Ben East Books

Tag: Fiction

  • Review: Foreign Service Fiction

    —

    by

    Ben East
    in ,

    Anyone who thinks diplomacy is about choosing the right fork at the right time should think again and read James O’Callaghan’s clever satire No Circuses (Tacchino Press, 2015). Forget preconceived notions of dinner-party diplomacy: keeping one’s elbows off the table, tangoing the rival into submission, and writing it up the next day in communiqués to DC. What diplomacy’s really about, in O’Callaghan’s world,…

  • True Crime Review: Ivory Tower Cop

    —

    by

    Ben East
    in

    George Kirkham and Leonard Territo pair up to deliver an informative, fast-paced police procedural in Ivory Tower Cop, exploring a serial rape case based on actual events. The thriller digs into half a dozen savage crimes, the latest developments in forensic science, arcane Biblical studies, historical detail from The Third Reich, and Nazism’s reach into…

  • Reviewers’ resource

    —

    by

    Ben East
    in ,

    If you’re looking to sink your teeth into reviewing books, Atticus Review is a good place to start. You can hear from their book review editor, Sam Slaughter, at Citizen Lit. He offers up a few thoughts on the art of the review and his approach to guiding writers in the process. Listen to the whole thing…

  • Work out! Rock out! Write on!

    —

    by

    Ben East
    in

    Here’s an inspiration to kick off the new year. John Grisham built a reputation as a writer (love him, hate him, it’s unimportant) by turning tax lawyers into the kind of people who drive fast cars, plot murders, and enjoy lives of sinister intrigue. Tax lawyers. Whatever you do for a living, it’s got to be more…

  • Cheney: still wrong after all these years

    —

    by

    Ben East
    in

    Former veep, elegantly cloaked in fiction Crediting Dick Cheney for his rebuke of Donald Trump’s bigotry gets no traction with me. Sorry Dick: you can’t make up for decades of reckless decisions and bad policy based on one easy moment of obvious decency. You’re still a modern architect of the very party now on the verge of nominating a racist…

  • San Francisco: Crime and Baseball

    —

    by

    Ben East
    in

    San Francisco–can you get any stranger? Spiked baseball bats chained to parking meters all over town. They appeared, 27 of them, on Thanksgiving: preparations for the Black Friday zombie shopper apocalypse? Speaking of crime, baseball, and the City by the Bay: check out Tom Pitts’ Knuckleball… The whole city of San Francisco wants a cop-killer caught. Over…

  • The Patron Saint of Juvenile Delinquents

    —

    by

    Ben East
    in

    Everyone who’s grown up Catholic has a few stories to share, long or short. The good folks at The Citron Review were good enough to publish one of my really short ones: CONFIRMATION Mrs. Dever sees their faces but can’t remember what to call them. They all look alike. They all look bored. They all look…

  • Debut San Francisco Cyber-Noir

    —

    by

    Ben East
    in ,

    Mark Richardson’s Hunt for the Troll (New Pulp Press) is a step up from ordinary pulp. It’s what happens to San Francisco noir when the shiny new promise of Silicon Valley comes to town, pushing back the fog to play some light in the corners. In this case, the light is more ominous than the dark. Our…

  • The Blind Rooster Jumps to Paperback

    —

    by

    Ben East
    in ,

    Preston Lang’s The Blind Rooster (Crime Wave Press) is now more pulpy than ever before. It’s recently been made available in paperback! Reading this dime-store crime tale is a lot like people-watching at the Laundromat: the major figures resemble coin-op types, people resigned to the vague indignity of paying to have their underwear tumble around in a public washer. And don’t…

  • Query Inquiry

    —

    by

    Ben East
    in

    In the decade or so that I’ve been shopping novels around I’ve noticed a strong downward trajectory in agent response rate. I don’t mean passes vs. requests for manuscripts. I mean a high and growing degree of non-response, period. Yes, the query landscape has changed dramatically from paper to electronic in that time, increasing the amount of…