Justin Hampton at The Bookloft

No sooner did I last post a semi-snarky mention of Nick Cave’s second novel than I ended up getting my hands on an advance copy. Busy as I’ve been, I haven’t been able to say anything at all about it until now. Good thing that I got it, as [...] Continue Reading…

As busy as I am preparing for Burning Man this week, there was virtually no way I could miss the Process Church Of The Final Judgment presentation hosted by Feral House and Cinefamily last night at the Silent Movie Film Theater in [...] Continue Reading…

I don’t know how I missed out on this one, but for those of you who have a tattoo or two of quotations from your favorite novel, poem or short story (or blog post, even. I’m sure we’ll see that one of these days), Justin Taylor and Eva Talmadge [...] Continue Reading…

Jeez, it’s something about storied authors of the 20th century and their titles. First, it’s near-centenarian J.D. Salinger successfully fighting off (for now) a sequel to Catcher In The Rye, and now it’s a Florida Courts judge ruling the will which bequeathed Keroac’s $20 million estate to his wife [...] Continue Reading…

Well, apparently, the publisher of Ziff-Davis says he’s never gonna buy a book again. His Kindle’s taken care of that.

“At first, my transition to digital book consumption was gradual. I’d often be reading (and buying) hard copy books at the same time I was getting used to the experience [...] Continue Reading…

Some disclosure: a few years back, I used to write for SPIN. I don’t anymore. It had become a steadily decaying relationship after they got sold in a fire sale back in ‘06, and while the magazine seems to have made a few good decisions since then, it goes [...] Continue Reading…

So back when I was in high school, oh, around the time Lincoln got shot, every hipster with a horse and buggy knew about this novel this weird alpha-male Goth guy named Nick Cave had written. I had known about him through his work with the seminal no wave [...] Continue Reading…

Arlo Guthrie saw the vision in a deconsecrated church decades ago. In Great Barrington, not far from the Bookloft’s base. Goofy internet trends. Really.

I refer to that observation at the end of “Alice’s Restaurant,” where he notes:

“If one person [sings this song], just one person does it they may [...] Continue Reading…

Well, lookee here, a bootleg Kindle 2, coming from the Chinese, no less!

That’s right, in keeping with all the great knockoff Gucci sunglasses and Yves-Saint Laurent handbags these guys love throwing our way, they’ve finally cracked the code on [...] Continue Reading…

…when Eric Wilska called me up and said, in his scariest, Boris-Karloff-after-a-tracheotomy rasp, eerily intoned, “Juuuuuuuussssttttttinnnnnn….. yyyoooooouuuu mmmmmuuuuusstttt wwwwrrrriiiitttteee aaaa blllllooooogggggg fffooooooorrrr mmmmmeeeeeeeee………”

I must admit that the thought terrified me at first.

But I gave it some thought. For not only have I been a writer all of my life, [...] Continue Reading…