OC Punk Music Book Fun But Flawed

My review of Tearing Down the Orange Curtain: How Punk Rock Brought Orange County To The World by Nate Jackson and Daniel Kohn was posted over at PopMatters.com today. Fun book and educational. It’s challenged by some clunky execution but I did add several new albums to my collection as a result of reading the…

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‘Unforgiving Places’ Provides a New Way to Think About Gun Violence

Rightly or wrongly, gun laws in America ain’t gonna change.  Whether legislating different would be effective is a question that this country will not answer. So, Jens Ludwig provides a new way of thinking about violence involving firearms. In Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, the Pritzker Director of the University of Chicago’s…

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Fisketjon Working with New Imprint

Legendary editor Gary Fisketjon was always one of my heroes. He worked, famously, with Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, Beverly Lowry, and many more. Courtesy of Publishers Weekly, I just learned that he is working with an imprint called Panamerica. The imprint falls under a broadsheet called County Highway that was founded by David Samuels and…

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McGinnis Jr. Announces Memoir

Novelist Joe McGinnis Jr. recently shared on his social media channels the news of a memoir, to be published in October this year. Damaged People: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons is said to examine his life growing up with his father who is perhaps most well-known for writing Fatal Vision. The younger McGinnis wrote…

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Writers and the Los Angeles Fires

Even though the fires in Southern California continue to burn, some time has passed, so affected writers are gathering their thoughts and sharing their experiences. The wonderful Karl Taro Greenfeld recounts the previous days in this moving piece for The Wall Street Journal. “Mourning Our Dream Home in the Pacific Palisades” I discovered Greenfield’s work…

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