Wednesday, March 11, 2020

New novel by Scott Phillips

By Steve Weddle

Scott Phillips has a new book out & Jedidiah Ayres invited some very talented people and me over to Hardboiled Wonderland to say some things.

A few decades back, I was in Kansas, researching the works of Luigi Pirandello and Eugène Ionesco in a cavernous bookstore I’d eventually be banned from. The bookstore, suitably dark and musty with a wonderful loft that hid cheap Penguin paperbacks, opened in 1988 just off Pittsburg’s main drag, Highway 69. My girlfriend (now wife) and I took poet Henry Taylor there when he visited the university and asked us to help his search for unusual dictionaries. At the time, my money was split among rent, books, and, for a reason that escapes me now, mail-order cigars. When the duplex I was renting got too cold one winter, the woman at the Salvation Army in town gave me busted electric blankets that no one else wanted. I nailed them up along each wall, like you would in a drafty castle that had fallen intro disrepair when your mad uncle died. The draftiest wall was floor to ceiling with books, shelved on planks and cinderblocks. Most of the books had come from the Pittsburg bookstore, Mostly Books.
More at Hardboiled Wonderland

Scott Phillips

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