Park’s delightful tales, which are driven by provocative ideas, strange occurrences, and gripping plots, pay tribute to the legacy of Kurt Vonnegut in the best ways. This pitch-perfect collection will linger in readers’ minds for a long time. Read more
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How Chuck Tingle went legit. Read more
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Among Smith’s honors were being named a “grand master” by the Mystery Writers of America, and winning the Hammett Prize for “Havana Bay” and a Gold Dagger award for “Gorky Park.” Read more
He is stepping into a new phase in his career -— winning a Pulitzer Prize and maybe a second Tony while writing the Prince musical “Purple Rain.” Read more
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“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” So reads the 10th of “10 Rules of Writing” (2007) by Elmore Leonard (1925-2013), the New Orleans-born, Detroit-raised, Hollywood-savvy author who changed the nature of crime stories (in print and on screen) while becoming one of the most successful and highly regarded writers of his genre and generation. Read more
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The book, out on Oct. 21 from Harper, includes eight previously unreleased stories and eight pieces of nonfiction that Lee published in various outlets between 1961 and 2006, including a profile of her friend, the writer Truman Capote, a cornbread recipe and a letter to Oprah Winfrey. Read more
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Joseph Wambaugh, the master storyteller of police dramas, whose books, films and television tales powerfully caught the hard psychic realities of lonely street cops and flawed detectives trapped in a seedy world of greed and senseless brutality, died on Friday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Read more
Tom Robbins, whose cosmically comic novels about gargantuan-thumbed hitchhikers, stoned secret agents and mystic stockbrokers caught hold of millions of readers in the 1970s counterculture, died on Sunday at his home in La Conner, Wash. Read more
He wasn’t just prolific, publishing 32 books. His output also showed an unusual range that included memoirs and forays into historical fiction and even poetry. Read more
The key fact about Malzberg was not just that he was fast—but that he was good. Perfectly readable was his baseline minimum, and when he was at his peak, he overshot that to achieve genuine brilliance. It’s easy enough to tote up evidence of Malzberg’s prolificity: In his peak decade, from 1967 to 1976, Malzberg wrote at least 68 novels and seven story collections along with scores of still uncollected stories published in many magazines and anthologies. He worked in a variety of genres, including mystery, thrillers, erotica, and adventure fiction, but his core work was in science fiction. Malzberg’s best science fiction novels—titles such as Beyond Apollo (1972), Herovit’s World (1973), Guernica Night (1975), and Galaxies (1975)—were astonishingly incisive critiques of modern technology and mass society. Intimately familiar with the genre, Malzberg used all the familiar SF tropes (space exploration, time travel, alternative histories) but amped them up with a bracing dose of pessimism and the stylistic bravura of literary modernism. Read more
