1592. England and Spain are at war, yet there is peril at home, too. The death of her trusted spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham has left Queen Elizabeth vulnerable. Conspiracies multiply. The quiet life of John Shakespeare is shattered by a summons from Robert Cecil, the cold but deadly young statesman who dominated the last years of the Queen's long reign, insisting Shakespeare re-enter government service. His mission: to find vital papers, now in the possession of the Earl of Essex. Essex is the brightest star in the firmament, a man of ambition. He woos the Queen, thirty-three years his senior, as if she were a girl his age. She is flattered by him – despite her loathing for his mother, the beautiful, dangerous Lettice Knollys who presides over her own glittering court – a dazzling array of the mad, bad, dangerous and disaffected. When John Shakespeare infiltrates this dissolute world he discovers not only that the Queen herself is in danger – but that he and his family is also a target. With only his loyal footsoldier Boltfoot Cooper at his side, Shakespeare must face implacable forces who believe themselves above the law: men and women who kill without compunction. And in a world of shifting allegiances, just how far he can trust Robert Cecil, his devious new master? Views: 16
This time the boys find themselves in cottage country making up spooky tales about staying out of the forest. Tales from the Philippines and Native American legends are told until the boys can almost see strange characters at their dinner table that night.From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 16
Amazon.com Review"Erickson is as unique and vital and pure a voice as American fiction has produced."--Jonathan LethemA film-obsessed ex-seminarian with images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his head arrives on Hollywood Boulevard in 1969. Vikar Jerome enters the vortex of a cultural transformation: rock and roll, sex, drugs, and--most important to him--the decline of the movie studios and the rise of independent directors. Jerome becomes a film editor of astonishing vision. Through encounters with former starlets, burglars, political guerillas, punk musicians, and veteran filmmakers, he discovers the secret that lies in every movie ever made.Questions for Steve EricksonJeff VanderMeer for Amazon.com: Could you describe where you are as you're answering these questions? Erickson: At the moment I'm in my home office in Topanga Canyon, which I can see outside my window. Amazon.com: How do you feel your fiction has changed over the years, beyond the changes that occur from acquiring greater mastery of technique? Erickson: Well, being a novelist yourself, you probably understand this is something it's better for a writer not to think too much about. While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite. On the other hand, though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows--the theme of parents and kids, for instance, which lurked under the surface in earlier novels like Days Between Stations and Rubicon Beach and Arc d'X, has come to the forefront over the course of my last three novels including Zeroville, just because my own personal experience has become more first-hand. Amazon.com: Because you've got more ways to tell a story now than when you were first published, does that also make it harder to write? Do you ever find yourself debating the merits of more than one approach to the same material? Erickson: The material dictates the approach. I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them. Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult." In my previous novel, Our Ecstatic Days, a lake has flooded Los Angeles and a young single mother believes it represents the chaos of the world that has come to take her small son. She dives down into the water to the hole at the bottom through which the lake is coming--and at the moment I wrote that scene, I had this idea she should "swim" through the rest of the novel, through the next 25 years of the story, and the reader sees this in the form of a single sentence that cuts through the rest of the text. A lot of people identified this as "experimental," but to me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake, and if anything I've always steered a bit clear of that kind of thing, because it seems gimmicky to play around with text rather than do the work of telling a story and creating characters. In the case of Our Ecstatic Days, it was just a way of conveying the world of that particular novel. A number of people have noted that Zeroville is more "linear" than the earlier novels but that was calculated only in the sense that I thought a novel about the Movies and why we love them (as opposed to a "Hollywood novel" about the movie business) should have the pop energy of a movie. People have mentioned how fast Zeroville reads--that's because I felt it should move the way a movie moves. Amazon.com: What really sparked Zeroville? Was there a moment where you suddenly realized you had a story to tell? Erickson: The idea was born in a short story I wrote for a McSweeney's anthology, but the novel really fell into place when the character of Vikar came into focus, when I got a handle on this guy who shows up in Hollywood in 1969 on what happens to be the day of the Manson murders, with a scene from George Stevens's A Place in the Sun tattooed on his head. He's identified by one of the other characters in the novel as not a cineaste but "cineautistic"--movies have become his religion after he's rejected the one his father imposed on him, and he sees movies through the eyes of an innocent. Once I had Vikar I had everything--the story, the approach, the perspective, the tone. Amazon.com: How difficult was it to layer in all of the movie information that's in Zeroville? For example, you include several real movie people in the novel, sometimes anonymously so the reader has to guess who they are. Was that all there in the initial drafts? Erickson: The whole novel wrote itself from beginning to end, including the film stuff. It was the easiest novel I've written. I almost feel like I can't take credit for it--it was like the universe said, Here, you worked pretty hard on all those other books, so we're giving you this one. You type, I'll dictate. If anything, when I went back over the novel, I took film stuff out. The stuff about movies had to support the story, it had to support the characters and be informed by them -- the novel couldn't just be a compendium of movies I happen to like. It's not a DVD guide. Amazon.com: Did you know going in that this was going to be a very funny novel? And do you think reviewers have, in the past, missed elements of humor in your work, or is this new for you? Erickson: I knew it was going to be funny once I knew who Vikar was. Once I knew we were going to tell the story pretty much from his vantage point, it couldn't help being funny. There are moments of humor in earlier novels like Tours of the Black Clock and The Sea Came in at Midnight that probably are so dry and dark that some people didn't understand they were funny. But with the exception of Amnesiascope, which generally is considered a funny novel, the humor usually hasn't been this overt. From Publishers WeeklySet primarily in Los Angeles from the late 1960s through 1980s, this darkly funny, wise but flawed novel from Erickson (Arc d'X) focuses on our collective fascination with movies. Vikar Jerome, whose almost deranged film fixation manifests itself in the images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his bald head, wanders around Hollywood, where he gets mistaken for a perp in the Charles Manson murders and is robbed by a man who turns out to be a fellow film buff. After Vikar becomes a film editor, he's kidnapped by revolutionaries in Spain who want him to edit their propaganda film. Later, he wins a Cannes Film Festival award in France and receives an Oscar nomination, with strange consequences. Vikar repeatedly crosses paths with actress Soledad Palladin and her daughter, Zazi, though ambiguities in his relationship with this enigmatic pair, along with a recurring dream of his, derail this black comedy toward the end. The sudden point-of-view shift and possible supernatural element jar in an otherwise brilliant, often hilarious love song to film. (Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Views: 16
Wanted: Hot holiday fling with an out-of-towner (sort of)Is jet-setting, supermodel-bedding hottie Colin Reeves actually home for the holidays? That's the rumor this Christmas. And now he's desperate for something only wholesome Emily Stanfield can provide: a room at her inn.But Emily's tired of her choir-girl rep. Sex-ravenous and determined, she's facing a tantalizing dilemma: can she entice Colin to some holiday cheer under the sheets-and trust him to secrecy after the deal is done? Because one slip and everybody will be gossiping about Tall Pine's poster girl having the delicious Colin.Unless, of course, one steamy night turns into something even these folks couldn't predict... Views: 16
Fans of Beautiful Disaster will devour Diana Peterfreund's Ivy League novels--Secret Society Girl, Under the Rose, Rites of Spring (Break), and Tap & Gown. At an elite university, Amy Haskel has been initiated into the country's most notorious secret society. But in this power-hungry world where new blood is at the mercy of old money, hooking up with the wrong people could be fatal. Now a senior at Eli University, Amy is looking her future squarely in the eye--until someone starts selling society secrets. When a female member mysteriously disappears and a series of bizarre messages suggests conspiracy within the ranks, no member of Rose & Grave is safe . . . or above suspicion. On Amy's side, the other women in Rose & Grave remain loyal. Against her? A group of Rose & Grave's überpowerful patriarchs who want their old boys' club back. As new developments in her love life threaten to explode, and the search for the missing girl... Views: 15
Elizabeth Young's brothers think they have it rough as vampires? Ha! Two words for them: unwanted hair. What werewolf Elizabeth craves is a normal life with a husband, kids, and less shaving. Unfortunately the vaccine she's researched isn't working yet. Worse, she's in heat-and soon every dangerous wolf pack for miles around will be at her door. To buy time, she needs to have sex, and often, with the first human male she can find Veterinarian Jensen Adler just meant to drown his sorrows, until a stunning, leather-clad brunette made him an offer he couldn't refuse. Now he's caught up in something really weird, definitely dangerous, and, okay, extremely hot. So his new girlfriend's hiding something (and she's a little freaky about the moon), but Jensen knows true love when he feels it, and this time, he's not giving upno matter how hairy things get. Views: 15
Bill Bryson meets Bruce Lee in this raucously funny story of one scrawny American's quest to become a kung fu master at China's legendary Shaolin Temple.Growing up a ninety-pound weakling tormented by bullies in the schoolyards of Kansas, young Matthew Polly dreamed of one day journeying to the Shaolin Temple in China to become the toughest fighter in the world, like Caine in his favorite 1970s TV series, Kung Fu. While in college, Matthew decided the time had come to pursue this quixotic dream before it was too late. Much to the dismay of his parents, he dropped out of Princeton to spend two years training with the legendary sect of monks who invented kung fu and Zen Buddhism.Expecting to find an isolated citadel populated by supernatural ascetics that he'd seen in countless badly dubbed chop-socky flicks, Matthew instead discovered a tacky tourist trap run by Communist party hacks. But the dedicated monks still trained in the rigorous age-old fighting forms—some... Views: 15
“Nothing special” is the best way to describe Owen Reeder—at least that's what he's been told all his life. When a stranger visits his father's bookstore, Owen's ordinary life spirals out of control and right into a world he didn't even know existed. Owen believes the only gift he possesses is his ability to devour books, but he is about to be forced into a battle that will affect two worlds: his and the unknown world of the Lowlands. Perfect for readers ages 10 to 14 who enjoy a fast-paced story packed with action, fantasy, and humor. Views: 15
