. It’s no wonder audiences back then found those classic monster movies shocking and truly scary.

But the beauty of a story like Frankenstein is that it succeeds on so many levels. Full Story »

As a lifelong comic book reader, I was curious to stumble across Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics at the bookstore one day. That was perhaps a year ago, but I never got around to reading it. Written as a comic book itself, I figured it wouldn’t take me too long to plow through it once I finally picked it up.

Well, confined to bed for a few days, trying to avoid anything that would tax my foggy and phlegm-filled head, I decided to tackle McCloud’s book.

Bad choice and good choice.

Bad choice because it looked deceptively light, but in fact, the book is a pretty heavy-duty, sophisticated look at comic book theory. Yeah, that’s right: “comic book theory.” Full Story »

Steve Alten is waiting for some big news. In Alten’s case, “big” involves a seventy-six-foot-long man-eater that lives in the world’s deepest oceans and has been trying, for twelve years, to rise out of the depths and into cineplexes.

Alten is the author of Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, arguably one of the best summer potboilers in the last decade and a half. In the book, a team of deep-sea explorers accidentally bring to the surface a Carcharodon megalodon—a species of giant prehistoric shark thought to have died out about 50,000 years ago.

“I have been enthralled with this entire species,” Alten said in a phone interview from his South Florida home.

In Alten’s world, as the prehistoric seas cooled, the giant sharks gradually retreated to the deepest parts of the ocean, where geothermal vents kept the water much warmer than the water at the surface. A layer of near-freezing deep-sea water just above the geothermal zone kept the sharks from surfacing.

When in came out in 1997, Meg rocketed onto the New York Times bestseller list. The Los Angles Times called it “Jurassic Shark!” A Time magazine cover story touted it as a “cool summer read.” Disney’s Hollywood Pictures optioned the movie rights. Three sequels hit bookshelves in the twelve years since, including the most recent, Meg: Hell’s Aquarium, this past summer.

But moviegoers are still waiting for their first Meg sighting. Full Story »

There’s been quite a lot of discussion the past several years on what we might refer to as The Future of the Book. Unsurprisingly, virtually all of this relates to the impact of the internet on the fate of the printed page. And while a lot of this discussion has been tedious, as it often is, much of it has been quite good; for example, Roger Darnton’s observations (and the subsequent commentary) in The New York Review of Books, and various discussion elsewhere on the overall impact of, particularly, Google. Few of these discussions, though, have generated the kind of visceral response that the Boston Globe story, about Cushing Academy getting rid of its books and replacing them with eighteen Kindles and a cappuccino machine, has generated.
Full Story »

Meld the slipperiness of memory with the manic power of pop culture and you’ll get an idea of the lens Rebecca Brown uses to look at the world these days.

Brown’s newest book, American Romances, a collection of eight essays, mixes and matches in surprising ways: Oreo cookies and Gertrude Stein. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Beach Boy Brian Wilson. The Invisible Woman, John Wayne, Felix Mendelssohn, and the God Squad. They’re all in there—along with a lot of Brown herself.

“I’m trying to understand my individual life in the context of other things,” she explains in a phone interview from her Seattle-area home. “Clearly, some of the pieces are very personal. The autobiographical stuff is really autobiographical.”

Brown, who’s taught writing for twenty years, is best known for her novels: The Haunted House, The Last Time I Saw You, The Gifts of the Body, The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary—eleven in all. Her 2003 book Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary, a powerful retelling of her mother’s battle with terminal cancer, provided her the opportunity to explore memoir.

But nothing quite compares to the essay style Brown creates in American Romances. Full Story »

Is a brain in a synthetic body still human? Is there such a thing as too much horticultural knowledge? Is there such a thing as too much Jane Austen? Is there a link between the JFK assassination and 9/11? Anyone have any good reading suggestions for someone going through a midlife crisis?

For answers to these burning questions and more, check out what the Scrogues have on their nightstands these days.

Brian Angliss: I’m reading two things right now—the manga Ghost in the Shell and an old copy of Numerical Recipes. Full Story »

An S&R exclusive interview

William Forstchen has a bad dream—a really bad dream—that goes something like this:

A cataclysmic attack throws the United States back to the dark ages, with no electricity, no communication or transportation networks, and no medicines. The most vulnerable members of society—the very young and the very old—begin to die off first, but soon hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people, begin dying. Rogue bands of lawless predators, living by rule of force rather than by rule of law, prey on weakened communities. The government, crippled, can’t come to anyone’s rescue.

And all it takes is a single bomb detonated high in the atmosphere, two hundred miles above the continent.

“Welcome to my nightmare,” Forstchen says with the kind of grim chuckle usually reserved for gallows humor.

But this is no joke. “It sounds like it’s science fiction, Mayan-prophecy, end-of-the-world stuff,” Forstchen admits, “but it’s dead-on real.” Full Story »

Sam Smith:

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A wonderful analysis on the difficulty of knowing and the impossibility of predicting.

Brian Angliss:

The End of Faith by Sam Harris

I’m not done with this book, but it’s been an interesting read thus far. Harris chronicles a long list of atrocities committed in the name of faith, with an understandable focus on the three major monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. While it took me a long time to put aside my own biases (I’m an animist neo-pagan) and actually be able to read the book at all, I’ve found it an illuminating if occasionally frustrating read. Full Story »

After eighteen years, I finally got around to reading Douglas Coupland’s Generation X—the novel that literally defined my generation.

In a way, that makes Generation X sort of like the Moby Dick for Gen X-ers—one of those novels that one should read because it’s a Classic-with-a-capital-C. It’s Important. It’s defining. It’s about me.

Right?

Published in 1991, Generation X tells the story of three unfulfilled, uninspired twenty-somethings who float through life, tell stories to each other, and experience a nagging sense of being adrift in their own lives despite their best efforts to ground themselves. You can almost hear U2 belting out “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” in the background.

Being young means getting old, and middle class means boredom. Full Story »

Like a lot of other people, I watched the Watchmen this past weekend.

Despite lukewarm reviews and a running time that nearly hits three hours, the movie still managed to pull in a hefty $55.7 million dollars. While that’s apparently at the low end of industry expectations, the movie exceeded my fanboy expectations.

What I didn’t expect, though, was the spectacular time capsule-on-a-movie screen that Watchmen turned out to be.

As ground-breaking as Watchmen was as a comic book back in 1986-87, it was also very much a product of its time, infused with Cold War sensibility and anxiety, set in a crime-and-slime-ridden Times Square atmosphere writ large upon the world. Full Story »

When baseball resumes in Moundville this year, it will do so after a 22-year rain delay.

In the intervening years, the town has reinvented itself around the rain. Homeowners have rigged giant sheets of plastic, like umbrellas, over their homes. Officials have constructed a series of canals around the town to siphon off water. Townsfolk have to go to the giant gymnasium if they want a rain-free place to exercise.

And the town itself has even earned a new nickname: Mudville.

The world is a whole lot cozier for Mudville’s creator, author Kurtis Scaletta. Full Story »

“To my wife, who read all the drafts of my book. I am the lucky beneficiary of not only her wise editorial comments, but her loving encouragement.”

“To my husband, whose generosity of spirit enables him to laugh at the irony that my writer’s solitude has imposed a life of solitude on him too.”

Ever notice how many volumes of poetry and prose these days are bookended by gushing dedications and acknowledgments like the fictional examples above? Writers outdo themselves in expressions of gratitude to their loved ones for their help and patience. It’s as if we’re in the midst of a golden age of support — emotional anyway — for writers. Full Story »

Stage and film star Claire Bloom and author Philip Roth took no prisoners when their 17-year relationship ended in a firestorm.

When one of the partners in a marriage is a man who’s been called “a gleeful misogynist” –- in a complimentary article, no less –- it comes as no surprise when their union is torn asunder.

Claire Bloom and Philip Roth became a couple in 1976. She was not only a classically trained actress, but her beauty rivaled that of fellow English-woman Elizabeth Taylor (who she actually beat to Richard Burton, with whom she had an affair). He, of course is the American novelist whose career ebbed and flowed, until, after bypass surgery in 1989, he devoted his whole being to writing and was been on a tear ever since. Full Story »

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Wendy Redal

Hermann Hesse, especially for Narcissus & Goldmund: His study of the tension between reason and emotion as told through the 14th century lives of these two protagonists has served as a backdrop for my enduring awareness of this often troubling juxtaposition — throughout culture and in my own life. I grew up as cool Narcissus — a means to cope with a childhood fraught by chaos — and have been wrestling ever since with how to handle my inner Goldmund. Full Story »

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Denny Wilkins

I wrote and edited news and commentary for a living for 20 years. I, as they say, “pumped out lots of copy” in two decades. That necessarily had as much of an impact on my progress and perspective as a writer as reading the well-regarded and much-honored fiction and non-fiction of others. Those people with whom we personally engage as mentor and mentee often play critical roles in our development as writers. Full Story »

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

J.S. O’Brien

The most influential writer and book of my life didn’t influence my writing style one bit (thank God!), but he and his book changed completely changed my life. Most deeply rural, Southern kids back in the day were exposed to no ideas outside the generally accepted ones of their fiercely insular society. Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land was my first look at American social institutions and mores from outside the mainstream, and it instilled in me a voracious appetite for moving my frame of reference outside the superego to get a wider, and extremely useful, perspective. Full Story »

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Lex

As a reader of mostly non-fiction, with its division by subject rather than author, this is kind of a tough one for me. It forces me pretty far back, and hence sounds cliched to me…but here goes.

Conrad and Dostoevsky for their examination of the dark recess of the human psyche. Dickens for teaching me that it’s okay to laugh at starving orphans. Melville (Billy Budd) and Conrad (Heart of Darkness) have always impressed me enough to reread and reread for the admirable ability to get whole novels into very short works. I’ve been through Billy Budd looking up and writing down every word that I couldn’t define and would probably have to look words up if I read it again tomorrow; that impresses me. Moby Dick needed an editor. Full Story »