Newly rec'd these last several days:
*"Vin Packer" (Marijane Meaker): Something in the Shadows/Intimate Victims and Whisper His Sin/The Evil Friendship (Stark House)...I wonder if "Anne Perry" and "Packer" have ever conversed over that last, like the film Heavenly Creatures based on the adolescent crime "Perry"/Hulme was involved in.
*Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Jon Breen is going semiannual with his column. Alas, but thirty years of monthly, or nearly monthly, columns is a lot to keep asking for more on top of...
*Fantasy & Science Fiction. Interesting Lucius Shepard take on the film Monsters
*T.V. Olsen: The Stalking Moon. The Leisure edition.
*Michael Chabon: Gentlemen of the Road. Or, "Jews with Swords" as Chabon would've had it, he notes. Managed not pick up either of these two before, and am amused the Chabon was published under the Del Rey Books imprint.
*Ecotone
*Asimov's Science Fiction...it is getting to be increasingly difficult to find new issues of the fiction magazines in the big box stores, my usual source for them...I haven't been able to pick up the new issue of The Strand or Cemetery Dance or Conjunctions for a bit, for example...
*Cinema Retro. But picking up a few odd items where and when I can...
From the mailbox:
*Harper's has a rather good short story from Daniel Mason, no relation, and another opportunity for William Vollmann to make an ass of himself, even though his cover essay's subject, the homeless in his affluent California city, is an important one which doesn't lend itself to masturbatory self-celebration...which hasn't ever stopped him before.
*Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, the humor issue
*Esquire, the typically trivial issue (though I suppose one can appreciate, for example, cheesecake photos of Sarah Shahi...among others...though not in this issue...)
*Sight and Sound, the attempt to defend auteurism issue (which is why the feature articles in the magazine tend to be weak, of course)
Books strongly considered: the newish Vonnegut collection of short stories; the newest two Joyce Carol Oates collections and her widowhood memoir; Peter Beagle's anthology The Hidden History of Fantasy.
In the secondhand store: a few annuals (O. Henry and Best American Short Stories), a couple of recent issues of The Gettysburg Review, a book club edition of Mazzeo's Hauntings, an Anthony Boucher anthology, a Peter De Vries novel. Spoiling myself, as with finally buying the cd of this:
The Brubeck Quartet album that Joe Morello told me he thought was their best recording, At Carnegie Hall.
