Piccirilli; Edwards; Sallis

Two writers who are good friends of this blog have won major awards:

The International Thriller Writers Award for Best Paperback Original has gone to Tom Piccirilli for his novel The Midnight Road.

The UK Crime Writers have given the Short Story Dagger to Martin Edwards "The Bookbinder's Apprentice"


Congratulations!

-------Thomas Disch

Ed here: James Sallis his written an eloquent goodbye to his friend Tom Disch and in the course of it reminded all us scribblers what our chosen calling is really all abou.

"Outside the science fiction world, little notice seems to have been taken of Tom's death. Not that he fit at all comfortably in that world either, mind you. He was one of a kind, possessed of a particular, quirkily American genius, forever on the fence between the literary and the pulpish, poetry and fiction, realism and the fantastic, genteel and aggressive, uptown, downtown.

"He wrote some of the best short stories ever put to page. A lot of the best short stories ever put to page. And his novels, especially "Camp Concentration," "334" and "On Wings of Song," for their quality and their influence, merit a place among the classics of SF. Add reams of astute criticism, hundreds of poems, marvelous romps like "Black Alice."

"Making their way to the inmost chambers of caves, bypassing other interiors that seem to us just as suitable, our ancestors covered walls with their paintings. We've little idea what purposes (social? religious?) the chambers served, all those detailed renderings, those grand animals. But there in privacy a few invented, for us all, the entire vocabulary of our arts: image, narrative, celebration, form. They speak to us still: We were here. This is what we saw. This is how we experienced our world."

For the rest go here http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-tomdisch13-2008jul13,0,3532164.story