1
My next book has been announced. The Strip will be published in early 2024 by Ultimo Press (Sydney) in Australia and the UK. According to the press release, I said:
"This is the book I’ve been working up to my whole career. I’ve always been on the hardboiled noir side of crime writing and have long sensed I’d eventually direct that bad energy at Queensland’s Joh Bjelke-Petersen era. I’m really happy with the result. It’s a nasty James Ellroy-styled crime novel about an equally nasty moment in Australian history."
2
I’ve been digging into the Dinosaur Jr catalogue a lot lately. They’ve always been on the periphery of what I like, but lately, their records are hitting. It’s what you turn to if you want to be relaxed, but you also want to listen to someone shred at the same time.
3
My reading has been all over the place. I loved the most recent Willy Vlautin novel The Night Always Comes. John Wray’s literary novel about Florida death metal Gone To The Wolves is one of the best-packaged books of the year.
4
Fellow Melbourne crime writer Andrew Nette has a new book out this month, Orphan Road. In a country inundated with ‘literary crime,’ this is an old-school heist novel (gritty, violent, twisty). I blurbed it, and I 100% endorse it.
5
This video of a young Frank Miller is pretty raw, but hearing him break down his influences in granular detail is pretty great. Sometimes when you love something (in this case, comics), it compels you to push so hard on it, that your stuff comes out super extreme and punk. That’s Miller.
6
The finale of Succession came and went. My feelings on it were low-key salty:
7
Vanity Fair profiled The Weeknd, our culture’s greatest purveyor of Gen-X styled nihilism. Big fan. Can’t wait for his TV show "The Idol." It sounds like a trainwreck.
8
This podcast episode with Elizabeth Ann West — who writes historical novels set in Jane Austen's out-of-copyright storyworld…with AI writing tool Sudowrite — is pretty interesting on a few fronts. This is what I love about self-publishing: the margins are bonkers. Niches within niches within niches.
That’s all.
That’s my Top 8.
— IAIN
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