Smatterings, the Frazzled Edition

My review of Elisa Albert’s THE BOOK OF DAHLIA is now up at JBooks.

The Thriller Award nominations are out, and to circumvent the expected sniping and grumbling, here’s some boilerplate copy: awards reflect judges’ tastes, not some great gender conspiracy. Also, I kinda like the Best Novel list but I also read all those books and thought them pretty good to flat-out-fantastic.

Charles Matthews has much praise for Cara Black’s new Aimee Leduc novel. Black is also interviewed at the Sacramento Bee.

The passing of Arthur C. Clarke has been understandably noted all around the ‘sphere and in print. A couple of excellent appreciations to read are by Ed Park, Edward Rothstein, Ed Champion (what is up with so many Eds digging Clarke?) and David Ulin, who shares some very special Clarke EGOGrams.

Book trailers provoke a heated discussion at the Crime Fiction Dossier.

PEN World Voices has now announced its schedule and slated authors.

Christopher Rice’s BLIND FALL gets the lengthy review treatment at Nashville Scene.

I watched the second episode of Titlepage.TV and come back with the following comments: the editing is better and faster-paced but can only help so much when authors aren’t given the chance to interact more naturally; Menaker clearly likes to talk with Sloane Crosley the most, though Ceridwen Dovey and Julie Klam also translate really well to video/tv; Keith Gessen has about a week of intensive media training ahead of him. Carolyn Kellogg has additional comments and per Mark Sarvas, who will appear on an upcoming episode, “the revamped format is livelier and there is no teleprompter in the room.” Hurray!

RIP LBC, with many thoughtful comments on its demise and litblogs in general from Dan Green.

Do we need a reset of 90210? Nooooooooo.

And finally, this made me spit up my coffee.