Jul
12
2013
July 12th, 2013 by Michael Sauers

Head on over to the Shine-O-Matic and go a little bit mad at the typewriter.

Shine-O-Matic

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Jul
01
2013
July 1st, 2013 by Michael Sauers

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Jun
21
2013
June 21st, 2013 by Michael Sauers

Joyland CD

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Jun
13
2013
June 13th, 2013 by Michael Sauers

Joyland KindleFireRemember all the noise about Stephen King not releasing Joyland as an eBook? Well, they exist anyway. I’ve seen it. (I’m not linking to it here but if you know where to look, or can craft a good Google search or two, you’ll find it.) As Cory Doctorow says: ‘To those publishers here today who believe that you can buy DRM that will stop your books from appearing on the Internet without restriction, I say to you, “Behold, the typist.”‘

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May
31
2013
May 31st, 2013 by Michael Sauers


(Subject to become unavailable without notice.)

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May
30
2013
May 30th, 2013 by Michael Sauers

JoylandFor 20 years, Stephen King has had an image stuck in his head: It’s a boy in a wheelchair flying a kite on a beach. “It wanted to be a story, but it wasn’t a story,” he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. But little by little, the story took shape around the image — and focused on an amusement park called “Joyland” located just a little farther down the beach.

King’s new thriller is set in North Carolina in 1973. Joyland has a horror house and a torture chamber, but it’s not exactly a horror novel. The park’s fun house may be haunted by a ghost — which may explain the dead bodies — but the book isn’t exactly a supernatural thriller, either. Instead, the book combines elements of crime, horror and the supernatural. The main character is a college student who aspires to write for The New Yorker. After his heart is broken by his girlfriend, he wants to get away from New England and takes a job in North Carolina, at the Joyland amusement park, where he enters a different world.

As King — who is also the author of such horror, mystery and crime classics as Carrie, The Shining and It — began writing the book, the amusement park atmosphere he began with turned more lurid, more “carny,” more influenced by the state fairs and local carnivals of his youth in rural Maine.

“The more carny it got, the better I liked it, actually,” he says, “and I started to go to websites that had various carny language, some of which I remembered a little: pitchmen called ‘shy bosses’ and their concessions called ‘shies,’ and the little places where they sold tickets and sometimes sat down to rest called ‘doghouses,’ and other stuff I just made up, like calling pretty girls ‘points.’ “

Read the full article and listen to the interview @ NPR.org.

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May
29
2013
May 29th, 2013 by Michael Sauers

JoylandBoing Boing is currently featuring a special essay by Charles Ardai, the publisher of Hard Case Crime. It’s wonderful read and a love letter to the world of paperbacks and publishing.

Originally, we were only going to publish Joyland in paperback.

Steve grew up buying paperbacks for fifty cents from the wire spinner racks at his local drugstore in Lisbon Falls, Maine, the sort with sexy cover paintings and lurid cover copy and breathless storytelling that kept you glued to the page well past your bedtime. I did, too, though in my case it was in New York City rather than Lisbon Falls, and by the time I came around the wire spinner racks had vanished and the era that produced them was gone, too. When I found these paperbacks it was at flea markets and library sales, at used book stores and on my father’s bookshelves. (My grandmother’s too – this proper old lady had been a big fan of Mickey Spillane back in the day.) Like Steve, I fell in love with them, discovered they scratched a powerful itch I hadn’t even known I had. And when, years later, I found myself reminiscing about them with a friend over drinks, we decided the world needed more books like that, damn it. That’s how Hard Case Crime was born.

Read the full essay on Boing Boing.

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May
21
2013
May 21st, 2013 by Michael Sauers

JoylandDigital Readers may find themselves with the inability to read the next Stephen King novel. The author has announced today that his upcoming title called Joyland, due out June 4th, will only be available via traditional bookstores.

…

Today, King told the Wall Street Journal: “I have no plans for a digital version. Maybe at some point, but in the meantime, let people stir their sticks and go to an actual bookstore rather than a digital one.”

Read the full article @ goodereader.com.

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May
10
2013
May 10th, 2013 by Michael Sauers

Stephen King Flowchart v2via Tessie Girl.

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May
03
2013
May 3rd, 2013 by Michael Sauers

Owen & JoeThis week, Joe Hill (born Joseph Hillstrom King) released his fourth book, a 700-page horror story called NOS4A2. In March, his brother, Owen King, published his first novel, Double Feature, about a young filmmaker grappling with disappointment after his first movie falls apart. The two books couldn’t be more different, but what their authors have in common, of course, is that their parents are Stephen and Tabitha King. Vulture spoke with the guys about their writing approaches, how they’ve learned to evade (and live with) their parents’ shadows, and who beat up whom as a kid.

Was there a lot of emphasis in your home on the value of stories?
JH: We’ve always been a family that cares very passionately about books. Our dinner conversation was literary conversation, about this writer or this publication. And after dinners, often we would have a family book we’d go and read together, we would pass the book around. Our framework for thought was built around writers and stories and literary content and scene-creation — so in that sense the trade, not so much the art, but the trade, was constant conversation.

Did you ever rebel by rejecting that family culture?
JH: No, but I had a lot of stuff about changing my name.
OK: There was, like, three years in high school when everybody had to call you Ellis, right? Ellis Moriarty?
JH: Yeah. I remember that both my folks were a little bit concerned about that. I was thinking about not just using a pen name but legally changing my name. I was one of these kids who was really close to his dad, loved my dad, very emotionally tight, and yet at the same time I was very conscious that he was this huge, looming presence in the work of pop culture, and it’s very difficult to carve out a space. And I did have this idea about going into film or writing. I know Owen’s wrestled with this, and I know one of the ways Owen has dealt with it is by kind of taking a left-hand turn off the expressway and writing almost a completely different type of fiction.
OK: I mean, you want to be Stephen King’s son in your regular life, so where does your regular life meet your public life? It gets to be quite a knot.

Read the full interview @ Vulture.com.

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