Joe Gores: 32 Cadillacs

32 Cadillacs opens with a preface in which Joe Gores claims that the bones of the titular scheme, in which hapless Bay Area dealerships are confidence-tricked out of a boatload of caddies, are rooted in his real-world repoman experiences. And he cautions the easily offended that they’ll find plenty of fodder, but that he can’t

Maureen Johnson: 13 Little Blue Envelopes

13 Little Blue Envelopes is tricky to write about while avoiding spoilers, but I found it satisfying, surprising, funny, and even insightful at times, and it almost entirely steers clear of opportunities to veer into sappiness. Protagonist Ginny is cast in the classic mode of A Wrinkle in Time‘s Meg: definitely older, but similarly clever,

Johan Harstad: 172 Hours on the Moon

I think I stumbled on Johan Harstad’s 172 Hours on the Moon when I was looking for John Barnes’ Losers in Space; both novels share the plot element of young people trying to get off of Earth to boost their social standing. Aside from that, they could scarcely be more different. In the alternate history

Lou Beach: 420 Characters

I expected that limiting the length of a short story to 420 characters — as counted by Facebook’s software, spaces and punctuation included — would come off as a gimmick rather than an artistic constraint, but this collection of a hundred and fiftyish micro-stories is pretty amazing, in several dimensions. The first thing I noticed

Jack Finney : 3 by Finney

This omnibus collection of 3 short novels is a case where a current re-reading failed to live up to the expectations set by the first time I encountered the book. The Woodrow Wilson Dime is an expansion/re-working of the short story “The Coin Collector” (featured in I Love Galesburg in the Springtime). I think it’s

Lee Irby: 7,000 Clams

I think the worst thing about becoming a baseball fan for me is getting infested by the magical thinking associated with the sport. This intricately-plotted, noirish crime novel features Babe Ruth (as a Yankee, in the 1925 offseason) and I found myself vaguely worried that reading it was somehow disloyal to my team. But there’s