lee crane

Former Transworld Snowboarding Editor Eric Blehm’s new book The Only Thing Worth Dying For arrives in bookstores on January 19, 2010. This latest work from the author of the award winning The Last Season follows a small group of Green Berets on America’s first action in Afghanistan following the events of 911. Not to be [...]

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Don’t know if I could make it back through, or if this is the way I’d like to spend my summer, but the crew at InfiniteSummer.org is doing a group read of David Foster Wallace’s mammoth, best novel ever written, Infinite Jest this summer starting on June 21, 2009. Join endurance bibliophiles from around the [...]

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Yesterday I killed off more than 100 old books and transported their analog corpses in a stolen suitcase to a lonely loading dock behind the library and dumped them. Now, thinking back, I can’t help but feel badly about it. To me books always hold more than the stories in them. They hold my memories [...]

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Remember what Apple did to music retail? Well, it’s about to happen again with books. Last night Amazon released an iPhone app for called Kindle for iPhone. While the Kindle 2 (which was just released last month) costs $359. The Kindle app for iPhone is free! Now, anyone with an iPhone can tap into Amazon’s [...]

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An excerpt of the novel David Foster Wallace was working on when he killed himself will run the next issue of New Yorker Magazine, according to a story in the Washington Post. The characters in “The Pale King” are Internal Revenue Service agents working at an IRS facility in the Midwest. The intense tediousness of [...]

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Throw another log on the ever-growing tortured genius bonfire. Infinite Jest author David Foster Wallace has hanged himself in an apparent suicide. The 46-year-old writer was found by his wife in their home on Friday night, September 12, 2008, according to as story in the LA Times. Wallace won a cult following for his dark [...]

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Writer Sean Mortimer (my first roommate when I moved to SoCal) has a new book out called Stalefish: skateboard culture from the rejects who made it featuring interviews with skateboarding’s most legendary. He’ll be signing the book along with a large crew of the featured rejects on Saturday May 31, 2008 at the Skatelab in [...]

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Writer David Rensin’s book on Miki Dora is coming out next month from HarperEntertainment. It’s titled: All for a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora. In an article for Malibu Arts Review Magazine writer Josh Hastings kicks down the details. Rensin’s book uncovers the truth about the sport’s [...]

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Paper Cuts, the New York Times book blog, featured a post today by Bob Harris titled Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing. Harris writes: Like all professions book reviewing has a lingo. Out of laziness, haste or a misguided effort to sound “literary,” reviewers use some words with startling predictability. Each of these seven entries [...]

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I’ve just begun reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and have a portrait of him hanging on the wall behind my desk. My wife looked over this morning and said, “Is that Tolstoy? He looks like a lawn gnome.” And she’s right. Exactly.

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