The Bachman book Thinner (1984) sold 28,000 copies during its initial run-and then ten times as many when it was revealed that Bachman was, in fact, King. King concludes that he has yet to find an answer to the "talent versus luck" question, as he felt he was outed as Bachman too early to know. He says he deliberately released the Bachman novels with as little marketing presence as possible and did his best to "load the dice against" Bachman. In his introduction to The Bachman Books, King states that adopting the nom de plume Bachman was also an attempt to make sense out of his career and try to answer the question of whether his success was due to talent or luck. He convinced his publisher, Signet Books, to print these novels under a pseudonym. King therefore wanted to write under another name, in order to increase his publication without over-saturating the market for the King "brand". At the beginning of Stephen King's career, the general view among publishers was that an author was limited to one book per year, since publishing more would be unacceptable to the public.
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Then it’s three fair to middling stories before ‘Brothers of the Blood’ by Dredd creators Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra. ‘The Good Man’ is a clever standalone Christmas story by John Wagner that toys nicely with readers’ expectations. John Smith’s story is fun, with a couple of pithy one-liners in a tale of extra-terrestrial butchers that (spoiler alert!) meet their match in Dredd. Siku’s version of Dredd’s helmet is removed from the way it’s drawn by every other artist, but it works and the artwork is bold and modern, even if it’s not always clear what’s going on. The Complete Case Files 38 contains a dozen stories, kicking off with ‘Meatmonger’, a chunky slice of Dredd that’s the book’s longest offering at six parts. Opening pages are laid out to accommodate them, and one doesn’t have to keep checking the front of the book (or section) to see who wrote and drew what. They don’t add anything to the stories, but it seems sensible to include them. It’s good to see the return of the story titles alongside the Judge Dredd logo and credit boxes, after a mysterious absence from the last two collections. She even convinces the shy Darby to perform at a nightclub. As the two become friends, Esme draws Darby into an underworld of jazz and drugs. She’s lonely and struggling when she meets Esme, a young maid who works at the hotel. By some administrative fluke, Darby is placed on a floor of aspiring models, among whom she doesn’t exactly feel at home. She moves into the Barbizon Hotel for Women, famed residence for luminaries such as Grace Kelly, Lauren Bacall, and others. Her father has died, her mother remarried, and Darby, who doesn’t expect much in the way of marriage prospects, would like to find a way to support herself. In 1952, she moves to New York to enroll in secretarial school. A debut novel about the renowned Barbizon Hotel and the generations of women who might have lived there.ĭarby McLaughlin is a plain girl from a small Ohio town. Like The Misfit Soldier, The Weight of Command is a standalone that requires no knowledge of Mammay’s other works. Michael Mammay, author of the military science fiction series Planetside as well as the standalone novel The Misfit Soldier, is back with another story this month. THE WEIGHT OF COMMAND by Michael Mammay (January 17) If you’ve already read The Stormlight Archive, think of this book as a tale being relayed by the enigmatic character Hoid, similar in style to “The Dog and the Dragon” chapter in Rhythm of War except novel-length.ĭiscover Falstaff Books’ “The Weight of Command” by Michael Mammay on Amazon. Tress of the Emerald Sea is a fable set in Sanderson’s interconnected Cosmere universe. Remember last year when juggernaut fantasy author Brandon Sanderson made headlines for launching the most successful Kickstart campaign in the platform’s history to independently release four novels he’d written in secret? Well, the Year of Sanderson is here, and so is the first of the author’s Secret Project novels! Even if you missed out on the Kickstarter, you can still get the first of these secret novels, Tress of the Emerald Sea, this month in ebook form, with a planned physical release set for April. TRESS OF THE EMERALD SEA by Brandon Sanderson (January 11) Discover Dragonsteel Entertainment’s “Tress of the Emerald Sea” by Brandon Sanderson on Amazon. And it all happens around a mic on a stage that’s mostly blank and white like an unwritten page.ĭirector Lloyd and designer Soutra Gilmour (also a hot ticket), have had the sense to get out of the way and strip everything back, to let the words and actors shine. Duels – like the one where Cyrano massacres a crap actor for massacring ‘Hamlet’ – are fought as rap battles or slam contests. The rapiers, intrigue and censorship of Cardinal Richelieu’s Paris, circa 1640, are modernised as razor-sharp banter about love, sex, and – nudge, wink – cultural appropriation. Writers are fighters and the word is everything in this firecracker show about passion, rejection, and the crazy genius of the spoken word. And writer Martin Crimp and director Jamie Lloyd have pulled off something improbably brilliant to get him here: taking Edmund Rostand’s frilly old French verse drama about a mournful musketeer with a massive nose and reinventing it as, basically, ‘Hamilton’ for Europeans. McAvoy is Cyrano: winner in words, loser in love – and he’s shit hot. For nearly three hours he spits fire, spraying lyrical pearls at his enemies, nailing rap battles and chucking his battered heart beneath the feet of the woman he loves, Roxane. That man is James McAvoy: booted and buzzcut like a Glaswegian squaddie and stripped to the waist. London’s hottest ticket is a middle-aged white man rapping. The letters from both authors included in the lot relate to their publishing activity. When Stoker proposed that he dedicate the book to his "dear friend Hommy-Beg," he wrote to Caine that "if the book is ever worth remembering it will be well understood what is meant" (23 February 1897). Bram Stoker first met the wildly popular novelist Hall Caine through their mutual friend Henry Irving. The first issue is without the advertisement for Stoker's The Shoulder of Shasta on page the present is the variant with 8-page publisher's catalogue at end and the main body of text printed on uncoated wove paper. London: Archibald Constable, 1897.įirst edition, first issue, with correspondence from Bram Stoker and from the book's dedicatee "Hommy-Beg," aka Hall Caine. In these mini-strips, he tracked his professional successes, personal failures, hopes for the future, and above all, struggles with feelings of emptiness and doubt. Stevenson’s self-portraits often featured a giant hole in the middle of his body, which in various strips housed a flower, or emanated a self-hating specter, or filled with flames. From there, he went on to become the showrunner for Netflix’s She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which immediately built a strong fandom among young women.īut while Stevenson was developing and presenting this wave of strong, confidently voiced work, he was also quietly posting doodly little comic strips to Tumblr, telling personal stories about romantic rejection and alienation, depression and self-harm. That same year, he started writing for television, helped create and launch the comic Lumberjanes, wrote a Thor story for Marvel and a Wonder Woman tale for DC, and took over the Marvel comic Runaways. As his autobiographical graphic novel The Fire Never Goes Out notes, he was 25 in 2015, when his award-winning independent webcomic Nimona was published as a book. It’s easy to see trans comics artist and TV creator ND Stevenson as an unmitigated success. Each of the patients Harper writes about taught her something important about recuperation and recovery. The Beauty in Breaking is the poignant true story of Harper’s journey toward self-healing. How we recognize those breaks, how we try to mend them, and where we go from there are all crucial parts of the healing process. In the ensuing years, as Harper learned to become an effective ER physician, bringing insight and empathy to every patient encounter, she came to understand that each of us is broken-physically, emotionally, psychically. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn’t move with her. Brought up in Washington, D.C., in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. As seen/heard on Fresh Air, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, Weekend Edition, and moreĪn emergency room physician explores how a life of service to others taught her how to heal herself. But Tisaanah will stop at nothing to save those she abandoned.Įven if it means forfeiting her freedom and sacrificing her heart. The Orders have bigger plans for Tisaanah. And as her feelings for Maxantarius deepen, she is forced to decide how much she is willing to trade away for revenge. Under looming war, Tisaanah must master her magic and survive the Orders demands. But as the Orders' grip tightens around them both, his bloody past may be the key to her future. However, in the case of Daughter of No Worlds, I think that if the page count had been pared down some, with a tighter overall narrative, this wouldve remained a. To earn her place, Tisaanah is forced into an apprenticeship with Maxantarius Farlione, a handsome and reclusive fire Wielder who despises the Orders. Instead, she murdered the most powerful man in Threll.įorced to flee, she has only one chance at saving those she left behind: pledging herself to the Orders, an organization of magic Wielders strong enough to destroy her former masters. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Daughter of No Worlds (The War of Lost Hearts Book 1). Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. But the night she tried to buy her freedom, she nearly paid with her life. Daughter of No Worlds (The War of Lost Hearts Book 1) - Kindle edition by Broadbent, Carissa. A life in slavery taught Tisaanah how to survive with nothing but a sharp eye, a quick mind, and a touch of magic. I feel as though Eleanor of Aquitaine is a difficult person to write about, much less put words into her mouth, and I think Lofts did an admirable job of writing as her. In fact, the real action of the book begins with the crusade, which doesn’t actually happen until around page 300! Nonetheless, this novel is written in an engaging style, and many of the characters, especially the ones who are narrators, are well-defined. It’s hard to write about someone in English history who is so well-known and well-loved what better way than to write his story from the point of view of the people who knew him best?The book takes a while to get going-most of the beginning is devoted to Berengaria, hopelessly in love with a man who was more in love with the idea of reclaiming the Holy Land. The novel focuses on Richard’s reign of England (a country he spent very little time in), especially the time he spent while on crusade. The Lute Player is the story of Richard the Lionhearted, as told from the point of view of Blondel, the eponymous lute player Richard’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Anna Apieta, crippled half sister to Richard’s wife, Berengaria. |