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1 month ago | 
the-line-up.com | Orrin Grey
In 1981, the Berlin Wall still symbolically separated East and West Germany, as the country had been divided since the end of World War II. In March of that year, in the city of Lubeck in what was then West Germany, a 30-year-old mother walked into a courtroom with a Beretta and fired seven shots into the back of Klaus Grabowski as he stood trial for the rape and murder of her 7-year-old daughter, Anna.
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1 month ago | 
theportalist.com | Orrin Grey
I host a monthly horror movie film series at a local micro-cinema in Kansas City called the Stray Cat Film Center, and one of the most infamous films we ever screened there was 1957 monster movie classic The Monolith Monsters. This is not because The Monolith Monsters is especially good (it’s pretty good) and definitely not because it is particularly shocking or graphic or boundary-pushing. It’s because the eponymous monsters in The Monolith Monsters are… just rocks.
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1 month ago | 
earlybirdbooks.com | Orrin Grey |Ron Hansen |Sandrine Collette |Cameron Judd
Many readers will tell you that there’s no other writer quite like Cormac McCarthy, and few of his books are as infamous as Blood Meridian. Harold Bloom called it “not only the ultimate Western [but] the ultimate dark dramatization of violence,” while The New York Times wrote that the novel “comes at the reader like a slap in the face.”Filled with brutal violence and surreal lyricism, Blood Meridian is undeniably a tough act to follow.
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1 month ago | 
earlybirdbooks.com | Orrin Grey |Dorothy Davis |Jeffrey Archer |Dorothy L. Sayers
When we think of great mystery stories, our minds tend to go to the many, many mystery novels packed on the shelves of bookstores, libraries, and probably our own homes.
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2 months ago | 
earlybirdbooks.com | Orrin Grey |Jonathan Starr |Booker T. Washington |David Means
Tara Westover was raised in isolation and homeschooled by her survivalist Mormon parents in Buck’s Peak, Idaho. At the age of 17, with no formal education, she started college at Brigham Young University, eventually studying abroad and completing a PhD in history from Cambridge.
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2 months ago | 
the-line-up.com | Orrin Grey
It was an October night in 1928 when a patrolling police officer found a man lying face down near the Fountain Gate of London’s Hyde Park. The man was an unemployed, 28-year-old Welsh carpenter named Robert Williams, and he was bleeding from an apparently self-inflicted wound in his neck, a bloody razor on the ground nearby. As the patrolman bent to offer aid, however, Williams made an utterance that added a chilling new dimension to the already grisly tableau.
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Feb 14, 2025 | 
unwinnable.com | Orrin Grey
I see board games in the store and they always look so cool and then I buy them and bring them home, I’m so excited to open them, and then I play them, like, twice… This column is dedicated to the love of games for those of us whose eyes may be bigger than our stomachs when it comes to playing, and the joy that we can all take from games, even if we don’t play them very often. ———I’ve mentioned before that King of Tokyo is probably my favorite board game of all time.
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Feb 10, 2025 | 
earlybirdbooks.com | Orrin Grey |Catherine Aird
Inducted into the prestigious Detection Club originally formed by such luminaries of the field as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Hugh Walpole, and G. K. Chesterton, Catherine Aird found a place among their number with her popular and long-running mystery series of Calleshire Chronicles books, set in the fictional county of Calleshire in England. Also known as the Sloan & Crosby series, it is “not to be missed by lovers of a good mystery” (Moray Council Public Library Newsletter).
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Jan 29, 2025 | 
unwinnable.com | Orrin Grey
This feature is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #183. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price. ———This series of articles is made possible through the generous sponsorship of Exalted Funeral. While Exalted Funeral puts us in touch with our subjects, they have no input or approval in the final story.
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
theportalist.com | Orrin Grey |Guy Gavriel Kay
Canadian fantasist Guy Gavriel Kay got his start in the world of literary fantasy under perhaps the most auspicious circumstances imaginable—he was personally picked by Christopher Tolkien to travel to Oxford in 1974 and help to edit J. R. R. Tolkien’s unpublished works, including The Silmarillion.
