In Decatur tonight, "Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter": author Tom Franklin

Tom Franklin appears tonight at the Decatur (GA) Library to talk about his third book, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (Harper/Collins), a mystery set in the 1970s that is also nominated for this year's Edgar Award.

One review commented that literary novelists are tiny rowboats next to the ocean liners of popular fiction; the story of Larry and Silas and the unraveling of a murder in rural Mississippi is more of a gothic spellbinder than a pulp potboiler. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is a southern crime novel that seems more appreciated with tall glasses of iced tea than shots of bourbon. Here's an excerpt that sets the story's novelistic tone. For more information about Franklin and tonight's appearance beginning at 7:15 p.m. contact the Georgia Center for the Book.

The Rutherford girl had been missing for eight days when Larry Ott returned home and found a monster waiting in his house.

It'd stormed the night before over much of the Southeast, flash floods on the news, trees snapped in half and pictures of trailer homes twisted apart. Larry, forty-one years old and single, lived alone in rural Mississippi in his parents' house, which was now his house, though he couldn't bring himself to think of it that way. He acted more like a curator, keeping the rooms clean, answering the mail and paying bills, turning on the television at the right times and smiling with the laugh tracks, eating his McDonald's or Kentucky Fried Chicken to what the networks presented him and then sitting on his front porch as the day bled out of the trees across the field and night settled in, each different, each the same.

Tom Franklin

It was early September. That morning he'd stood on the porch, holding a cup of coffee, already sweating a little as he gazed out at the glistening front yard, his muddy driveway, the bobwire fence, the sodden green field beyond studded with thistle, goldenrod, blue salvia, and honeysuckle at the far edges, where the woods began. It was a mile to his nearest neighbor and another to the crossroads store, closed for years.

At the edge of the porch several ferns hung from the eave, his mother's wind chime lodged in one like a flung puppet. He set the coffee on the rail and went to disentangle the chime's slender pipes from the leaves ...

"Any Day Now": Bowie, facing those strange ch-ch-ch-changes

For those who enjoy tripping down rock's memory lane, David Bowie (...remember him?) now gets the ultra-glam treatment in a coffee-table slab of his own. Any Day Now: David Bowie The London Years 1947-1974 (Adelita Publishers) is an eye-popping collection of memorabilia (and a memento of a gallery show) that should remind readers of a certain age that the '70s -- in the UK, at least -- certainly seemed ... well, a bit more colorful than here in the drab, Nixon-browed USA at the time.

Bowie has always been a smart businessman -- he was the first to offer a stock offering in his musical back catalog -- and it seems only natural at this point to expect the Diamond Dog to approve this extravagant look back in mascara at the early years.

The parade of pictures shows The Thin White Duke in his many transformations from Maidstone folkie to Ziggy space case. The resulting tumble of images is a great laugh or a serious head-scratching case of pop remorse ... sometimes on the same page. Lady Gaga's got nothin' on this Aladdin Sane.

Bowie, au-courant, by Kenneth Pitt (1969)

340 pages, 850 images, pull-outs, signed glossies, concert tickets, lipstick traces: if you're interested in Bowie's history, you can read between the promo shots, coy backstage glances, and space-age album-cover art. Author Kevin Cann has put together all the details, as well as "the most concise listing of Bowie performances ever published," according to the Guardian UK.

At a length of 140,000 words, there's not much more to be read about Bowie's UK years. One must admit it was a nice gesture on Bowie's part to ask Dudley Moore to add piano to Hunky Dory, though. (Moore declined.)

Pin-up boy: Bowie by Terry O'Neill (1973)

But if a picture is worth a thousand words, then the price of the book (£24.99 for the no-frills paperback, £175.00 for the all-you-can-collect limited edition of 450 signed and numbered copies) is a bargain. A history stopping at 1974, when Bowie left the UK for his Stateside dukedom, should give the collector and his wallet pause: If you have any quid left over from buying this book of ch-ch-ch-changes, better start saving it for Bowie, vol. 2.

"Kindle, registered trademark" (M Bromberg)

"Kindle, registered trademark"
M Bromberg



"In the time it takes to skim the bestseller list
you can wirelessly download an entire book."

That's an ad for the Kindle

and the Kindle 3G, registered trademark,
on page 20 of the NYT Sunday Book Review

of Feb 20 2011.

The tagline for the Kindle

describes my own self
ten years previous: "Smaller! Lighter! Faster!"

but the ad makes me pause. I re-assess

my own reading brain
in its process: "Heavier ... leakier ... slower."

I appear to be letting more things in,

the older I become,
in the hopes that more ideas will stay put.

I read entire books, page by page,
turning the pages slower and slower than I used to.

My brain

wirelessly downloads in the curious reactions

of synapse and nerve.
I enjoy the texture of the printed page

between my fingers,

the ink that still rubs off newsprint at the library
and leaves fingerprint smudges

on the cover of my mac:

the inky identifier that marks me

as a print reader, still.

I begin to notice more and more books in the library
with their broken spines and torn covers,

the plastic ripped,

as if they were buildings in the process of falling apart
and ideas being let loose

from their windows of unbound pages.

No threat of the Kindle doing that.

Its screen will only be blank
when it fails: you won't be able to read

a single downloaded word,

the ones and zeroes will be as indecipherable

as dead language.

My mind still downloads entire books, page by page.

It's taking longer, slower, and occasionally

I trace a word with my finger, in awe

of a meaning I am not certain of. I am reading,

not simply accessing, not scanning,

not storing information

to be tabulated and graphed.

Let the web be the great guardian of books:

the exact phrase and the precise paragraph,

the comma and the quotation-mark.

The Kindle, of registered trademark and sleek design,
will give you the Dialogues of Plato, Reagan's speeches,

quantify the Adventures of Superman

and Martin Luther King, Jr.,
encyclopedize both Hoagy and Stokely Carmichael,

download Einstein in an instant.

Facts are dead as tombs;an idea is still not responsible for what happens to it.


I read with all the faults that flesh is heir to. 
The Kindle can remember a million books 


with its infinite ones-and-zeroes, but has it ever actually read one?

"Kindle, registered trademark" is previously unpublished. M Bromberg's poetry is currently featured online in Big Bridge magazine (San Francisco) and he is at work on a chapbook of original poems.