Ever wonder what the most popular and unpopular baby names are? And how certain people and places got their names? Or are you just looking for guidance in choosing your child’s name? All Those Wonderful Names by J. N. Hook is an amusing exploration of names, familiar words, phrases, and the stories behind their origins. From the common to the confounding, this book has it all. Hear the true stories behind the naming of tropical storms, cars, fictitious characters, major league baseball teams, and more. Find out the real names of celebrities, such as Elton John, Cher, Rip Torn, Cary Grant, Liberace, and Conway Twitty. Discover counties, towns, and cities with strange names like Difficult, Tennessee; Jiggs, Nevada; Virgin, Utah; and Bosom, Wyoming. Learn unusual names for newborns—and perhaps the origin of your own surname as well.

– Richard Curtis

Hillary’s victory in Indiana is more than offset by Barack’s huge win in North Carolina, prompting tabloid New York Post to declare Hillary “Toast”. No one who’s followed the campaign believes Hillary is going to fold up her tent, especially with the Reverand Wright controversy boiling furiously despite Barack’s inspiring statement on race in America.

The quickening pace of the campaign seems to be bringing our cast together as both the Democratic nomination race and The Faithful hurtle to a climax. But the threat of a sex scandal still hovers over the story as a reporter who knows too much angles for an inducement to kill the story. What does she want?

Click here to find out.

Would you kill someone if you knew you could get away with it? John Taff’s taut thriller The Sorcerer’s Apprentice begins with that very question. And David Benning, a successful accountant, is seriously asking it. His dying father is racking up exorbitant charges at an expensive nursing home. And then there’s that bank account fat with embezzled money.

When he’s blackmailed by a shadowy organization known only as “The Group,” David finds himself thrust into a world far beyond his normal boundaries, one in which his survival requires him to kill seemingly ordinary people.

Welcome to a nightmare. It’s David Benning’s this time, but could be yours the next.

– Richard Curtis

There are some things authors just don’t like to think about, and one of them is their books going out of print.

For the new author, the idea that that might happen to your book one day considering it isn’t even in print yet, may be a matter of very remote concern. And that the book might go out of print within a year or less after publication is so shocking that your first impulse may be to dismiss the suggestion with a (nervous) laugh. Most books, however, do go out of print eventually, few being relegated to the status of deathless classics. Even more disturbing, an increasing number of them go out of print in a very short time.

In this two part article we look book-death squarely in the eye and contemplate the possibilities for resurrection

Click here to continue.

Publication of Tarnsman of Gor launched John Norman’s fantasy world and its culture of male masters and female subservients. Twenty-five volumes later the series has gone from cult classic to, simply, classic. There is no science fiction universe remotely approaching Gor for action, adventure, an exotic culture, and eroticism. But the second book was in many ways even more critical than the first.

In Volume #2, Outlaw of Gor, Tarl Cabot finds himself transported back to Counter-Earth – another name for Gor – from the sedate life he has known as a history professor on Earth. He is glad to be back in his role as a dominant warrior and back in the arms of his true love. Yet, Tarl finds that his name on Gor has been tainted, his city defiled, and all those he loves have been made into outcasts. He is no longer in the position of a proud warrior, but an outlaw for whom the simplest answers must come at a high price. He wonders why the Priest Kings have called him back to Gor, and whether it is only to render him powerless.

This is the book on which Norman’s series pivoted from a single title to an endlessly complex and entertaining skein of adventures. When Tarl Cabot’s returns to Gor, his fate is sealed. Once you read it (after Tarnsman of course) it will be very hard to disconnect yourself from the rest of the books.

- Richard Curtis

Steve Riggio, CEO of Barnes & Noble, calls the business model entitling bookstores to return books to publishers for full credit “insane” and he hopes to find a solution to a century-old practice “in a year or two,” according to an item by Jim Milliot in PW Daily.

Now you tell us, Mr. Riggio?

After bookstore chains used returnability to drive countless publishers to their knees? After bookstore chains employed returns to “buy” new books for little or no cash by dumping slow-moving stock on publishers’ doorsteps and using the credit as currency? After bookstore chains spurned remaindering in place because it was cheaper to send books back to publishers than develop creative solutions to the returns problem?

Mr. Riggio criticizes returns practices as “expensive.” Perhaps he means it’s become expensive for the chains now that publishers have been squeezed so ruthlessly they have nothing left to give. Has it begun to dawn on executives like Mr. Riggio that, as powerful as the chains may appear to be, they are just another brick and mortar operation doomed to disintermediation by the Digital Revolution?

So, now you want to end the consignment model of book distribution? Sorry, Mr. Riggio. The monster created by bookstore chains has the industry by the throat and will not let go. Returnability may be archaic, wasteful, stupid and fraudulent but publishers, bookstores and consumers are addicted and nobody is going to give it up. Not now, not ever.

You’re welcome to try to reform the old business, Mr. Riggio, but that’s no longer where the game is being played. While bookstore chains have battened on the consignment system, a new, virtually returns-free distribution model has arisen based on Internet fulfillment, prepaid orders printed on demand, and on e-books, a format that Mr. Riggio’s company abandoned years ago.

“Once a new technology starts rolling,” said Stewart Brand, “if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”

Seek a solution to returns? Be our guest, Mr. Riggio. But we have news for you: it’s too late. The steamroller has arrived.

– Richard Curtis

Pennsylvania is a bad news state for everyone on the campaign, from Barack Obama down to Reggie, Caroline, Chloe, and Kanesha. While the professional pols are desperate to spin Reverand Wright and Barack’s “Bitter” gaffe, and Hillary relentlessly plays the White Worker card, our cast is desperately seeking to uncover the spy in their midst, the one they’ve been calling “X”. Now that they know who it is, they discover there may also be a “Y”!

It’s not all bad. Kanesha enjoys an hour of majorly rough sex before dismissing her lover from her life. And Thomas, our gay narrator, is on the trail of a hot new attraction.

Despite a loss in Pennsylvania, Barack is moving inexorably to victory and The Faithful to its climax.

Check out Chapter Ten of The Faithful.

George Zebrowski’s vision extends to the farthest reaches of the known universe, and maybe beyond that. His work has garnered high praise from peers who reside on the Olympus of today’s science fiction world. Greg Bear calls him “one of those rare speculators who bases his dreams on science as well as inspiration.” And Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master James Gunn wrote, “Young people, all of us, need dreams to achieve the human potential. The kinds of habitats George Zebrowski describes may one day be the natural home of the human race and the kind of questing, hardworking young people he portrays may build them, if they have dreams to shape them around.”

Of Zebrowski’s Sunspacers Trilogy, Michael Bishop says, “In this thoughtful novel George Zebrowski has created a convincing future society that spans our entire solar system. Its evocation of the challenge and excitement of building an interdependent community of space habitats from hollowed-out asteroids is impressive, and I can easily imagine delighted young readers emerging from the story determined to make their lives count for something…Good science and an optimistic but far from simple-minded glimpse of a tomorrow that we might reasonably try to bring about.”

– Richard Curtis

A literary agent’s life involves far more than reading, lunching, and deal-making. Agents’ services embrace the literary, legal, financial, social, political, psychological, and even the spiritual; and the jobs they are obliged to tackle run the gamut from computer troubleshooting to espionage. But because our business is a day-to-day, book-to-book affair, we tend to lose perspective. With our preoccupation with advances and royalties, payout schedules and discounts, movie rights and foreign rights and serial rights and merchandise rights, with option clauses and agency clauses and acceptability clauses and termination clauses, it is all too easy for us to forget that our primary goal is to build careers, to take writers of raw talents, modest accomplishments, and unimpressive incomes and render them prosperous, successful, and emotionally fulfilled.

To read more, click here.

Jim Thompson is one of the world’s great masters of Noir fiction. He’s best known for his classic crime novel The Killer Inside Me and for several films based on his books, notably The Grifters.

In Savage Night, a handsome criminal named Carl Bigelow wants to bump off hoodlum Jake Winroy without making it look like a hit. Winroy’s gotta go because he’s going to turn state’s evidence on Carl’s boss. But there’s good news: Winroy’s beautiful wife is bored with the hood’s drunken behavior and yearns to become a widow. She also wouldn’t mind taking Carl for a lover. If Carl can whack Winroy and hang it on the dame, he can get away with murder.

Don’t be surprised if you end up rooting for the bad guys. Everybody does: That’s Jim Thompson’s genius.

– Richard Curtis