Ben East Books

Tag: Novel

  • The Blind Rooster Jumps to Paperback

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    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

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    Ben East
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    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…

  • Review: C.S. DeWildt’s Love You to a Pulp

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    Ben East
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    C.S. DeWildt’s Love You to a Pulp packs two narratives, tight spirals driving like hammerdrills against the cranium til they breach the dark cavern beneath. You’ll know it when you get there underground with him. In the first narrative glue-nose dick Neil McGrath sniffs out a mystery involving the pharmacist’s daughter in a Podunk southern town. In the…

  • Writers at Rest

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    Ben East
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    Taking a break from producing fiction? A couple of reads that offer ridiculous, pathetic, sad, witty, funny–fun–looks at the fiction-writer’s life include The Visiting Writer, a short story from Matthew Vollmer’s collection Gateway to Paradise, and Chris Belden’s novel, Shriver. The Visiting Writer delivers us into the world of literary aspiration, a lament on the lack of success, a self examination,…

  • Review: Shriver

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    Ben East
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    Chris Belden’s Shriver might be called a book about a novelist who wrote a book called Goat Time which everybody seems to enjoy but nobody seems to have read, at least not entirely, including not the author Shriver himself. Add to this nonsensical loop a few day’s worth of swarming mosquitoes, a crate or two…

  • Beginnings and Endings

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    Ben East
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    You might inscribe the title of your novel a couple dozen times before it sticks. You might make it longer, shorter, TBD, Working Title, WIP, B.S., Nada, Whatever… whatever. And revert after all that to the original working title. Or not. But “The End”… this is a thing you only write once on a manuscript. Today was that…

  • Dundee International Book Prize

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    Ben East
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    Two weeks until the February 15th deadline for submitting your manuscript to this year’s Dundee International Book Prize. Curious about what floats their boat? Read last year’s shortlisted works: My manuscript Sea Never Dry, thick with crooked cops, fetish priests, Internet fraudsters, and orphans turning a buck off a West African e-waste dump, made last year’s cut. Read the excerpt below. Now,…

  • Review–The Blind Rooster

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    by

    Ben East
    in

    Reading Preston Lang’s The Blind Rooster (Crime Wave Press) feels 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 take your eyes off them for a moment—they’d just as soon pinch a quarter…

  • Review – The Family Hightower

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    Ben East
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    Blood Sport and the American Dream The Family Hightower takes a savage and intelligent look at the American Dream, asserting an inextricable link between capitalism and crime in a voice that borders on the eternal.  Appropriate, considering the timeless and unattainable aspiration of Brian Francis Slattery’s characters: to “get out”, to escape the prison of wealth and violence…