If you find yourself in the Hotel InterContinental up north this week and hear a bizarre, intermittent rattle coming from the second-floor ballroom, worry not. It’s not a rattlesnake handlers’ convention. It’s just the world’s best Scrabble players shaking for Qs and Us. That’s right: There’s a national championship of…
Writer Miroslav Penkov put out his first book this summer, East of the West: A Country in Stories, a collection of eight short stories set in his native Bulgaria. The culmination of several years of work, the book is a fine delivery on the promise Penkov has shown in his…
With the final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, steadily climbing the box office charts (earning more than $1 billion) and JK Rowling devising a virtual scavenger hunt for Pottermore, it’s only right for Potterheads to go bat-shit crazy with excitement during Harry Potter’s birthday. This year…
This is it, MOBCers. The final assignment of our first book club selection, Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts is, naturally, Part 7 and the Epilogue. Finish it by Friday, August 12, for another comments meeting at approximately 3:30 p.m. We had a good discussion Friday about the middle…
Welcome! We hope you snooped during our inaugural MOBC meeting two weeks ago and have decided to return, either to snoop again or, better yet, to join in the action. The reading assignment for this round was sections three through six of Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts. As…
I hadn’t heard about it until my sister texted me a few weeks back, “So excited about the new snuff film!!!” I read that three times before I dialed her number to tell her what a bad person she was. “Smurfs,” she texted me just before I was about to…
Every year, journalists, writers and readers gather at the Hilton DFW Lakes Executive Conference Center in Grapevine for the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. Dozens of influential and popular writers speak to the crowds, and attendees partake in writing workshops and contests. Observer writers Anna Merlan, Brantley Hargrove and Leslie Minora…
Located beneath the concrete silhouette of downtown, a lone figure rides a painted horse through a vibrant field of fresh and weathered graves. His glowing, amber eyes stand vigil against a threatening horizon overtaking the great American plains. Spanning the courtyard of the Double-Wide, the mural stands as a tribute…
I wrote a book that came out in June of 2008 called Open: Love, Sex, and Life in an Open Marriage. For the last three years, I’ve had the chance to read at all sorts of venues. I’ve read at Good Vibrations in San Francisco with a wall of dildos,…
After our inaugural MOBC meeting, or, rather live discussion in the comments, we looked back and felt pretty good. Unlike the vets over on Unfair Park, we were all fairly new to the live commenting scene, but once it began, the discussion was a flurry of replies, liked comments, expanded…
Dallas author David W. Menefee has written a new book that inspired his publisher enough to submit it for a Pulitzer Prize. It’s a long shot, sure. But with his unlikely career, he just might have a chance. Menefee, who was once a writer for the Dallas Morning News, has…
Welcome! As we said before, the first reading assignment for the first Mixmaster Online Book Club selection, Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, was the first two sections. Below, in the comments, please feel free to jump in with replies, questions, opinions, historical observations, etc. If you’re a reader,…
It’s officially Harry Potter Week. And, as you may have guessed, we’re totally celebrating. For those of us who have waited in line for countless hours to receive our copy of the latest Harry Potter book, wore our favorite house colors to a midnight movie premiere and even plastered a…
Get More: Movie Trailers, Movies BlogWinning free tickets to an advance-screening of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 days before the official release, really satisfies our inner geek. To get the tickets, we entered a contest and invented the curse, Basium Mupa, to disarm you know who by…
It’s Christmas in July for science-fiction and fantasy fans. In the coming weeks, both “American Tolkien” George R. R. Martin and urban fantasy master Jim Butcher will flood the market with new books for their respective series. Blogs are a-flutter with the news that a couple hundred copies of Martin’s…
Alamo Drafthouse’s Texas Monthly Rolling Roadshow has been kicking up dust around the Lone Star State for the last month, screening 10 Texas film gems in their locales of conception: Blood Simple in Austin, The Searchers in Groesbeck and No Country For Old Men in Marfa, etc. But the finale…
You came, you voted…and, yeah, you dissed a dead guy, a legendary musician and a cinematic smartass by quite a large measure, and an improv queen by notsomuch. At the close of the poll, historian Erik Larson beat the pack scoring a little over 40 percent of the total votes…
Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of the death of one of literature’s manliest men: Ernest Hemingway. About a month ago, author Marty Beckerman released his latest book, The Heming Way. I figured it might be a tribute until I read the subhead, How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy-Chested,…
Will you be joining the Mixmaster Online Book Club for its inaugural selection? Make sure you make your opinion known by voting for the book you want to read. As of right now, Erik Larson’s historical In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin…
“Accio Pottermore!” For a full week, hundreds of thousands of Potter Heads have uttered this command as they waited for the unveiling of JK Rowling’s website and wondered what it would actually be. The time finally came today. Pottermore is an exclusive interactive website for fans of all ages, and…
Most writers – even the successful ones – only fantasize about publishing a best-selling book, much less see their work translated onto the big screen by a team of Hollywood A-listers. Both happened to S.C. Gwynne, author of the wildly popular Empire of the Summer Moon. Gwynne spoke to an…
You there, with your Kindles, Nooks and bound sheets of paper. Would you join us? Would you read, along with us, books of the fictional and non-fictional, the popular and the possibly obscure?We’re starting a book club, see: The Mixmaster Book Club. Clever name, right?We’ll designate a portion of a…
