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Review: Charactered Pieces, by Caleb J. Ross

This is yet another installment in my ongoing and idiosyncratic effort to curate decent indie, DRM-free, (did we mention decent?) ebooks.  Previously, I’ve recommended ebooks by Jiri Kajane, Laura Ellen Scott, and Matt Bell.  Here’s another:  Charactered Pieces, by Caleb J. Ross.  It’s a chapbook of seven short stories, available as an ebook from Smashwords [...]

Paul Quarrington’s Civilization and Its Part in My Downfall

Imagine you are an inmate of the Cahuenga Federal Penitentiary awaiting a hanging (not your own) while your mother, a religious zealot with a sizable following, protests outside the prison walls, and the warden, a great admirer of your work (you have starred in numerous 2-reeler silent films, including Bald Mountain Men whose title belies [...]

Parent Seeks to Ban The Wars, by Timothy Findley

According to the Walkerton Herald-Times, the parent of a grade-12 student has filed a complaint with the Bluewater District School Board calling for removal of Timothy Findley’s novel, The Wars, from the curriculum.  According to the article, Carolyn Waddell, a professional counselor, alleges that there are parts of Findley’s novel which are “depraved”.  She states [...]

Did Doris Lessing Influence David Foster Wallace?

Did Doris Lessing influence David Foster Wallace?  The question occurred to me as I read Lessing’s Shikasta, the first in her five-volume Canopus in Argos series of “space fiction” novels.  Shikasta is a planet subject to Canopian “supervision”.  Canopus is a galactic empire.  Their rivals are the Sirians, but the real thorn in their flesh [...]

Smashwords, Mark Coker and the Gears of Big Publishing

Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, posted an op-ed today in the Huffington Post, calling on authors to throw themselves on the gears of the machine.  This is a reference to Mario Savio‘s 1964 speech in which he called on students at UCLA to resist the administration’s attempts to curtail free speech.  In the case [...]

If Copyright Lawyers Wrote the Rules for Baseball

The Anthropocene Age: The Drowned World & J.G. Ballard

According to the BBC news online, we now live in the Anthropocene period, which is a fancy way of saying humans have so altered the planet’s surface that we’ve left traces of ourselves in its permanent geological record.  Naturally, the first order of business is to give our recklessness a name.  What strikes me most [...]

Dream Sequence #2 – The Litigation Lawyer

Unlike my Dream Sequence #1 (The Lost Bowling Alley of Atlantis), this is someone else’s dream, which I am mining for fun and profit.  Yesterday, I was walking down St. George Street, on my way to pick up a book I had ordered, when a man dashed from a doorway and joined me.  He was [...]

The Most Unlikely Movie Scene Ever

The most unlikely movie scene ever in the history of Hollywood (at least in my humble opinion) has to be the closing scene of Stand By Me, the Rob Reiner film based on a short story by Stephen King.  Maybe you remember the film.  It’s a quest/coming-of-age story about four boys in Smalltown, U.S.A. circa [...]

Some Dirt on The Land

I was aiming for May 7th to release The Land, but managed to get everything done with a couple days to spare, so here it is, complete with book trailer.  I showed Tamiko and she thinks the tone is sufficiently creepy for the subject matter.  Some members of my family have been waiting for this [...]

All My Cover Designers Are Superheroes

All My Friends Are Superheroes is a slender sentimental quasi-allegorical tale by Andrew Kaufman.  However, the real superhero of this book is Ian McInnis, whose cheeky whimsical cover has probably done more to sell this book than all the other marketing efforts combined.  Pulled from the City of Toronto archives, the cover photo is a [...]

David Barker Writes Sappy Poetry

I confess it:  I sometimes vanity google.  My name is sufficiently common that enhancing my google rankings has become an exercise in frustration.  However, it passes beyond frustration when I discover that I’m outranked by a dead poet no one has ever heard of.  Ah me!  If you can’t fight it, then embrace it with [...]

Reading Mishima in Light of Japan’s Tsunami

Sometimes, when I read, it feels as if the words were always already written inside me and the author has simply drawn them to my attention.  That happens most often to me with poetry and large novels, rarely with short stories.  But with short stories, there are a few notable exceptions—Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter, Poe’s Telltale [...]

A New Novel About Organic Farmers and Psychotic Children

I’ve committed an act of theft and, if I’m lucky, I’ll get away with it.  I’ve stolen some lives and a piece of property and I’ve hawked them for a novel.  My novel is called The Land and I plan to release it on May 7th or thereabouts.  Here’s what I did:  I took four [...]

Hex Hex Hex

I’m stuck.  I wouldn’t call it writer’s block.  I can think of lots to blog about.  There’s a list of ideas floating around my desk somewhere and it’s full of notions that may or may not work, but at least they’re worth trying.  My problem is more a soulful disorganization.  This has been going on [...]