Oh, now this looks good.  From the back cover:

Hallucinatory and darkly comic, these tales of paranoia, pursuit, sensory deprivation, amnesia and retribution [sounds like my life, says Dissident Books editor Nicholas Towasser] rattle the cages of the psyche.  And through the illustrations of graphic novelist Zak Sally, this unsettling world is brought to life.

From sadistic bosses with secret fears to a woman trapped in a mime’s imaginary box, and from a post-apocalyptic misidentified messiah to unwitting portraitits of the dead, Brian Evenson’s mind-bending fiction peers fearlessly into the shadows.

You better believe I’m looking foward to reading this!   Sounds like this generation’s H.  P.  Lovecraft!  And Sally’s illustrations are excellent.  See http://www.amazon.com/Fugue-State-Brian-Evenson/dp/1566892252 and http://www.brianevenson.com/fugue.html

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong by Terry Teachout, $30, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  Terry Teachout is one cool guy.  He wrote a The Skeptic, great bio of Mencken, and was kind enough to pen some words of praise for the back cover of Notes on Democracy:  A New Edition.  I caught him at his autograph signing and gave him three copies of Notes plus a copy of Don’t Call Me a Crook!  Did I ask him to sign a Pops ARC?  You better believe I did.  And I’m looking forward to reading it.  See http://www.amazon.com/Pops-Louis-Armstrong-Terry-Teachout/dp/0151010897 and http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/

Undone by Karin Slaughter, US$26/CAN$30, Delacorte Press

The opening caught my attention:

They had been married forty years to the day and Judith still felt like she didn’t know everything about her husband.  Forty years of cooking Henry’s dinner, forty years of ironing his shirts, forty years of sleeping in his bed, and he was still a mystery.  Maybe that was why she kept doing all these things for him with little or no complaint.  There was a lot to be said for a man who, after forty years, still managed to hold your attention.

I’m reminded a line from from Henry Hill’s wife in Goodfellas:  “All the other girls would’ve gotten outta there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn’t. I have to admit, it turned me on.”  This is a sequel to Slaughter’s Faithless and Fractured.  See http://www.amazon.com/Undone-Grant-County-Karin-Slaughter/dp/0385341962 and http://www.karinslaughter.com/undone.shtml.

The Official Heavy Metal Book of Listsby Eric Danville, illustrations by Cliff Mott, and foreward by Lemmy, US$19.95, BackBeat Books, release date September 2009.  I met Eric at the booth of his publisher, Backbeat Books.  He was wearing a “Venom/Welcome to Hell” tee-shirt and I immediately exclaimed “Great band!  Great album!”  Eric is a wonderful conversationalist about all things metallic.  And his book?  It’s fantastic!  Who can resist a tome with entries like “Rock Bottom: Metalheads Arrested for Being Drunk in Public,” “The Song Retains The Name: 15 Unusual Metal Cover Bands” (I especially like “Cookie Mongoloid,” a band that plays speed metal versions of Sesame Street songs), and “Phil Campbell of Motorhead’s List of Six Things You’ll Never See in a Motorhead Dressing Room” (No. 1:  ”A coffee machine.”)  See http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0879309830 and http://www.myspace.com/theheavymetalbookoflists.

Torture at the Back Forty: The Gang Rape and Slaying of Margaret Anderson, by Mike Dauplaise, $12.95, TitletTown Publishing LLC, released dated August 7, 2009 and Run at Destruction: A True Fatal Love Triangle by Lynda Drews, $15.95, TitleTown Publishing LLC  I met Tracy C. Ertl, publisher of true-crime house TitleTown, at the booth of our mutual distributor, Midpoint Trade Books.  She and I immediatley hit it off.  We agreed that readers of Don’t Call Me a Crook! A Scotsman’s Tale of World Travel, Whisky, and Crime should know about TitleTown’s offerings and vice versa.  I gave Tracy a copy of Don’t Call Me a Crook! and she passed to me a Torture at the Back Forty sampler and a finished copy of Run at Destruction.  They both look like very intense books.  Torture in particular looks harrowing:

The true story of the murder of Margaret Anderson, raped on a pool table and left for dead on a manure pile.  Though nearly beheaded, the single mother fought hard for her life, but in the end Margaret died….  Author Mike Dauplaise practically makes the reader feel Margaret’s breath as he recreates the night she was killed….  Dauplaise even interviewed Margaret Anderson’s convicted killer, and exposes the motorcycle-gang culture of the 1980s to reveal what was done to Margaret….

Run at Destruction seems to offer a similarly intimate, horrifying read.  Pam and Bob Bulik were teachers and long-distance runners.  Bob began an affair.   Pam ended up dead.   The book is penned by her best friend.  See http://titletownpublishing.com/shop/article_3/Torture-at-the-Back-Forty.html?shop_param=cid%3D3%26aid%3D3%26 and http://titletownpublishing.com/shop/article_4/Run-at-Destruction.html?shop_param=cid%3D3%26aid%3D4%26

Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mobby Jeff Coen, US24.95/CAN27.95  I was so jazzed Chicago Review Press gave me a copy of this Sunday afternoon.  As someone who loves Chicago and is fascinated by crooks, this book beckoned to me like a painted woman to a sailor on leave after a two-month voyage.  Or something like that.  From the front flap:

Even in Chicago, a city steeped in mob history and legend, the Family Secrets case was a true spectacle when it made it to court in 2007.  A top mob boss, a reputed consigliere, and other high-profile members of the Chicago Outfit were accused in a total of eighteen gangland killings, revealing organized crime’s ruthless grip on the city throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Painting a vivid picture of murder, courtroom drama, and family loyalties and disloyalties, journalist Jeff Coen accurately portrays the Chicago Outfit’s cold-blooded–and sometimes incompetent–killers and their crimes in the case that brought them down.

Sounds fascinating.  As some of you might know, Bob Moore, author of Don’t Call Me a Crook!, spent a lot of time in Chicago in the 1920s, and speaks about gangsters and the city’s rampant crime.  He even spots Al Capone’s car escorted by two “speed cops” to clear the way for the great man! 

See:  http://www.amazon.com/Family-Secrets-Case-Crippled-Chicago/dp/1556527810/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244078423&sr=1-1 and http://chicagoist.com/2009/05/19/interview_the_tribunes_jeff_coen_re.php