Broken April by Ismail Kadare
I’m always looking through articles and bibliographies on books; searching for new authors and new reading experiences. So when Caustic Cover Critic recommended Broken April in his Best-Books-of-the-Year (2009), I was intrigued. “It’s very well written, which helps, but the underlying idea is even more fascinating. The setting is Kadare’s native Albania, where the hill-dwelling people have
First Lines From Recent Paperback Purchases
Looking over my vintage paperback loot from the recent 32nd Annual Paperback Show, I found myself reading the first paragraphs of each book in succession just to get a taste of the writers style. They were surprisingly different. In fact, the one book that I bought on a whim (The Mark of Pak San Ri) with
Ep 1 – Introduction to the Show & Ace Doubles
In our first episode, Paperback Show host/producer Ricky Lee Grove introduces the Paperback Show Podcast. He shares the story of his first paperback purchase at the age of 12 years old. At a local used paperback shop, he picked up an Ace Double paperback which contained Philip E. High’s Reality Forbidden and A. Bertram Chandler’s Contraband
Episode 9 – Dan Marlowe: Neglected Gold Medal Crime Novelist
Dan J. Marlowe is a master crime novelist who deserves to be part of the pantheon of crime writers like Jim Thompson, Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake), and Patricia Highsmith. Why has he been forgotten? Probably because he wrote his major crime novels for a paperback publisher (Gold Medal) and never had a hardback publisher. Also,
