New York Crimes

I look rather the dork in this photo–we don’t have the professional pictures back yet, so we are having to suffice with whatever guests took on their camera phones–but no matter how well I photographed, I was never going to shine in comparison, was I?

After the craziest year and half of my life, […]

Parker Progress Report: Backflash (1998)

NB: A version of this post also appears on Existential Ennui.

In the previous Parker Progress Report, I took a look at the seventeenth Parker, Comeback (1997), originally published twenty-three years after the sixteenth Parker, Butcher’s Moon (1974). Luckily, Parker fans didn’t have quite so long to wait for the next book […]

Lawrence Block’s trilogy of Parker forewords

Today, Mulholland Books posted Lawrence Block’s foreword to the University of Chicago Press edition of Butcher’s Moon. This means that all three of Block’s forewords, which form a trilogy of sorts, are now available for reading online.

The foreword to Butcher’s Moon, titled to make it more article-like “Canarsie and Westlake, Parker […]

Lawrence Block’s introduction to U of C Press’ Backflash

I know some people skip introductions, forewords, afterwords, &c. Not me. I love ’em. There are several posted on this site, and every single one of them is interesting.

Of course, on this site I can only post forewords and so on from out-of-print editions, usually long-out-of-print editions, and even then I’m walking a […]

The slaying of writer’s block, Backflash, 361, and podcasts

One reason I haven’t been posting much lately is because I’ve had an acute case of writer’s block. You see, I read both Backflash and 361 recently, and felt obligated to write about them. It wasn’t working. And that was stopping me from writing anything else.

361 itself was partially a product of writer’s […]

U of C reprints: Backflash

Here’s the cover of Backflash, third and last of the upcoming batch of University of Chicago Press reprints.

And with it comes good news. The previous reprints had one introduction shared amongst the three in the batch (except for the first batch which lacked intros entirely). For this […]

Good news from University of Chicago Press

Good news from the University of Chicago Press. They have secured the reprint rights for all of the Parker novels through Firebreak. The next batch of reprints (March 2011) will be Butcher’s Moon, Comeback, and Backflash.

Lawrence Block has introduction duty on Butcher’s Moon. Great choice.

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