This Just In....News from The Agony Column

04-25-03: Wayne Allen Salle's True Tales of the Scarlet Sponge

Doctor, Hand me the patient's brain! "Nurse, please discard that bloody sponge!" "That's not a sponge, doctor, it's the patient's brain!" Some bad jokes will never die. Wayne Allen Sallee wrote me to tell me that he's still in the game, and sent me the cover from his barely-published 'True Tales of the Scarlet Sponge', an autobiography as only he could write it. It's been a long time since I read 'The Holy Terror', but Sallee's prose just drives home like the kind of insult only your closest lover could deliver. Alas, I never really followed the DarkTales saga; yet another wet-web dream gone dry on the sheets. Glancing at this work, I can only hope that Sallee keeps stoking the anger and sowing the ashes for something to burn us with. I can assure my readers that there will be more from this talented writer. I plan on squeezing that Scarlet Sponge.

04-24-03: Shoto Press Nominated for Eisner Award, My Ultimate Fate, Neal Asher Website Update with German Book Covers

Shoto Press Nominated for Eisner Award Shoto Press has been nominated for an Eisner Award for this wonderful Graphic novel. It's one of the most beautifully printed works I've recently come across. And I quote their press release.... Shoto Press's Garlands of Moonlight nominated for prestigious Eisner Award Judges for the 2003 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards nominate Garlands of Moonlight for Best Graphic Album NEW YORK, April 11, 2003 -- Shoto Press, a small press imprint specializing in speculative fiction and graphic novels, announced today that its Xeric award-winning Garlands of Moonlight was nominated for a coveted 2003 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award in the category of Best Graphic Album - New. "What struck me most about this year's submissions," noted Jackie Estrada, awards administrator of the Eisners for the last twelve years, "is the wide range of publication formats and the attention to design and bookcraft we're seeing from publishers of every size and type." Nominees are selected from entries submitted to a panel of judges culled from all parts of the comics industry. This year's panel included Time magazine columnist Andrew D. Arnold, The Pulse journalist Jen Contino, Diamond Comic Distributors' product manager Steve Leaf, Titan Comics owner and retailer reviewer for the Comic Buyer's Guide Jeremy Shorr, and multiple award-winning writer/artist Charles Vess. "I put a lot of love and hard work into Garlands of Moonlight, and I'm completely beside myself that it's being nominated for an Eisner," said author Jai Sen of his first graphic novel. "They're the equivalent of Oscars for the comics industry, and it's a great honor to be recognized by one's peers. But delighted as I am by this recognition of my work, the lion's share of the credit goes to Rizky Wasisto Edi, whose enchanting illustrations really brought the story to life." Garlands of Moonlight, the debut title in the ten-book, biannually published Malay Mysteries series by Shoto Press also received an esteemed Xeric Foundation Award in April 2002. The 86-page graphic novel, printed in a high-definition duotone of black and specially formulated silver metallic ink to simulate turn-of-the-last-century daguerreotypes, achieved critical acclaim from various notable critics including the widely-read Johanna Draper Carlson of Comics Worth Reading. The Ghost of Silver Cliff, book 2 in The Malay Mysteries, was published last year and has garnered similarly positive reviews. Shoto Press books are available through Baker & Taylor and include Publisher's Cataloging-in-Publication (P-CIP) data provided by Quality Books, Inc. to facilitate integration of Shoto titles into library collections and bookstores. Garlands of Moonlight and all Shoto Press books can be ordered through the Shoto Press web site (URL: www.shotopress.com), Diamond Previews, Cold Cut (URL: www.coldcut.com), local bookstores, and at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble Online.

My Ultimate Fate (from Australian News Corporation and the ever-vigilant Loren Coleman) Professor trapped for Easter under pile of books Last Update: Tuesday, April 22, 2003. 8:47pm (AEST) A Croatian professor has spent three days trapped under a pile of books in his apartment in Zagreb before being saved by a neighbour who heard his cries for help. The Jutarnji List daily reports the unfortunate 60-year-old mathematics professor, identified only by his initials DK, spent the Easter weekend lying helplessly on the floor, trapped between a bed and a book-case under a pile of books which fell on him. The neighbour who called the police and paramedics told the daily that the professor's apartment was very untidy, "filled up with books, tapes, furniture and food." "It looked like a real rubbish dump," he said, adding it was hard to imagine how the rather corpulent professor, weighing some 120 kilograms, could freely move around in it. He was treated for exhaustion and dehydration in his apartment by paramedics, and recovered enough to refuse hospital treatment.

Neal Asher Website Update with German Book Covers This is disturbingly reminiscent of the cover for the 1970 paperback edition of 'Solaris'. Neal Asher has just revamped his website a bit and there are some fascinating covers from the German editions of his novels. Above we see a fairly subdued cover for 'Gridlinked' ('The Dragon of Samarkand') Sort of a seventies thing happening there....but below we get some really telling material.   Now here's the kind of excess to which we regularly require access. And here you can see the German cover for 'The Skinner', known as 'The Blue Death'. You can check out his website yourself and see lots more pitchers, even some of Neal and the Tor UK gang. Damn, I wish I'd made that opening.....

04-23-03: Self Destruction 101 with James Frey, Thrilling Tales of High Literature, Margaret Weis Alone With the Dragons

Self Destruction 101 with James Frey Not your usual literary confection. I'll be talking to James Frey next Friday about his new memoir 'A Million Little Pieces'. Here's a guy who was writing terribly reviewed David Schwimmer movies in his twenties, while in the midst of a multiyear streak of alcoholism and crack addiction. He checked into a residential help center at the age of twenty three and was told he was unlikely to see life beyond twenty four unless he made some changes. He managed to do this without the help of twelve step programs, and his tale is utterly gripping. I've been peeking at this book for the past five days,trying to stop myself from reading it. You'll see a review and an interview up soon enough. If you're in the local independent bookstore, pick this one up and give it a read. I bet you'll leave with it.

Not your usual literary confection. Hey looky, I can recycle the caption! For those of you who listened to the Glen David Gold interview way back when, you'll recall he told us about this forthcoming collection. It's here, and the cast is stellar, the production is stellar, just about everything here is stellar. So what are you waiting for? Even I might find time to read a couple of short stories, in particular Gold's, and yes, you can see he profited from his time with elephants in 'Carter Beats the Devil', which we have two reviews of onsite --my glowing words, but don't take my word for it, try Katie Dean's.

Margaret Weis goes for a solo outing in a world where B&D duds are the new dress code. I'll be talking to Margaret Weis next month. Here's the cover of her hotly anticipated solo debut, 'Mistress of Dragons'. You get dragons, humans, politics and thick slabs of fantasy, sex -- wait, do I need that comma? -- and monsters. She's half of a tremendously popular duo. I suspect that only in The Agony Column are you going to find Margaret Weis sharing space with James Frey. Ah, I love variety.