L.A./Hollywood relived by a suicidal ex-husband ex-producer ex-Jew with a  screenplay.  The screenplay is  fresh off the bus from New Jersey, delivered to Charlie (post suicide) by his 21 year old nephew, Lionel. It is about Disraeli but that doesn’t matter.  The screenplay is his property, and all Charlie needs to make it (again)  in this town is one property.

The screenplay, nicknamed Ben and Bill, or Bob and Bill, somehow makes itself known to a studio,  an agent, a casting director,  who manage to get a black pro-Israel karate expert to play Disraeli, the Jew.

The characters are mimetic:

The  studio executive assistant has the unwieldy habit of walking to the nearest ladies room, locking the door, and screaming.   (It is always a mistake to actually read the screenplay.) We visit with her and her Beverly Hills therapist in intimate one hour sessions,  at which she arrives  hystericized with laughter. The therapist is straight out of DSM-V and full of noteworthy advice, relevant to any and all professional women over 35 who work among men. Cut out a small nook of rationality inside the chaos.

The director is paid in  dinar which have been blocked from leaving Yugoslavia, and doesn’t talk to the actors.  The actors are not worth characterizing.

Prepare to grow a dry grin and giggle while reading.

Tagged: agents, Disraeli, Hollywood, movie making

Categories: Clever,Editor's pick,Funny,Original narration

Quiet, patient, relentless intelligence spills over the pages of this story about a girl geek, a journalist, a news magazine devoted to the critique of corrupt Swedish institutions, and an odd assemblage of  Stockholm’s thugs, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and cops.   None are verbose. Men and women think. Thinking happens without talk, without sounds, without annunciation. It is sometimes   signaled  by cigarettes. Sometimes by a  walk.   Much goes unsaid, and unshared.

All the good guys use Macs. Some of them smoke.  The geek uses a powerbook, the journalist a Mac ibook, the magazine editor  an Airbook. The geekgirl (Salander) is  skinny,  occasionally violent,  abnormally intelligent, obsessively private. She does not emote; she enjoys:  mathematics, sex, hacking.  She has  lesbian girlfriends, bank accounts in the Canary Islands, lawyers in Gibraltar, and a local accountant. She buys a 2.5 million kroner flat with a view and decorates it in one day of shopping in Ikea,   for a total of 97,000 kroner.

Tagged: Crime novel, Larson, Simon Vance, Sweden, Swedish

Categories: Audible,Brilliant,Editor's pick,Enchanting,Funny,Original narration

“Dear Chatter: To answer your question, when a Southerner looks at you with a blank smile and doesn’t answer you right away, it’s because he doesn’t trust you and he’s lookin’ you over and seein’ how much damage you can do as a human bein’...Have a nice day!”

Chatter is a kind of oral help desk published daily in Selby’s town newspaper: questions and complaints called in by local folks about Yankees and by Yankees about local folks.

Margaret Pinaldi, even tempered daughter of a militant feminist gynecologist from Buffalo, NY, transcribes the native messages with the sensitivity of an anthropologist and a degree in women’s studies. The combination of skirtiness and guile and slow, drawn out vowels describes a particular kind of Southern power with a female signature. When a Southern lady says: “Well, bless her heart!,” she means:

“she’s a bitch and I don’t like her and I’m fixing to say something awful about her. It’s like this: ‘Well, bless her heart! She’s got the fattest ass on the planet and her taste is all in her mouth but she does the best she can.’

Mothers, daughters, wives organize, decorate and manage Southern life from behind affluent decorating magazines and glasses of sweet tea.

A Yankee would call someone a fat slob. A Selbyite would say: “Now there’s a lady who likes her cheese straws and biscuits”.

Southern men can either accommodate them or be discontinued, like the dead appliances set on porches in South Selby “as if they’d been granted some (final) years in the sun after putting in all those years of work in the basement.”

The day’s Chatter is the popular subjective log of what people think in a class-conscious, gospelly mid-Georgia town. Meanwhile, the daily affairs of three women —a smart reporter, a poor, pretty, slightly scarred Kroger’s Supermarket employee, and a desperate, over-reaching, ‘old Selby’ wife—track what people say and how they behave. Cynthia Darlow piles on the twang and pulls out the drawl and turns simple sentences into terms of art. From red neck firemen, to poor white Southern good girls, to smart-ass Yankee reporters, to sensible daughters of militant feminist gynecologists, Darlow does Selby like Julia Child does sauces.

The roundabout way that most Selbyites communicate feelings and facts is not merely a matter of dialect or drawl. It is an altogether different way of being-with others. Consider, for example, the blunt, brutal directness of Margaret Pinaldi’s mother telling her daughter about her CATSCAN results:

Let me show you something.. She tapped the glass with the ball point pen… This is my left ovary… and this, this right here this white mass that looks like a supernova… this is a six cm necrotic mass with satellite lesions and I am totally, irrevocably fucked.

Finally, this is a manual for managers of feelings, a step by step guide on how to treat the truth differently, how to speak the truth, Georgia time.

Categories: Brilliant,Editor's pick,Funny,Original narration

Read by Stephen Lang who is good doing liddle giwls and the monotones of the personal(it)y disordered but not wonderful
doing Barty who is (we guess) the hero. Unless the real hero is: the theory
of quantum mechanics as interpreted by Feynman and the possibility of understanding
that things are always all the ways things are and we only sense some of the ways things are … sometimes.

It is possible that this book was written for the Koontz children or by the Koontz children … because it is difficult
to conceive that this is all there is after the wicked genius of FALSE MEMORY and the Topcat cooldom of SEIZE THE NIGHT.

Or maybe we only read the book some of the ways it could have been read and not all of the ways for which we apologize. Not that we didnt grin or giggle or laugh, with fangs on, listening to Jacob and Edom small talk of big disasters, earthquakes, tycoons, hurricanes, canned
hams…. Listen:

...he bolted up from the sofa saying “Canned Hams” but at once he realized this made no sense. None. ZIP. So he searched desperately for something coherent to say. “Potatoes.” “Corn Chips.” Which was equally ridiculous. So Edam plunged across the living room as though he were falling off a ladder, struggling to explain himself as he went. “We’ve brought some. There are some. I’ll get some if you wouldn’t mind having some. We have boxes in the car…but I’ll bring them in. Boxes of …boxes. Well, not boxes of boxes. Of course not. Its boxes of stuff, you know… Stuff
we’ve brought in boxes.” Yanking open the front door, lurching aross the threshold onto the porch, he thought at last of the word he needed and he cried out over his shoulder “GROCERIES” with triumph and relief…”

Categories: Clever,Funny,Listen up

Imagine Frank Muller doing   CZ Sakall, the jowly, bespectacled, hysterical Hungarian who cannot stop wiping his spectacles, shaking his head and concocting
scenarios of doom … “today… its going to happen today…” etc.

The stammering, anxious NYC diamond dealer calls Jimmy McShane, well heeled ex-cop and private dick, who bodyguards him,  makes sure it doesn’t happen today, and strolls home. Home: to the walk up on Christopher Street, to the  old hag sitting on her heavy ovaries,   to the next ex-girlfriend re-aligning his Chakras in the flat redecorated by his  old ex-girlfriend,  to the Zelda-esque client who asks him to find her pedophilic father’s killer. Hi, ho. Absolutely funny, absolutely cool, absolutely wonderful.

Categories: Editor's pick,Frank Muller,Funny,Original narration

Wry, infinitely bored, softhearted ex-cop holes up in the Upper Peninsula, runs his snow plow up and down the block, and hangs out in a Scottish pub, drinking Canadian beer. Then trouble comes knocking at his door….
“You spend your whole life up here sitting in your cabin all by yourself. You don’t even have a television, for godsake. You’re so desperate for human contact you gotta come in here and make my life miserable…If a new face comes through that door and asks you for help you’re gonna do it … no matter what…. In fact one of these days an alien spaceship is gonna land out there in the parking lot and a couple of little green men are gonna come in here and ask you to help them… You know, take you back to their planet so you can help them ward off some other aliens who are trying to invade them or something. And of course you’ll just get your ass kicked again but it doesn’t matter because you’ll go. In two minutes you’ll be out that door and in that spaceship…”

Categories: Clever,Funny,Listen up,Original narration

The voice is everything. Instead of the typical pomposity of a haughty OBE accent, spouting that mixture of bad faith, betrayal, and malice so characteristic of the displaced British upper class, we have a whisper, a tempered, middle brow tone telling a tale about a slightly fat slightly alcoholic Nottingham housewife who falls in love with the burglar who robs her house. The robbery is problematic. Gone is the stash of Coke her failed director-husband was holding for a slightly murderous slightly psychopathic drug thug. The housewife and the thief meet, fuck, and renegotiate the stolen goods. Inspector Charles Resnick, divorced, badly dressed, with bad table manners, figures it out—kind of—but still somehow does the wrong thing. BRILLIANT.

“Grabianski didn’t know…He felt about music what his partners felt about birds. Large ones and small ones. With music it was small ones and fast ones.”

Categories: Brilliant,Clever,Editor's pick,Funny,Original narration