Catching up on the news roundup: 6/8/13 – 8/3/13

Some of you may have noticed that the weekly news roundup posts, which I feed through Twitter, stopped on June 7. I never stopped linking news items through Twitter, as those that follow the account for this site (@worldofparker), surely noticed. The problem was that Twitter made some changes that broke the tool that created the post each week.

That tool has now been fixed, and with a little finagling, I was able to successfully generate a test post. So the feature will resume. Hallelujah!

This post will round up everything that I linked from June 7 until the beginning of this week, and (fingers crossed), we should see items from this week rounded up this weekend, just like the old days.

Unfortunately, those same Twitter changes seem to have broken the “Latest News” widget in the sidebar as well. I haven’t gone shopping for a new one yet, but I hope to do so soon.

If anyone knows a WordPress guru who might be interested in doing some tweaks to the back end of the site, please contact me. I waste too much time trying to figure out back-end stuff and I’m sick of messing with it. I’m just looking for someone who can fix a few things and the be a go-to when new stuff goes wrong or I’d like to make some improvements. I’ll happily pay a reasonable rate (keeping in mind that this is a hobby site) for a few hours’ work here and there.

Anyway, on to the news.

• Coming soon from Stark House Press–Paperback Confidential: Crime Writers of the Paperback Era http://starkhousepress.com/ritt.php
• A review of the Donald Westlake (as Tucker Coe) novel Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death, first in the Mitch Tobin series: http://swiftlytiltingplanet.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/kinds-of-love-kinds-of-death-by-donald-westlake/
• A look at the original cover of The Jugger at Pop Sensations: http://salmongutter.blogspot.com/2013/07/paperback-672-jugger-richard-stark-aka.html …
• A video review (in French) of The Ax (Le Couperet) by Donald Westlake: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOK9enWDukI …
• Randy Johnson at Not the Baseball Pitcher reviews the first two Spider novels: http://randall120.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/ffb-the-spider-r-t-m-scott/ …
• Jesse Willis at SFFaudio brings to our attention a free audiobook of the Donald Westlake SF short story The Risk Profession… (cont.)
• …by the late Gregg Margarite, who I did a podcast with on Westlake’s lost novel Memory. He was great and died too young. (Cont.)
• Jesse’s post also includes a scan of the short story from Amazing Stories. http://www.sffaudio.com/?p=48454  Memory podcast: https://violentworldofparker.com/?p=4186
• A look at the original cover of The Handle at Pop Sensations: http://salmongutter.blogspot.com/2013/07/paperback-667-handle-richard-stark-aka.html …
• Darwyn Cooke gets an Eisner nom for best adaptation for The Score: http://www.comic-con.org/awards/will-eisner-comic-industry-award-nominees-2013 … Our interview with Darwyn: https://violentworldofparker.com/?p=6700
• ‘This Did Something Powerful to Me’: Authors’ Favorite First Lines of Books. Featuring a couple of VWOP favorites http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/07/this-did-something-powerful-to-me-authors-favorite-first-lines-of-books/278085/ …
• Donald E. Westlake is a grandfather for the seventh time! Congratulations to Paul Westlake and his wife: http://www.donaldwestlake.com/2013/07/19/mini-update-literally/ …
• C. Hill at Acerbic Writing reviews The Hunter: http://acerbicwriting.wordpress.com/2013/06/29/the-hunter-by-richard-stark/ …
• Lawrence Block has a new collection of short stories out in September from Hard Case Crime and Subterranean Press: http://lawrenceblock.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/catch-release/ …
• Don’t miss: Illustrations from the abridgement of The Mourner, from Man’s World magazine, 1965: http://ladythatsmyskull.tumblr.com/post/48725013223/nude-blonde-of-manhunt-street …
• Parker shelfporn: http://longwalkwithbooks.blogspot.ru/2013/07/shelfporn.html …
• I haven’t gone through it so I hope it’s OK. Here’s a gallery of the 50 best gangster movies. The Outfit is included. http://movies.msn.com/fifty-best-gangster-movies/photo-gallery/feature/?photoidx=1 …