What is Kameron Hurley reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Kameron Hurley, author of God’s War and Infidel.

Her entry begins:

A good deal of my nonfiction reading involves tales of war and tactics, logistics and the psychology of killing. You would think I’d take a break from this when I read fiction, but because I’m fascinated with the exploration of war, terror, fear, and violence and how the way we divide, oppress and categorize people plays into that, I am just as interested in how other fiction writers explore these topics.

Just this week, I finished reading Stories from the New War by Joel Best. It’s a book of prose poetry that explores the stories of the people and places being transformed by a long, drawn-out conflict. One of the truths you uncover as you delve into the history of war is that often, who the enemy is and what people are fighting over isn’t...[read on]

Among the praise for Kameron Hurley and her books:

“Kameron Hurley's a brave, unflinching, truly original writer with a unique vision—her fiction burns right through your brain and your heart.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, author of Finch

“[A] compelling far-future debut … Hurley's world-building is phenomenal, with casual references to insectile technology and the world's history that provide atmosphere without infodumps … Hurley smoothly handles tricky themes such as race, class, religion, and gender without sacrificing action.”
—Publishers Weekly on God's War

“[A] stellar debut novel ... beautifully crafted ... truly a work of art—bloody, brutal, bug-filled art.”
—The Ranting Dragon

“Very original world-building. ... Hurley belongs in the new class of Sci-Fi authors we've been waiting for to invigorate the genre along the sides of Rajaniemi, Bacigalupi, and Yu although each brings different skills to the table.”
—The Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf

Learn more about the author and her work at Kameron Hurley's website.

My Book, The Movie: God’s War and Infidel.

Writers Read: Kameron Hurley.

--Marshal Zeringue

J.J. Murphy's "Algonquin Round Table Mysteries," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: The Algonquin Round Table Mysteries by J.J. Murphy.

The entry begins:

Who could play the infamous Dorothy Parker and the members of the Algonquin Round Table in a movie? Fortunately or unfortunately, these were real people. So their appearances are already a matter of record.

Also, I’m going to cheat...I have my own poll on my website, so I’ll let the readers decide. Here’s how they voted:

Dorothy Parker. She was a petite, brown-haired, sharp-tongued young woman [photo left]. So the candidates for this role include Emily Blunt (with 9% of the votes), Rachel McAdams (with 10%), Ellen Page (15%), and Anne Hathaway (18%). But the winner is...Christina Ricci, with almost half (47%) of the votes.

Interestingly, write-in candidates include Helena Bonham-Carter, Selma...[read on]

Learn more about the books and author at J.J. Murphy's website and Facebook page.

My Book, The Movie: The Algonquin Round Table Mysteries.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jason Morgan Ward's "Defending White Democracy"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965 by Jason Morgan Ward.

About the book, from the publisher:

After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, southern white backlash seemed to explode overnight. Journalists profiled the rise of a segregationist movement committed to preserving the "southern way of life" through a campaign of massive resistance. In Defending White Democracy, Jason Morgan Ward reconsiders the origins of this white resistance, arguing that southern conservatives began mobilizing against civil rights some years earlier, in the era before World War II, when the New Deal politics of the mid-1930s threatened the monopoly on power that whites held in the South.

As Ward shows, years before "segregationist" became a badge of honor for civil rights opponents, many white southerners resisted racial change at every turn--launching a preemptive campaign aimed at preserving a social order that they saw as under siege. By the time of the Brown decision, segregationists had amassed an arsenal of tested tactics and arguments to deploy against the civil rights movement in the coming battles. Connecting the racial controversies of the New Deal era to the more familiar confrontations of the 1950s and 1960s, Ward uncovers a parallel history of segregationist opposition that mirrors the new focus on the long civil rights movement and raises troubling questions about the enduring influence of segregation's defenders.

Learn more about Defending White Democracy at the University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Defending White Democracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best coach rides in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the most memorable coach rides in literature.

One title on the list:

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Jonathan Harker travels to deepest Transylvania. "The crazy coach rocked on its great leather springs, and swayed like a boat tossed on a stormy sea." As the mountains close in, his fellow passengers press gifts on him to "guard against the evil eye", but he doesn't quite get their terror. And why are they so keen to speed away after dropping him off?

Read about another novel on the list.

Dracula is on Rowan Somerville's top ten list of good sex in fiction, Arthur Phillips' list of six favorite books set in places that their authors never visited, and Anthony Browne's six best books list. It is one of the books on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best teeth in literature, ten of the best wolves in literature and ten of the best mirrors in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Laura DiSilverio reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Laura DiSilverio, author of Swift Edge.

Her entry begins:

I’m currently reading Mr. Ives’ Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos, which seems appropriate since Christmas is just around the corner. It’s a tale of loss and relationship, told in a vaguely Dickensian way with an omniscient narrator that I find fascinating. It is inspiring me to attempt a similar narrator myself, probably in a short story. I usually dash through books, racing the detective to the conclusion, but Mr. Ives has a gravity that is making me read slowly and savor the experience. I’m rationing how much I read because I don’t want to reach the end. I foresee...[read on]

About Swift Edge, from the publisher:

When world-class figure skater Dmitri Fane goes missing, his partner knows just whom to hire. It’s up to Swift Investigations to find the missing Fane, and fast---the Olympics are just weeks away. It should be no trouble for the investigative team of Charlie Swift and Gigi Goldman: Their chief obstacle is Gigi’s teenage daughter, Kendall, and her mad crush on Fane. That is, until the skating team’s coach is brutally attacked and a colleague of Dmitri is killed, and things start to get complicated.

Gigi’s corralling a lovesick Kendall and dying to test out the hilarious techniques from her surveillance class. Charlie’s dodging bullets and fending off Detective Connor Montgomery’s advances. Their client is suddenly MIA. Can Charlie and Gigi solve two missing-persons cases and a murder at once, or will the culprit get off skate-free?

Fast-paced adventure, high-stakes intrigue, and the madcap capers of these unlikely partners-in-crime solving make Swift Edge a delightful and welcome addition to the series.

Learn more about the book and author at Laura DiSilverio's website and Facebook page.

Writers Read: Laura DiSilverio.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Gina Robinson's "The Spy Who Left Me"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Spy Who Left Me by Gina Robinson.

About the book, from the publisher:

If there’s one thing that can ruin a vacation, it’s running into your ex. Just ask Treflee Miller. If she’d only known that her husband Ty would be here in Hawaii—muscular, sun-bronzed, and infuriatingly gorgeous—she would have brought the divorce papers for him to sign. But life is full of surprises when you’re married to a world-class spy…

Ty Miller can understand why his wife is tired of playing Mrs. James Bond. He’s never home, he’s always on a mission, and he’s usually surrounded by exotic informants. He has to admit that the perfect spy makes a pretty lousy husband. But for the sake of Ty’s security and Treflee’s safety, they can’t blow his cover. Not here. Not now. Not when his longing is so strong, her lips so tempting—and his enemies so close…

Learn more about the book and author at Gina Robinson's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Spy Who Left Me.

--Marshal Zeringue

The Rap Sheet’s 10 favorite crime novels of 2011

J. Kingston Pierce is both the editor of The Rap Sheet and the senior editor of January Magazine.

One of his ten favorite crime novels of 2011:

The End of Everything, by Megan Abbott

Lizzie Hood and Evie Verver were 13-year-old best friends living in a “safe” American suburb during the late 20th century. They thought they knew everything about each other. But after Evie suddenly vanishes—evidently kidnapped—Lizzie starts poking around for answers, only to discover that her naïveté had blinded her to Evie’s complexities and desires. Before long, Lizzie is manipulating evidence in the case and exploring her sexuality in ways that make her more like her friend than she realizes.

Read about another novel on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The End of Everything.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Markus Krajewski's "Paper Machines"

Today's feature at the Page 99 Test: Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski.

About the book, from the publisher:

Today on almost every desk in every office sits a computer. Eighty years ago, desktops were equipped with a nonelectronic data processing machine: a card file. In Paper Machines, Markus Krajewski traces the evolution of this proto-computer of rearrangeable parts (file cards) that became ubiquitous in offices between the world wars.

The story begins with Konrad Gessner, a sixteenth-century Swiss polymath who described a new method of processing data: to cut up a sheet of handwritten notes into slips of paper, with one fact or topic per slip, and arrange as desired. In the late eighteenth century, the card catalog became the librarian's answer to the threat of information overload. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, business adopted the technology of the card catalog as a bookkeeping tool. Krajewski explores this conceptual development and casts the card file as a "universal paper machine" that accomplishes the basic operations of Turing's universal discrete machine: storing, processing, and transferring data. In telling his story, Krajewski takes the reader on a number of illuminating detours, telling us, for example, that the card catalog and the numbered street address emerged at the same time in the same city (Vienna), and that Harvard University's home-grown cataloging system grew out of a librarian's laziness; and that Melvil Dewey (originator of the Dewey Decimal System) helped bring about the technology transfer of card files to business.

Learn more about Paper Machines at The MIT Press website.

Markus Krajewski is Associate Professor of Media History at the Bauhaus University, Weimar, and a developer of the bibliographic software Synapsen: A Hypertextual Card Index.

The Page 99 Test: Paper Machines.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on China, 1911-2011

Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford, is the author of Modern China: A Very Short Introduction.

One of five top books on modern China he discussed with Alec Ash at The Browser:

Two Kinds of Time
by Graham Peck

Jumping forwards to the 1930s and 40s, the two rival forces which arose after the failed promise of the 1911 revolution are Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and Mao Zedong’s communists. The book you’ve chosen here is an American perspective on events, Graham Peck’s Two Kinds of Time.

Two Kinds of Time is the only one of the five books I’ve chosen that’s not actually by a Chinese, but I’ve chosen it because it seems to me, of the fairly wide range of things you can read about World War Two in China, to be the single most evocative. It’s quite a long book but it actually goes by quite fast. One doesn’t have to make too much of an effort because the prose is so good. Of the many people who came to China in the 20th century and wrote about it, Peck remains one of the most fluid and sensitive.

His description of a Japanese wartime air raid over occupied China is one of the funniest passages I’ve read on China, which is actually rather odd considering the nature of the topic. This vision of people walking at first with dignity, and then deciding as the planes get closer that they’ll make a run for it and dignity be blown, is very nicely done. It’s not in any way mocking, he is someone who was a friend of many Chinese and lived amongst them. So it’s very much a story with the Chinese, rather than looking at them.

It’s also a very important book because it speaks about a very important historical moment which we’ve almost forgotten, which was the debate in cold war America about – as they put it – who “lost China”. In other words, why did China turn to the communists? Peck’s book is probably the best of those which argue that essentially America spent too long propping up the nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek that ruled China at the time, that became corrupt, hollowed out and ineffective – and that essentially cleared the way for the communists to take over, because the Americans clung too long to a failed leader.

The book itself is not important because of what it says about the interpretation, but rather it gives a fabulous picture of this moment when America and the West more generally and China try to come to an understanding and singularly fail, and unfortunately set the path, for the best part of a quarter of a century, for isolation from each other before things change again in the 1960s and 1970s.

Read about another book Mitter tagged at The Browser.

The Page 69 Test: Rana Mitter's Modern China: A Very Short Introduction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tim Riley's "Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music by Tim Riley.

The entry begins:

This is easy: Brad Pitt has been talking about doing Lennon for a couple years, and he would be both box office and a fascinating entry to the Lennon sweepstakes. My favorite Lennon so far is Ian Hart in The Hours and Times, but those who underrate Pitt should watch The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The role calls for a combustible mix of hilarity and doom.

Cameron Crowe should direct, obviously. Yoko: much harder to cast, but I'd vote for...[read on]

About Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music, from the publisher:

In his commanding new book, the eminent NPR critic Tim Riley takes us on the remarkable journey that brought a Liverpool art student from a disastrous childhood to the highest realms of fame.

Riley portrays Lennon’s rise from Hamburg’s red light district to Britain’s Royal Variety Show; from the charmed naiveté of “Love Me Do” to the soaring ambivalence of “Don’t Let Me Down”; from his shotgun marriage to Cynthia Powell in 1962 to his epic media romance with Yoko Ono. Written with the critical insight and stylistic mastery readers have come to expect from Riley, this richly textured narrative draws on numerous new and exclusive interviews with Lennon’s friends, enemies, confidantes, and associates; lost memoirs written by relatives and friends; as well as previously undiscovered City of Liverpool records. Riley explores Lennon in all of his contradictions: the British art student who universalized an American style, the anarchic rock ’n’ roller with the moral spine, the anti-jazz snob who posed naked with his avant-garde lover, and the misogynist who became a househusband. What emerges is the enormous, seductive, and confounding personality that made Lennon a cultural touchstone.

In Lennon, Riley casts Lennon as a modernist hero in a sweeping epic, dramatizing rock history anew as Lennon himself might have experienced it.

Learn more about the book and author at Tim Riley's website.

My Book, The Movie: Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Deborah Baker reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Deborah Baker, author of The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award.

Her entry begins:

I’ve been reading Mary McCarthy’s trilogy of book length essays on the Vietnam War. I found them collected in a book called The Seventeenth Degree that I picked up at a used bookstore for a dollar. This is probably more than she made from them when they were published, in 1967, 1968 and 1972 as they were greeted with critical silence and left the bookstore only when the shop owners gave up the prospect of selling them. It is hard to see why no one paid attention, unless it was because people had already decided their views on the war and that was that. Or maybe people just felt there was nothing they could do. McCarthy was the only American novelist to visit North Vietnam. And in South Vietnam only John Steinbeck and Martha Gellhorn preceded her. Her decision to go began forming when talk of bombing North Vietnam first arose. She thought perhaps India or the Pope might intervene. Her need to find an alternative to the bombing, a way out of the impasse, she said, was evidence of how wedded she was to the “good image” she had of her country.

Until the war on Iraq actually began, I too was wedded to this image. I had imagined that the lessons we learned from Vietnam were...[read on]

Among the praise for The Convert:

“[A] stellar biography that doubles as a mediation on the fraught relationship between America and the Muslim world.... [The Convert] is a cogent, thought-provoking look at a radical life and its rippling consequences.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“With remarkable even-handedness, Deborah Baker reveals the terrible costs of belonging exacted by two very different, battling cultures. Sweeping books on the big wars can’t do what this focused gaze on a single misfit so vividly accomplishes.”
—Kiran Desai, author of The Inheritance of Loss

"Deborah Baker's astonishing book reads like a detective story but is also a work of enormous beauty and understanding. She has explored the most difficult of subjects in an evocative and original way, powerfully conjuring a bygone, albeit simpler era when an argument between Islam and the West first arose fifty years ago. The Convert is the most brilliant and moving book written about Islam and the West since 9/11."
—Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban and Descent into Chaos

Learn more about the book and author at Deborah Baker's website.

Writers Read: Deborah Baker.

--Marshal Zeringue

Twelve best science fiction books of 2011

At Barnes & Noble, Paul Goat Allen named his favorite science fiction releases of 2011.

One title on the list:

WWW: Wonder by Robert J. Sawyer

Read about another novel on the list.

Visit Robert J. Sawyer's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test:: WWW: Wonder.

Writers Read: Robert Sawyer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Michael Broyles's "Beethoven in America"

Today's feature at the Page 99 Test: Beethoven in America by Michael Broyles.

About the book, from the publisher:

Beethoven permeates American culture. His image appears on countless busts and coffee mugs; his music is heard in movie scores, TV soundtracks, commercials, and pop songs; he is Schroeder’s god in Peanuts and Chuck Berry’s freaked-out parent in “Roll over Beethoven.” In this book, Michael Broyles seeks to understand the composer as he exists in the American imagination and explores how Beethoven became a cultural icon. Broyles examines Beethoven’s appearance in a variety of contexts: American commercialism, the Afrocentrist and black power movements, and the modernist critique of Romanticism. He considers portrayals of Beethoven in American film and theater and the uses of his music in film scores, as well as references to Beethoven and his music in disco, country, rock, and rap. In the end, he shows that to examine Beethoven on American soil is to examine America itself.

Learn more about Beethoven in America at the Indiana University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Beethoven in America.

Writers Read: Michael Broyles.

The Page 99 Test: Beethoven in America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 dark and haunted heroes and heroines

H.M. Castor is the author of more than forty books--fiction and non-fiction; VIII, her first novel for teenagers, was published this year.

One of her top ten dark and haunted heroes and heroines, as told to the Guardian:

Dr Jekyll in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

The basic premise of this story is famous, though I won't spell it out here in case you don't know it (lucky you – reading the book will be an even more exciting!). The story's short, and a gem: a dark and prowling tale of foggy London streets, mysterious horrible crimes and dangerous scientific experiments. Dr Jekyll is a respected pillar of the community, but he seems to be in thrall to an altogether less pleasant man named Mr Hyde. What dark secret lies behind their connection?

Read about another entry on the list.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde also appears on John Mullan's list of ten of the best butlers in literature and among Yann Martel's six favorite books. It is one of Ali Shaw's top ten transformation stories and Nicholas Frankel's five best pieces of decadent writing from the nineteenth century.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Nick Drake's "Egypt: The Book of Chaos"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Egypt: The Book of Chaos by Nick Drake.

About the book, from the publisher:

The future of Egypt lies in the hands of chief detective Rahotep in this final installment of Nick Drake’s acclaimed ancient Egyptian trilogy.

King Tutankhamun has died without an heir, and his young widow, Queen Ankhesenamun, last of her dynasty, struggles to maintain power and order. To defeat her enemies, she has but one hope: to forge an alliance with the Hittites, a powerful, militant new empire that threatens Egypt’s supremacy.

The loyal Rahotep, chief detective of the Thebes Medjay—the ancient capital’s elite police force—and his friend, the royal envoy Nakht, are sent on a clandestine mission to the Hittite homeland, to persuade the king to agree to a marriage between one of his sons and Ankhesenamun—a union that would bring peace to the region and consolidate the queen’s power.

Back in Egypt, the nefarious General Horemheb is poised to use his army to impose martial law and destroy the dynasty. But he is not the only enemy vying for control. A mysterious and brutal new opium cartel has emerged within the criminal underworld of Thebes, ready to take over the lucrative black market—and, ultimately, the very heart of the government.

In this epic quest to the dark heart of the ancient world, Rahotep must also confront his own demons if he is to prevent the gathering forces of chaos from destroying Egypt’s greatest dynasty, and to return home in time to save his own family from the terror that threatens them all.

Based on a true story and meticulously researched, Egypt: The Book of Chaos brings to life the ancient world and the cradle of civilization in a riveting, suspenseful finale to Nick Drake’s acclaimed trilogy.

Learn more about the book and author at Nick Drake's website.

The Page 69 Test: Egypt: The Book of Chaos.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books about life in the Victorian age

Judith Flanders's first book, A Circle of Sisters, the biography of four Victorian sisters, was published to great acclaim, and nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. In 2003, The Victorian House (2004 in the USA, as Inside the Victorian Home) received widespread praise, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards History Book of the Year. In 2006 Consuming Passions, was published. Her most recent book, The Invention of Murder, was published in 2011. Her book Dickens’ London: Everyday Life in a Victorian City will be published in 2012.

One of her five top books on life in the Victorian age, as told to Toby Ash at The Browser:

Victorian Studies in Scarlet
by Richard D Altick

Your next book is by the American academic Richard Altick, who died three years ago after a long and very distinguished career. He is most famous for his pioneering contribution to the field of Victorian studies. How influential a scholar do you think he was?

In terms of Victorian studies, perhaps no one was more influential. He was one of the earliest to explore those elements of life that previous generations had thought didn’t count as “history” – travelling shows, or what the common people read. One of my favourite books of his is The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (yes, another book about books and reading – we are definitely seeing a pattern here). This is a look at how current events were transformed into literature – what were people reading about their own times, and how did it change their views? He was a giant.

Why have you chosen his book on murder cases in the 19th century?

This was one of the two starting points for my last book, The Invention of Murder, which looked at how murder was transformed into popular entertainment in the 19th century. My previous book, Consuming Passions, had explored various forms of popular leisure – in theatres, I was fascinated to discover, current and historical murder cases were turned into plays. I then found Altick’s book, Victorian Studies in Scarlet: Murders and Manners in the Age of Victoria, and realised it was an even richer subject that I’d thought, and he led the way for the rest of my research.

What’s wonderful is the way he makes us see that our responses to murder now are no different to then. When I tell people that the Victorians had a taste for giving their racehorses the names of current murderers, or that they liked puppet shows about murders, they always think it is seriously peculiar. But as Altick shows, it is only a difference in method. The Victorians loved to watch murders on stage, we like to watch docudramas on TV or in cinemas – there is really no difference. Racehorses seem weird to us, T-shirts with slogans about Charles Manson would have seemed weird to them. But they all come from the same impulse, and Altick captures that wonderfully.

Read about another book Flanders tagged.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Lia Habel reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Lia Habel, author of Dearly, Departed.

Her entry begins:

I'm currently reading Spook by Mary Roach, and I'm of two minds about it. The book chronicles her search for evidence for or against "the afterlife" - she does everything from interviewing scientists with incredibly expensive and complex plans for how one might measure the energy or weight of a departing soul to pulling apart lengths of fraudulent, spiritualism-age ectoplasm in university libraries. From the research and anecdotal side, it's fascinating - but it seems to have a...[read on]

About Dearly, Departed, from the publisher:

Love can never die.

Love conquers all, so they say. But can Cupid’s arrow pierce the hearts of the living and the dead—or rather, the undead? Can a proper young Victorian lady find true love in the arms of a dashing zombie?

The year is 2195. The place is New Victoria—a high-tech nation modeled on the manners, mores, and fashions of an antique era. A teenager in high society, Nora Dearly is far more interested in military history and her country’s political unrest than in tea parties and debutante balls. But after her beloved parents die, Nora is left at the mercy of her domineering aunt, a social-climbing spendthrift who has squandered the family fortune and now plans to marry her niece off for money. For Nora, no fate could be more horrible—until she’s nearly kidnapped by an army of walking corpses.

But fate is just getting started with Nora. Catapulted from her world of drawing-room civility, she’s suddenly gunning down ravenous zombies alongside mysterious black-clad commandos and confronting “The Laz,” a fatal virus that raises the dead—and hell along with them. Hardly ideal circumstances. Then Nora meets Bram Griswold, a young soldier who is brave, handsome, noble . . . and dead. But as is the case with the rest of his special undead unit, luck and modern science have enabled Bram to hold on to his mind, his manners, and his body parts. And when his bond of trust with Nora turns to tenderness, there’s no turning back. Eventually, they know, the disease will win, separating the star-crossed lovers forever. But until then, beating or not, their hearts will have what they desire.

In Dearly, Departed, romance meets walking-dead thriller, spawning a madly imaginative novel of rip-roaring adventure, spine-tingling suspense, and macabre comedy that forever redefines the concept of undying love.

Learn more about the book and author at Lia Habel's website and blog.

Writers Read: Lia Habel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kameron Hurley's "God’s War" & "Infidel," the movies

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: God’s War and Infidel by Kameron Hurley.

The entry begins:

Oh, the God’s War and Infidel movies… the bloodiest, most bad-ass piece of awesome you have ever seen, combining the ragtag mercenary team dynamics of Firefly with the lovely brutality of The 300, all marinated in some of the most terrifying female combat scenes… well, ever.

I can just picture it now…

Primary Recurring Characters:

Nyx. Most folks are likely thinking Michelle Rodriguez for this part, and I won’t lie that the Michelle from Girlfight with a really glorious tan could be an epic Nyx. She is, however, a tad short, and I’m not sure she’d have the physical stopping power Nyx needs. I have yet to find another mainstream actress I think could pull off this role, though.

Rhys. He may not have the acting chops for it yet, but Isaiah Mustafa is still my first pick as the beautiful, devout magician Nyx signs for her team. I do know he’s a little too tall to actually go toe-to-toe with Nyx (especially if Rodriguez was cast), so Taye Diggs or Donald...[read on]

Learn more about the books and author at Kameron Hurley's website.

My Book, The Movie: God’s War and Infidel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top fantasy books

Lev Grossman is the author of The Magicians and The Magician King, which were both New York Times bestsellers.

He also writes about books and technology for Time magazine.

One of Grossman's five favorite fantasy novels as told to Sophie Roell at The Browser:

The Once and Future King
by T H White

White is less famous than Lewis and Tolkien, but he was a better writer, at least as far as style goes, and his book is a true masterpiece in its own right – a thoroughly modern re-imagining of the great English epic, the story of King Arthur. Like Tolkien, White takes an ancient, mythic landscape and scales it down to human size (or perhaps he scales us up). But White’s world is more brightly lit than Tolkien’s – he dispenses with all those Wagnerian storm clouds. White’s England is all streaming banners and sun-splashed meadows and shining walls, and he lingers longer over his characters, making them more complex and flawed and divided against themselves. The first part alone, “The Sword in the Stone”, about Arthur’s early years and his education by Merlin, may be the best story of a childhood ever committed to paper.

Read about another novel on the list.

Also see Megan Wasson's list of five fantasy series geared towards teens that adults will love too.

The Page 69 Test: Lev Grossman's The Magicians.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Bruce N. Waller's "Against Moral Responsibility"

This weekend's feature at the Page 99 Test: Against Moral Responsibility by Bruce N. Waller.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Against Moral Responsibility, Bruce Waller launches a spirited attack on a system that is profoundly entrenched in our society and its institutions, deeply rooted in our emotions, and vigorously defended by philosophers from ancient times to the present. Waller argues that, despite the creative defenses of it by contemporary thinkers, moral responsibility cannot survive in our naturalistic-scientific system. The scientific understanding of human behavior and the causes that shape human character, he contends, leaves no room for moral responsibility.

Waller argues that moral responsibility in all its forms--including criminal justice, distributive justice, and all claims of just deserts--is fundamentally unfair and harmful and that its abolition will be liberating and beneficial. What we really want--natural human free will, moral judgments, meaningful human relationships, creative abilities--would survive and flourish without moral responsibility. In the course of his argument, Waller examines the origins of the basic belief in moral responsibility, proposes a naturalistic understanding of free will, offers a detailed argument against moral responsibility and critiques arguments in favor of it, gives a general account of what a world without moral responsibility would look like, and examines the social and psychological aspects of abolishing moral responsibility. Waller not only mounts a vigorous, and philosophically rigorous, attack on the moral responsibility system, but also celebrates the benefits that would result from its total abolition.

Learn more about Against Moral Responsibility at the MIT Press website.

Bruce N. Waller is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University.

The Page 99 Test: Against Moral Responsibility.

--Marshal Zeringue