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     Volume 4 Issue 45 | May 6, 2005 |


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Books


Stephen King Specials

Faithful
Stewart O'Nan & Stephen King
Scribner; December 2004

A fan's notes for the ages, Faithful grew from an email exchange last summer. Filled with the heady mix of exhilaration and frustration familiar to all Boston Red Sox fans, Stewart O'Nan fired off a note to fellow Sox fan, Stephen King, who responded with his thoughts on Pedro, Nomar, Manny, Mueller, and Theo. Baseball history has transformed these fans into a "nation" not to mention the most dedicated, knowledgeable fanbase on the planet. Stewart O'Nan and Stephen King, proud members of Red Sox Nation, will chronicle the 2004 baseball season from spring training to the last game of the season the important plays, the controversial managerial decisions, the significant front office moves, and the spectacular finish (whether heartbreaking or joyous). Attending games together, keeping a running diary of observations and arguments, and occasionally evoking great or tragic events in Red Sox history. King and O'Nan will cheer on their beloved team with the eternal hope that this just might be the year. If you don't have season ticket box seats right behind the firstbase dugout, you can't beat Faithful.


From a Buick 8
Stephen King
Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group; September 2002

The state police of Troop D. in Statler, Pennsylvania, have kept the mysterious, vintage Buick Roadmaster caged in Shed B out in back of the barracks ever since 1979, when Troopers Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox answered a call about its driver gone missing from a gas station just down the road. Mostly it sleeps (that's one way of putting it, anyway), and over the years the troop has absorbed its mystery as part of the background to their work. But even as it sleeps, it breathesinhaling a little bit of this world, exhaling a little bit of whatever world it came from until the fateful day when its terrifying secrets are finally revealed.


Everything's Eventual
Stephen King
Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group; March 2002

The first collection of stories Stephen King has published since Nightmares & Dreamscapes nine years ago, Everything's Eventual includes one "O Henry Prize" winner, two other award winners, four stories published by The New Yorker, and "Riding the Bullet", one of the most appreciated short stories of King. "Riding the Bullet" is the story of Alan Parker, who's hitchhiking to see his dying mother but takes the wrong ride, farther than he ever intended. In "Lunch at the Gotham Cafe," a sparring couple's contentious lunch turns very, very bloody when the maitre d' gets out of sorts. "1408," the audio story in print for the first time, is about a successful writer whose specialty is "Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Graveyards" or "Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Houses," and though Room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel doesn't kill him, he won't be writing about ghosts anymore. And in "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French," terror is de-ja-vu at 16,000 feet. Whether writing about encounters with the dead, the near dead, or about the mundane dreads of life, from quitting smoking to yard sales, Stephen King is at the top of his form in the fourteen dark tales assembled in Everything's Eventual. Intense, eerie, and instantly compelling, they announce the stunningly fertile imagination of perhaps the greatest storyteller of our time.

(Source: ETC, Gulshan 1, Dhaka.)

Compiled by: Sanyat Sattar

 

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