Quirk Books: Ben H. Winters & Seth Grahame-Smith Reinvent the Classics

Wish I could get these in my neighborhood bookstore, they are to die for! How postmodern and post apocalyptic ey?


The cover for Android Karenina

If only these were out when I was in High School then the classics wouldn't have been a total bore. Silas Marner could have been Silas Mechwarrior Robot! and I could have read that in one go.


Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Winters shares a byline with Austen


Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

The HuffPost talks about writers like Ben H. Winters on how he co-authors with dead people particularly Jane Austen. And how he upsets the literati and the purists. Read More

To date there are rumors of a movie deal for the books. Yeah I would like to see Elizabeth Bennet take a bite out of Mr. Darcy! A nod to the strict feminist approach

The Recluse Has Left the Building: The Death of JD Salinger

The legendary novelist whose novel Catcher in the Ryle became the signature voice for the angry and alienated youth, it was almost like reinventing adolescence.

The whole world catches its breath and mourns the hermit Salinger.

Catcher in the Rye author JD Salinger would not be caught in the public eye
Writer whose seminal work still sells 200,000 copies a year withdrew from public life in the 1960s

J.D. Salinger RIP 

The Secret History of JD Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye's voice of postwar teenage disaffection seems to me to articulate the experiences of an earlier generation

Reviewed: Dave Eggers' Remembrance of J.D. Salinger in The New Yorker

So where has he been hiding all these decades?
This Is J.D. Salinger's House 

Happy Reading this 2010!

The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.

— Alan Bennett, The History Boys

On Books and Reading

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice.
- Gilbert Highet

I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
- William Lyon Phelps

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow

Another gem from my Booksale hunt.

This book has bite and it won't let go of any rabid reader.

Sharp Teeth has gone rogue with werewolves in LA. Barlow weaves the lycanthrope myth in free verse and flows evenly like spoken word poetry.

The Girl Who Played Go by Shan Sa

This find really made my day.

I remember being at Bibliarch once and 9 Asian fiction novels were on display, they were released with similarly styled covers. I guess they were being marketed as a novels having the same theme and feel. Three of them were quite popular already and one, Norwegian Wood being a common favorite of the literati. I bought one of the eight - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Since Dai Sijie the author is also a filmmaker.  But I also have my eye on Yukio Mishima'sThe Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea in my bookworm radar.


Synopsis: In war-torn Manchuria of the 1930s, a young girl and a Japanese soldier briefly find peace over a game of go.


A lovely photo of the author Shan Sa.

Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician

I loved the magic realism of Big Fish, this is what lured me in taking a chance in this book by Daniel Wallace and best of all the copy is in large print. Oh my poor eyes...

Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician is a multi-layer fantastical feast told by all the surrounding characters in reference to the main ones in the title, both whom we never really get to hear from. This book has just has too many tricks. Deceptive at times, this novel distorts its own reality like a fun house mirror.