The Dark Streets by John Shannon
<p> A pile of books arrived at the Druidical & Literary’s posh offices yesterday prompting this reporter to rip open the envelopes before searching for shelf space. A couple of notable arrivals bear mentioning on a day when Wellington Leg broke records in a heat wave: 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Time to inflate the Fred Flinstone pool and smoke a cigar.
<p> By the way Mariano Rivera is working on a changeup. Tremble, Red Sox Nation, tremble.
<p> Okay, I’m reading THE DARK STREETS by John Shannon from Pegasus Books. It may be early in the year for “best of” kind of praise but this novel reminds me why crime fiction transcends marketing labels and snide put downs to simply explore the human condition in extremis. Jack Liffey is looking for a missing college student, a Korean-American involved in making a documentary about comfort women during the Japanese occupation. That’s all I will say for now, other than to say that John Shannon deserves recognition as one of the elite writers in our beloved genre.
<p> Spare a thought for Jason Pinter one of the Killer Year founders and author of the forthcoming novel, THE MARK. As Sarah Weinman reported yesterday, Jason was fired by Crown over a blog post that suggested Starbucks book program was moving product. It’s hard to say what the brass at Random House found threatening in Jason’s observations other than he used Barnes & Noble as a reference point in his comparison to Starbucks. You’d think that Publishers would be excited by the Starbucks program, but no, Howard Schultz & Co. don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know how to select books. They don’t know how to market. Starbucks might as well close all their stores and throw in the towel. And if it’s true about Mariano Rivera’s changeup, we should cancel the baseball season, close the Piltdown Exchange, climb the Alaska Way Viaduct and wait for the Big One.
<p> Although I’m sure Barnes & Noble has their hands full with cranky shareholders and friendly staff are they frightened by Starbucks? ( I am, but who am I?) What if Starbucks were to acquire BN in a hostile coffee throwing takeover greenmail short squeeze throw caution to the winds deal? Hey, they need another book. BN has books in there man.
March 7th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Down in these here parts, B&N and Starbucks are already joined at the hip–every B&N has a Starbucks inside. So I don’t think it’s surprising that Starbucks is starting to sprout books.
In fact, many scientists now believe that Starbuckses are larval forms of Barnes&Nobleses, though no one has observed them in their cocoon-spinning stage. Only the larvae are true flesh-eaters; the adult forms have mouth parts that are adapted for sucking rather than biting.
Or so I hear…