What's in Your Name?

Ever wonder what the most popular and unpopular baby names are? And how certain people and places got their names? Or are you just looking for guidance in choosing your child’s name? All Those Wonderful Names by J. N. Hook is an amusing exploration of names, familiar words, phrases, and the stories behind their origins. From the common to the confounding, this book has it all. Hear the true stories behind the naming of tropical storms, cars, fictitious characters, major league baseball teams, and more. Find out the real names of celebrities, such as Elton John, Cher, Rip Torn, Cary Grant, Liberace, and Conway Twitty. Discover counties, towns, and cities with strange names like Difficult, Tennessee; Jiggs, Nevada; Virgin, Utah; and Bosom, Wyoming. Learn unusual names for newborns—and perhaps the origin of your own surname as well.

- Richard Curtis

The Faithful - Chapter Eleven ("The Beginning of the End")

Hillary's victory in Indiana is more than offset by Barack's huge win in North Carolina, prompting tabloid New York Post to declare Hillary "Toast". No one who's followed the campaign believes Hillary is going to fold up her tent, especially with the Reverand Wright controversy boiling furiously despite Barack's inspiring statement on race in America.

The quickening pace of the campaign seems to be bringing our cast together as both the Democratic nomination race and The Faithful hurtle to a climax. But the threat of a sex scandal still hovers over the story as a reporter who knows too much angles for an inducement to kill the story. What does she want?

Click here to find out.

This Sorcerer's Apprentice is no Mickey Mouse

Would you kill someone if you knew you could get away with it? John Taff's taut thriller The Sorcerer's Apprentice begins with that very question. And David Benning, a successful accountant, is seriously asking it. His dying father is racking up exorbitant charges at an expensive nursing home. And then there's that bank account fat with embezzled money.

When he's blackmailed by a shadowy organization known only as "The Group," David finds himself thrust into a world far beyond his normal boundaries, one in which his survival requires him to kill seemingly ordinary people.

Welcome to a nightmare. It's David Benning's this time, but could be yours the next.

- Richard Curtis

Is There Life After Book? All About Reversions, Part 1

There are some things authors just don't like to think about, and one of them is their books going out of print.

For the new author, the idea that that might happen to your book one day considering it isn’t even in print yet, may be a matter of very remote concern. And that the book might go out of print within a year or less after publication is so shocking that your first impulse may be to dismiss the suggestion with a (nervous) laugh. Most books, however, do go out of print eventually, few being relegated to the status of deathless classics. Even more disturbing, an increasing number of them go out of print in a very short time.

In this two part article we look book-death squarely in the eye and contemplate the possibilities for resurrection

Click here to continue.

Return of the Tarnsman

Publication of Tarnsman of Gor launched John Norman's fantasy world and its culture of male masters and female subservients. Twenty-five volumes later the series has gone from cult classic to, simply, classic. There is no science fiction universe remotely approaching Gor for action, adventure, an exotic culture, and eroticism. But the second book was in many ways even more critical than the first.

In Volume #2, Outlaw of Gor, Tarl Cabot finds himself transported back to Counter-Earth - another name for Gor - from the sedate life he has known as a history professor on Earth. He is glad to be back in his role as a dominant warrior and back in the arms of his true love. Yet, Tarl finds that his name on Gor has been tainted, his city defiled, and all those he loves have been made into outcasts. He is no longer in the position of a proud warrior, but an outlaw for whom the simplest answers must come at a high price. He wonders why the Priest Kings have called him back to Gor, and whether it is only to render him powerless.

This is the book on which Norman's series pivoted from a single title to an endlessly complex and entertaining skein of adventures. When Tarl Cabot's returns to Gor, his fate is sealed. Once you read it (after Tarnsman of course) it will be very hard to disconnect yourself from the rest of the books.

- Richard Curtis

It's Too Late, Mr. Riggio!

Steve Riggio, CEO of Barnes & Noble, calls the business model entitling bookstores to return books to publishers for full credit "insane" and he hopes to find a solution to a century-old practice “in a year or two,” according to an item by Jim Milliot in PW Daily.

Now you tell us, Mr. Riggio?

After bookstore chains used returnability to drive countless publishers to their knees? After bookstore chains employed returns to "buy" new books for little or no cash by dumping slow-moving stock on publishers' doorsteps and using the credit as currency? After bookstore chains spurned remaindering in place because it was cheaper to send books back to publishers than develop creative solutions to the returns problem?

Mr. Riggio criticizes returns practices as "expensive." Perhaps he means it’s become expensive for the chains now that publishers have been squeezed so ruthlessly they have nothing left to give. Has it begun to dawn on executives like Mr. Riggio that, as powerful as the chains may appear to be, they are just another brick and mortar operation doomed to disintermediation by the Digital Revolution?

So, now you want to end the consignment model of book distribution? Sorry, Mr. Riggio. The monster created by bookstore chains has the industry by the throat and will not let go. Returnability may be archaic, wasteful, stupid and fraudulent but publishers, bookstores and consumers are addicted and nobody is going to give it up. Not now, not ever.

You’re welcome to try to reform the old business, Mr. Riggio, but that’s no longer where the game is being played. While bookstore chains have battened on the consignment system, a new, virtually returns-free distribution model has arisen based on Internet fulfillment, prepaid orders printed on demand, and on e-books, a format that Mr. Riggio's company abandoned years ago.

"Once a new technology starts rolling," said Stewart Brand, "if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road."

Seek a solution to returns? Be our guest, Mr. Riggio. But we have news for you: it's too late. The steamroller has arrived.

- Richard Curtis

The Faithful - Chapter Ten ("White People")

Pennsylvania is a bad news state for everyone on the campaign, from Barack Obama down to Reggie, Caroline, Chloe, and Kanesha. While the professional pols are desperate to spin Reverand Wright and Barack's "Bitter" gaffe, and Hillary relentlessly plays the White Worker card, our cast is desperately seeking to uncover the spy in their midst, the one they've been calling "X". Now that they know who it is, they discover there may also be a "Y"!

It's not all bad. Kanesha enjoys an hour of majorly rough sex before dismissing her lover from her life. And Thomas, our gay narrator, is on the trail of a hot new attraction.

Despite a loss in Pennsylvania, Barack is moving inexorably to victory and The Faithful to its climax.

Check out Chapter Ten of The Faithful.

George Zebrowski's Cosmic Ride in a Hollowed-Out Asteroid

George Zebrowski's vision extends to the farthest reaches of the known universe, and maybe beyond that. His work has garnered high praise from peers who reside on the Olympus of today's science fiction world. Greg Bear calls him “one of those rare speculators who bases his dreams on science as well as inspiration.” And Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master James Gunn wrote, "Young people, all of us, need dreams to achieve the human potential. The kinds of habitats George Zebrowski describes may one day be the natural home of the human race and the kind of questing, hardworking young people he portrays may build them, if they have dreams to shape them around."

Of Zebrowski's Sunspacers Trilogy, Michael Bishop says, "In this thoughtful novel George Zebrowski has created a convincing future society that spans our entire solar system. Its evocation of the challenge and excitement of building an interdependent community of space habitats from hollowed-out asteroids is impressive, and I can easily imagine delighted young readers emerging from the story determined to make their lives count for something...Good science and an optimistic but far from simple-minded glimpse of a tomorrow that we might reasonably try to bring about."

- Richard Curtis

How Agents Build Authors' Careers

A literary agent's life involves far more than reading, lunching, and deal-making. Agents' services embrace the literary, legal, financial, social, political, psychological, and even the spiritual; and the jobs they are obliged to tackle run the gamut from computer troubleshooting to espionage. But because our business is a day-to-day, book-to-book affair, we tend to lose perspective. With our preoccupation with advances and royalties, payout schedules and discounts, movie rights and foreign rights and serial rights and merchandise rights, with option clauses and agency clauses and acceptability clauses and termination clauses, it is all too easy for us to forget that our primary goal is to build careers, to take writers of raw talents, modest accomplishments, and unimpressive incomes and render them prosperous, successful, and emotionally fulfilled.

To read more, click here.

The Killer Inside Her

Jim Thompson is one of the world's great masters of Noir fiction. He's best known for his classic crime novel The Killer Inside Me and for several films based on his books, notably The Grifters.

In Savage Night, a handsome criminal named Carl Bigelow wants to bump off hoodlum Jake Winroy without making it look like a hit. Winroy's gotta go because he's going to turn state's evidence on Carl's boss. But there's good news: Winroy's beautiful wife is bored with the hood's drunken behavior and yearns to become a widow. She also wouldn't mind taking Carl for a lover. If Carl can whack Winroy and hang it on the dame, he can get away with murder.

Don't be surprised if you end up rooting for the bad guys. Everybody does: That's Jim Thompson's genius.

- Richard Curtis

The Faithful - Chapter Nine ("A Crisis of Faith")

While Barack Obama is winning handily in Wyoming and Mississippi, there's another war between the sexes taking place behind the scenes. Thomas discovers two of his companions in flagrante delictu and is swept by nearly uncontrollable envy and lust, not for the female partner but for the male. And it looks like the identity of Spy X is about to be revealed by none other than Kanesha's mother!

Now available, Chapter Nine...

Ratha Returns with New "Courage"

Ratha, the fire-wielding leader of Clare Bell's prehistoric cat clan, is back after an almost intolerably long wait, and her fans couldn't be happier to greet Ratha's Courage. After introducing her protagonist in 1983 in the now classic hardcover, Ratha's Creature (Atheneum/Margaret McElderry Books) Bell followed up with three sequels: Clan Ground, Ratha and Thistle-chaser, and Ratha's Challenge. The quartet went out of print, but Firebird Books, a division of Penguin, recently brought them out again.

In writing Ratha's Courage, Bell returned to the strength of her award-winning first volume but drew on up-to-date paleontology. She researched a leopard-like paleofelid and a cheetah-like sister species. From the latter she generated her fictional "Named" race.

To learn more about Bell's creative process and the evolution of Ratha, and to find out why there's been such a long gap after Ratha's Creature, click here.

E-Reads is thrilled to launch this long-awaited return of a classic fantasy figure.

- Richard Curtis

George Effinger's One-Way Ticket to Wherever

Far into the future, Hartstein's graduation present from his grandparents is a wonderful trip into the past. In the world of George Alec Effinger's Bird of Time, time travel is a lucrative tourist industry, with one smallish issue: two percent never come back. This cover-up is the work of something called The Agency, which conveniently hasn't told Hartstein that there's a war going on on the other side. Have a nice holiday, Hartstein, and come back...er...soon? Whenever? At all?

- Richard Curtis

What Your Agent Has Done For You Lately

After talking a hotheaded author out of beating up his copyeditor, I began to reflect on some of the unusual things that agents are called upon to do in the course of their careers. I am often asked to speak to groups of aspiring writers and explain just what literary agents do. I wonder how the audience would react if I told them that among other things, literary agents babysit for their clients' kids, paint their clients' houses, and bail their clients out of jail. They even fall in love with their clients and marry them. In fact, I have done all these things and more.

If you think that all agents do is submit manuscripts in the morning, collect checks in the afternoon, and go to lunch for three hours in between, you're in for some interesting insights. Click here for the inside dope on the secret lives of literary agents.

- Richard Curtis

The Faithful - Chapter Eight ("The Empire Fights Back")

What's assault to the the goose is consensual sex to the gander. Those bruises? Spanking, and she asked for it.

The trail of the double crosser, Spy X, in the Obama campaign becomes red-hot with the discovery of a photo of one of our Obama stalwarts posed with - Hillary! Someone has some very tall explaining to do. Scandal couldn't come at a worse time, with the tide turning in Hillary's direction. She wins Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island.

Read more in this week's installment of The Faithful.

Beyond Weird Tales: Fritz Leiber's Black Gondolier

Assembled in The Black Gondolier is a selection of some of Fritz Leiber's most horrific tales, many virtually unobtainable for decades. From the riveting "Spider Mansion" and "The Phantom Slayer" from Weird Tales to the more recent "Lie Still, Snow White" and "Black Has Its Charms" culled from rare, small-press magazines, this collection provides an overview of Leiber's fifty-plus years as an acknowledged master of the weird tale. While much of his seminal science fiction and fantasy remains in print, his work in the field of supernatural horror has been sadly neglected.

Until now.

- Richard Curtis

Jaki Girdner's Kate Jasper

We'd like to let Jaqueline ("Jaki") Girdner tell you about her Kate Jasper mystery series, now available from E-Reads, in her own words:

My protagonist, Kate Jasper, lives in Marin County, California, a very strange place. I like to call Kate, "Marin's own, organically grown, amateur sleuth."

Marin County, for those of you who haven't been here, is filled with people who still think the New Age is really new. There's a lot of money here too, not to mention an attitude of spiritual elitism. (In Berkeley across the Bay, people like to be politically correct. In Marin, they like to be spiritually correct.) So Kate Jasper tends to stumble over dead bodies against this particularly touch-feely Marin backdrop: a human potential discussion group in Murder Most Mellow; a chiropractor's table in Adjusted To Death; a lethal health spa in The Last Resort; and a psychic seminar in Murder on the Astral Plane (just to name a few). Kate has a serious side too. She recognizes the dichotomy of spiritual correctness in collision with poverty, crime, injustice, and despair, collisions that often end in murder in Kate's world.

Yet Kate Jasper is definitely a product of mellow Marin County. Kate's a vegetarian. Since I was a vegan for fifteen years, it's easy for me to write the semi-orgasmic food scenes. And of course, her vegetarianism gets her into trouble. There's a lot more comic potential in vegetables than most people realize. In Fat-Free and Fatal, Kate attends a vegetarian cooking class along with her psychic friend, Barbara Chu. Unfortunately, Barbara isn't psychic enough to avoid tripping over a murder victim on her way to the restroom. The murder weapon? A little hand-held electrical appliance used to grate vegetables, called a SaladShooter. But don't worry, the victim wasn't shredded to death. Now if you want to find out exactly how to murder someone with a SaladShooter, you might want to read Fat-Free and Fatal.

Kate Jasper also practices tai chi, a meditative martial art form that I'm certain no tough P.I. would deign to use. But believe me, it's effective, especially for Kate. In tai chi, the person who is the most relaxed and centered wins. Not the big guys with all the muscles! I've practiced tai chi for over twenty years. And I've done a kind of tai chi sparring called "push hands" in which I was consistently pushed over by a woman twenty years older and much smaller than myself. And in turn, I was always able to push over this young muscular guy who was about six-foot-three. The poor guy kept trying, but he was just too big and tough. I love it. And it's even more satisfying in fiction when Kate uses tai chi to protect herself. In one of the books, Kate uses a particularly elegant move which is meant to strike a person in the groin and the throat at the same time. Unfortunately, she misses the throat of the thug who has been terrorizing her, but what the hey? The man's writhing on the floor, clutching his crotch. Fictional tai chi can be so much fun!

Kate owns her own small business, a gag-gift business called "Jest Gifts." Jest Gifts sells specialty items to professionals, things like shark mugs for the attorneys and shrunken-head earrings for the psychotherapists. She's easy for me to write. I once owned a company called "Jest Cards" which manufactured greeting cards featuring terrible puns. It's also a great position for an amateur sleuth. It's Kate's own company. She can take time off to investigate murder, even though she does have to work late to make up for it. And like most people who own their own business, she's both determined and a little crazy, crazy enough to follow up on her misguided investigations. So far I haven't had a gag-gift murder. No one's been strangled with a psychotherapist's "Uh-Huh" tie or brained with a doctor's quack cup, but you never know.

Kate is too busy with gag gifts to be a professional detective, so why does she keep sticking her nose into murder? Her friends tell her it's her karma. But of course, they're from Marin. The real truth is that Kate Jasper is a caretaker. Unlike the lone wolf detective, she has a lot of friends, and when her friends are in trouble, she tries to help them out. Kate even helps out her ex-husband, Craig, in The Last Resort. He and his new girlfriend, attorney Suzanne Sorenson, have taken a trip to a health spa. Suzanne is not only the woman who broke up their marriage, she's the one who filed the divorce papers. She's found dead, face down in a mud bath. And the police suspect Craig. Kate gets on a plane and flies down to help him. Now that's a caretaker!

I know what makes Kate Jasper tick. Sometimes, she's too close for comfort. She's the kind of character who gets a phone call from a friend in need, say a friend who says her boyfriend's going crazy on her. And Kate says, "Oh that's terrible, why don't you come stay with me?" So the friend does. Then the boyfriend comes over, and he really is crazy. And his friends come over and they're Hell's Angels. And his family members are from another planet entirely, and his dog's a Doberman pinscher, and, well... you get the idea. That's Kate Jasper.

At least, that's how I think of Kate Jasper. Here's what a few others have said:

"Kate is a heroine with backbone, heart, and a sweet sense of humor."
—Pacific Sun

"She's smart, funny, vulnerable, and unpretentious."
—Marilyn Wallace, editor of the Sisters in Crime series

"Clever, smart, and resourceful, Kate is an ideal amateur detective."
—Silk Stalkings, Nicholas and Thompson

"Kate is smart and funny and independent and all those other things we like our protagonist to be. But one of the things that makes her special to me... is that she is a kind and loving person."
—Kathleen Swanholt, editor of Mysterious Women

I'll be curious to find out what you think of Kate. And of course, Kate will be curious about you.

Are Literary Agents Friends or Rivals?

Are literary agents friendly with each other? Are they mutually suspicious or hostile? Do they steal authors from each other at every opportunity, or do they cooperate with one another? Do they have a code of behavior? Are they too competitive to act collectively? You may be surprised to learn the answers. For the complete article, click here.

Two Masterworks by a Lifetime Overachiever

There is scarcely an award that James Gunn hasn't won, or a distinguished position in the fantasy and science fiction world he hasn't held. A few minutes reviewing his accomplishments is time well spent. The most significant of his honors is Grand Master for a lifetime of achievement placing him at the pinnacle of accomplishment in science fiction. He earned it not just for his books, of which there are many of great distinction, but for the service he has rendered to the literary genre and the giants and pioneers like himself who created it. He is also an archivist and scholar who has preserved drafts, correspondence, and historical information that satisfy our curiosity about the authors and processes behind the books themselves.

E-Reads has a solid block of Gunn's work, and today we're happy to feature two favorites at the top of everyone's Gunn chart, The Dreamers and the The Listeners.

- Richard Curtis

The Faithful - Chapter Seven (The Inevitable Candidate)

In Chapter 7 of The Faithful, the Obama campaign team speculates that the spy in their midst was planted by the Clinton camp. "Suddenly," says our narrator, "I realized just how dangerous a Clinton camp spy in our midst could be. These people are ruthless. Winning, winning, winning - winning is everything. They have no soul. Hillary didn’t care if her dirty politics hurt the Democratic Party and the nation. Wouldn’t some of the people who worked for her stop at nothing to help her?"

They become desperate to find X, who's been reporting their steamy sexual liaisons to a snoopy New York Times reporter. But any one of them could be the traitor.