In honor of a new Veronica Mars season hitting Hulu, Literary Hub lists “11 Books to Read if You’re an Adult Who Loves Veronica Mars”. The list includes Generation Loss alongside works from Tana French, Sue Grafton, and Shirley Jackson.
If you wish Veronica were actually punk, and not just Neptune punk, you may just fall for Cass Neary, a skilled photographer in the 1970s New York music scene who bottoms out and, years later, finds herself investigating a murder.
Writer Michael T. Fournier interviewed Liz for punk zine Razorcake’s Paging All Punks, “a new series focused on interviews with writers about their involvement in the punk scene.” Their conversation touches on Liz’s involvement in the New York City and Washington, DC punk scenes, punk’s influence on her life and writing, jobs, being poor, Maine, and lots inbetween.
…I was in awe of Legs [McNeil] and John Holmstrom. I had no conception that they were just a couple of kids my age who were doing this DIY thing in a storefront. It’s very weird. I look at myself back then, and I didn’t, for whatever reason—maybe because I wanted to be a “writer,” a quote unquote writer, writing books that would be published by a publisher, or getting published in The New Yorker, you know what I mean? I had this fantasy that’s the kind of writer I was going to be.
Or I wanted to be Lester Bangs. I really wanted to be a rock critic. I had no conception of how to do it. I don’t know if it’s because I was a young woman, you know? Or because I didn’t know other people who were doing it. I knew musicians, people in bands who were performers, but I didn’t know other kinds of makers. I guess I wasn’t confident enough to put myself out there with writing.
Did you miss out on ReaderCon this past July? Lucky for you, writer Scott Edelman was on hand to record Liz Hand reading from her upcoming novel, Curious Toys.
In honor of the impending release of Midsommar—director Ari Aster’s follow-up to Hereditary—Nightmare Fuel, a dark lit newsletter by Tor senior marketing manager Emily Hughes, has included Wylding Hall in a list of best folk horror.
Hall appears alongside Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney, Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home, and Kai Ashante Wilson’s The Devil in America.
The book is written as an oral history, a series of interviews with the surviving band members, their manager, and a journalist who profiled the band that summer, which I love as a narrative choice, because you’re immediately plunged into a plethora of narrators of varying degrees of unreliability. Add that to the fact that the interviews are taking place forty years after the events of the story, and you’ve got a nice haze of uncertainty over what actually happened at Wylding Hall.
You can read the entire newsletter over at Nightmare Fuel on Substack, and subscribe to receive future editions (it’s free!).
Enter to win an advanced reader’s copy of Curious Toys, Elizabeth Hand’s upcoming historical mystery, over at GoodReads.
Mulholland Books is giving away 50 copies. The giveaway ends May 24, so get your entry in now!
Curious Toys will be released on October 15, 2019.
Lisa Levy of Crime Reads has assembled a list of canon texts for what she coins "Hipster Mystery” (or “hipstery”)—crime novels featuring “hipster” characters (are they in a band? were they in a band? do they wear band t-shirts?) or set in notoriously hipster scenes or cities and neighborhoods (Brookyln, East Village, London).
Levy includes the Cass Neary Crime Novels in her canon, citing Cass’s gritty, punk aesthetic, and the scenes Cass finds herself moving through:
In her adventures we not only see underground NYC but the speed metal culture of Scandinavia and Iceland, a 1960s communal Maine idyll gone wrong, and the dank basement clubs of contemporary London.
You can read the entire article over at Crime Reads.
Elizabeth joined the crew at the This Is Horror Podcast to discuss her first experiences with story, writers that had an effect on her, the punk scene’s influence on her writing, Wylding Hall, PS Publishing—the famous U.K. indie genre publisher—and much more. The interview is split into two parts:
TIH 273: Elizabeth Hand on Creative Writing, Life Lessons, and the Seventies Punk Scene
Elizabeth will be a guest at ReaderCon 30, taking place at the Quincy Marriott in Quincy, Massachusetts, July 11-14, 2019. She will be giving a talk titled Henry Darger: Inside America's Best-Known "Outsider" Artist, who is featured in her upcoming novel, Curious Toys.
ReaderCon is a convention devoted solely to imaginative literature. Elizabeth was formerly Guest of Honor at ReaderCon 20. The convention also hosts the Shirley Jackson Awards, recognizing outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. (Elizabeth has won the award three times.)
For more information on scheduled guests, panel programming, and event registration, visit the ReaderCon website.