Search Results for: book club

Future Treasures: The Dark Days Club by Alison Goodman

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Alison Goodman is the author of the New York Times bestseller EON, winner of the 2008 Aurealis Award and a Tiptree nominee, and its sequel EONA, both set in a mythical China. Her other novels include the SF thriller Singing the Dogstar Blues and Killing the Rabbit. Her latest novel is The Dark Days Club (published as Lady Helen and the Dark Days Club in her native Australia), a Regency adventure starring a stylish and intrepid demon-hunter. It is the opening…

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Amazon Announces its Top-Selling Books of 2014

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Amazon.com has announced its top-selling books of 2014, and the list includes half a dozen fantasy novels. This isn’t a truly definitive breakdown of top sellers for the year, since it’s just from one bookseller (as powerful as Amazon may be). Also, 2014 isn’t even over yet, fer cryin’ out loud. Still, it’s an interesting list, with plenty on it for fantasy fans — including several popular series (The Heroes of Olympus, The Mortal Instruments, and two Outlander books, just…

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Bringing Neglected Classics Back Into Print: The Horror Catalog of Valancourt Books

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One of the many delights of the World Fantasy Convention, as I reported last week, is meeting the small publishers doing marvelous work in the industry. Seeing their catalogs of books spread out before you on a table in the Dealers Room can be quite a revelation. That was certainly the case with Valancourt Books. As they proclaim proudly on their website, Valancourt Books is an independent small press specializing in the rediscovery of rare, neglected, and out-of-print fiction. They have…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Crimes Club

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Violette Malan wrote a post about Isaac Asimov’s Black Widower mysteries. These were stories about a group of men, members of a private club, who met monthly and tried to solve a guest’s mystery. The Black Widowers were based on a real-life group that Asimov was a member of, The Trap Door Spiders. Founded by science-fiction author Fletcher Pratt, I believe that the roots go even deeper and can be traced back to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Name That Crime…

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Compiling The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure

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Greetings, Black Gate readers! You may be familiar with my work as the game designer Lawrence Schick – possibly from role-playing material like the White Plume Mountain D&D scenario, video games such as Sword of the Samurai, or my recent work as Loremaster for The Elder Scrolls Online. But I also write, edit, and translate historical fiction as Lawrence Ellsworth, and in that capacity I have a new title coming out from Pegasus Books, an anthology called The Big Book…

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Vintage Treasures: The Book of Skaith: The Adventures of Eric John Stark by Leigh Brackett

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I joined the Science Fiction Book Club in the fall of 1975, when I was in my last year at St. Francis Junior High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Before I joined, I agonized over my introductory selection — three books for a just a dollar! — for days, reading and re-reading the tiny paragraphs in the brochure, and then waiting impatiently for my selections to arrive in the mail. My friend John MacMaster enrolled me and I’m pretty sure I’ll…

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Self Published Book Review: The Book of Thoth by Paul Leone

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If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see the submission guidelines here. Considering my dislike of vampires, I seem to review a lot of books about them. Either vampires are hard to avoid or I just can’t help myself. Paul Leone’s The Book of Thoth is part of his Vatican Vampire Hunters series. As you might guess by the name of the series, Mr. Leone does not shy away from religious themes. Or vampires. In his series,…

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Little Lulu Volume 25: The Burglar-Proof Clubhouse and Other Stories

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During my heyday as a young comic collector — from maybe 1973-1977 — I primarily chased Marvel titles, with the occasional DC offering like Legion of Super-Heroes, and a smattering of Charlton comics such as Blue Beetle. Like most ten-year-old collectors I scorned kid’s comics, of course. At least in public. Behind closed doors, I loved virtually all comics, and read whatever I could get my hands on: Archie, Uncle Scrooge, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and even Little Lulu, which featured the…

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On the Future of Bookstores

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So everyone’s crying about the demise of Borders, though it wasn’t that long ago we were all crying about how it and evil twin Barnes and Noble were driving  local independent bookstores out of business, even as we were shopping mostly at Amazon to get the books we found browsing at the physical bookstore at a better price (sinner, heal thyself). Like everyone else, I used to love going into the megastores, and maybe felt a little guilty about it,…

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I Am Number Four: Why Movies Are Rarely As Good As Books

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I am in my mid-thirties and my wife is in her mid-twenties. The eight-year difference between us can be jarring at times, especially because I am a pop culture junkie and she grew up without cable television (and rarely watched the network television she did have access to, as I learned when I discovered she’d never seen an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard, even in rerun). Recently, this generation gap has became particularly evident. A close friend of hers…

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