My wife bought a painting of a man and woman sitting in a rustic kitchen from a Haitian street artist once when we were in Miami celebrating our anniversary. Tropical pink walls surrounded the woman sitting at a crude table carving a pineapple. Behind her a man was reading in a wooden chair. “This reminds [...]
Archive for September, 2012
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Review: John Hornor Jacobs’ This Dark Earth
Posted by John on September 24th, 2012
I’m close to asking John Hornor Jacobs to write a romance. Not that I’m overly eager to dip a toe into those lavender-scented waters. Rather, I’m just interested to see what he’d do with the genre. I’m not a big fan of the supernatural, but his debut, Southern Gods, was so gripping, so good, that it [...]
Grift Flash: Breakup by Peter Tieryas Liu
Posted by John on September 19th, 2012
His girlfriend had just told them they were splits. “Ethan, I’ve been seeing someone else for the last three weeks. I’m leaving for Europe tonight. This is the last time we’ll see each other.” There wasn’t a scene. It was calculated and controlled. She’d planned it for some time. Her performance was impeccably cold. Ethan [...]
Review: Wolf Hass’s Brenner and God
Posted by John on September 17th, 2012
By Jane Hammons What is life worth? Asked implicitly or explicitly, that’s the question underlying murder and other crimes that put life at risk. Wolf Haas’s seventh Brenner novel (the first translated into English) invites us to mull this over as Haas presents us with a multi-layered plot, a cast of intriguing characters and a [...]
Tags: Reviewers wanted: Apply within
Posted by John on September 16th, 2012
So, Grift magazine is lucky enough to have publishers grace us with review copies of their books. What we are not lucky enough to receive, however, is more time in the day. So, we have more books than we have time to read. That’s where things turn lucky for you, dear reader. If you are [...]
Why do we place so much faith in ‘customer’ reviews?
Posted by John on September 3rd, 2012
So, it seems that RJ Ellory stepped in it, huh? Don’t worry, I’m not going to comment about his practice of writing reviews of his own work under pseudonyms (or the fact that it took people this long to figure out that “Nicodemus Jones” wasn’t real). No, what strikes me most about this is the [...]
