Book Reviews

Montana has always fascinated me for strange reasons.  Partly because there’s an alien quality to its physical beauty, as if a piece of Mars or Saturn had been towed in by some alien spacecraft millions of years ago.  Once it was dropped off, the shipping manifest got lost and the aliens forgot about it.  So there it sits.  Another part of Montana’s appeal is the people who live there.  For one, there aren’t many of them.  It’s what’s called “sparsely populated.”  For two, some of the people who do live there are…how shall I put it?…different from the rest of […]

Let it be said first that It May Be Forever: An Irish Rebel on the American Frontier is an excellent, very enjoyable book which would win the highest rating if we did that kind of thing at SPR.  The problem is that is resists classification.  Is it a history, a non-fiction novel, a biography, or historical fiction?  It works best as the latter, but one does not normally find photographs and other illustrations in such text, nor a bibliography.  A glossary of terms, sometimes, but any fictional text that fails to generate reader understanding of what these mean organically […]

Christopher Meeks is a self-publishing success story.  No, he hasn’t landed a huge publishing contract, but he’s establishing a very serious writing career via the self-publishing route – one that could be the model of how to do self-publishing right and how it can be the avenue for serious and entertaining fiction.

I’ve read every one of his books that he’s put out via Lulu: two short-story collections – The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea and Months and Seasons – and a play – Who Lives?  I’ve also seen a performance of Months and Seasons with stories read by […]

Wil Wheaton publishing a book via Lulu is one of the better developments in self-publishing.  It further helps to legitimize self-publishing for those who don’t have such quick name recognition, and could spark new interest in self-publishing among people who do.  Most celebrities wait out for their huge advance and write one major book, usually with another writer.  Given the huge interest in everything celebrities do, you could imagine well-known people releasing compilations of their writing periodically.  Publishing could become the new blogging – in which private thoughts are packaged for people to read.  That’s a possibility, at least.

But […]

Note: Guest reviewed by Tom Baum, who happens to be the father of the editor of the Self-Publishing Review, as well as the author of the novel Out of Body, the children’s book Hugo the Hippo, screenplays for film and TV, and theatre.  As Francis Hamit is a writer for this site, I thought it best to have someone impartial review the novel.

Charlize Theron, call your agent.  In The Shenandoah Spy, Francis Hamit has cast into brilliant light a character from history any actress would kill to play—Belle Boyd, the first American female Army […]

You might think that writing a book with Charles Bukowski is redundant.  Bukowski’s own fiction is basically autobiography, in which his alter-ego Henry Chinaski works at the post office, sleeps with groupies, makes a movie, has a childhood, and so on.  You might think that, but you’d be wrong about Mr. Bukowski’s Wild Ride because of two things:

1.  It’s written in the third person, not the first person.
2.  This is like no book Bukowski ever wrote.

The book puts Bukowski in touch with people from his lifetime, both fictional and not, and how he’d […]

I have a deep interest in UFO’s.  Gearing up to write the book I’m currently working on (which I’m going to self-publish) I read a lot about the UFO phenomenon.  It amazed me that something with such profound implications is not taken seriously.  “What if” is enough of a reason to pay attention to the phenomenon, regardless of the amount of physical evidence.  And there are a lot of credible witnesses – many more than are given mainstream attention.

In a way, the UFO phenomenon is similar to self-publishing.  Because there is such a drastic amount of less-than-credible material being […]

Melanie Haney is a great writer and she masterful at the what makes short stories strongest: the last sentence.  In Melanie Haney’s collection, The Simplest of Acts and Other Stories, you’re often left at the end of the story wishing it would go on, but knowing that it ended perfectly: concise and alive, as if you know the characters will go on living even if you’re not reading.  These stories are quiet, deep, and powerful.

In a way, the book is not well-advertised on the back.  The back copy says these are “carefully wrought tales of loss and love […]