Showing results by author "Lawrence Block" in All Categories

You might be surprised to learn that back in 1961 Nightstand Books published an inquiry into the heartbreak of scoliosis, but—oh, hang on a minute. You say the title refers to characters who are not spinally but psychosexually bent?Oh.Well, never mind.Dave and Nancy Grantland look for all the world like happy couple leading a comfortable suburban lifestyle. And Lucy King, the regular babysitter for the Gavilans next door, looks for all the world like a normal teenager.But Dave’s lost interest in sex with his wife, as he increasingly becomes obsessed with the desire for a much younger ...

Lawrence Block reports: “THE SIN-DAMNED was one of the early Andrew Shaw titles, published by Nightstand Books in sometime in 1960. The cover, like that of many of its contemporaries, is the work of Harold W. McCauley. “While I can recognize the text as my work, I can’t claim to recall writing it. Every day the great hoard of things I don’t remember grows incrementally larger, and writing this novel has long since been a part of it. I do know, though, that someone else supplied the title, probably some editor in publisher Bill Hamling’s employ. It could have been Harlan Elison, or...

Lawrence Block remembers: “Sexpot! was my sixth book for Nightstand, my sixth as Andrew Shaw. Aside from admiring Harold W. McCauley’s cover—and isn't it a perfect example of what it is?—I can’t say I ever really looked at the book after I’d gathered the pages of typescript together, hailed a taxi, and hand-delivered them to my agent at 580 Fifth Avenue. “Or did I put them in the mail? It depends whether I wrote Sexpot! before the spring of 1960, while I was living on Starin Avenue in Buffalo, or later, after I’d married and moved to 110 West 69th Street in New York. ...

Lawrence Block writes: “As a prelude to the process of republishing The Wife-Swappers, I Googled my way to a textual analysis of Andrew Shaw titles by Lynn Munroe, perhaps the leading scholar of Midcentury Erotica. He says of this particular novel, ‘Perhaps the worst-written of the early Shaws (which is saying it's almost unreadable)…’ “I’m not sure it’s terribly wise of me to quote this observation as a way of introducing a book I’d presumably like you to buy. I have a feeling Lynn’s judgment may have been a little harsh, but maybe not. “Regardless, the literary merit ...

During the 1970’s, John Warren Wells chronicled the seismic shift in human behavior which has come to be known as the Sexual Revolution. His monthly column in Swank Magazine brought no end of letters; he replied to everyone who wrote, and ihterviewed many of his correspondents by mail or, often, in person. All of the letters were interesting. Some were extraordinary. The most outrageous found their way into Beyond Group Sex. Here’s the publisher’s blurb: “They all do their own thing! “Katherine, a beautiful woman who finds release in watching other couples...Grant, a minister who ...

Keller ist ein Killer. Durch und durch Profi, cool, selbstsicher, kompetent, zuverlässig. Aber er ist auch eine vielschichtige Persönlichkeit: in sich gekehrt und zurückgezogen, eiskalt und gnadenlos effizient, aber zugleich anfällig für Selbstzweifel und Einsamkeit, Albträume und Zukunftssorgen. Seinem Therapeuten gegenüber gibt er sich als "Troubleshooter" eines großen Unternehmens aus, aber sein eigentliches Metier ist Mord.

In A Woman Must Love, Barbara, a young widow, has vowed to be true to her husband’s memory (even though he’d wished otherwise). She’s courted, and she has a couple of adventures.

The crime fiction canopy's a broad one, with room to give shelter to writing of all sorts, as editor Lawrence Block shows with At Home in the Dark.

In Thirty, the novel pretended to be a diary. That worked fine, and the resultant narrative proved at once challenging and effortless to sustain. I enjoyed writing it, Berkley enjoyed publishing it - and they wanted something else. What they got in Threesome was a novel pretending to be a novel. The premise, as you’ll see, is that the book has been written by its three main characters, Harry and Rhoda and Priss, in the form of a lightly fictionalized chronicle of their own life as a menage a trois.

Karen Winslow is starting over. But she's not sure how to move forward when her deepest secret haunts her and keeps her from enjoying her carefree youth. She's a sweet but troubled young thing, and not until she meets Rae, a confident young lesbian, does she realize what she's been missing. Meanwhile, she's also intrigued by a man and can't help but wonder if a normal life will put an end her sorrows for good.

THOSE BOYS AND THEIR CARS… Danny Duncan drives his father’s Oldsmobile. It's a nice respectable family sedan, and April North is every bit as respectable as the car. Until he manages to get her into the back seat. Now she's no longer a good girl, but only Danny know it, and he can keep a secret, can’t he? Well, no. He tells half the town of Antrim, Ohio—the male half, and they all come sniffing around, led by Bill Piersall, driving a homemade hot rod cobbled together from spare parts and held together with spit and baling wire. She gives Bill what he wants, but he turns out to be ...

Lawrence Block on AFTERTHOUGHTS 2.0: AFTERTHOUGHTS began in 2011, when I first began self-publishing titles from my voluminous backlist. I packed it with forewords and afterwords and essays and articles about the work, and arranged for its distribution as an ebook. Here's wwhat the publisher had to day about it at the time: "In a career spanning more than fifty years, Lawrence Block has produced more than one hundred books, ranging in genre from hard-boiled detective stories to pseudonymous erotica. Collected here for the first time are more than forty-five afterwords from the works that ...

The Sexual Revolution is Here! From the introduction by Benjamin Morse, MD: "As John Warren Wells points out, the past decade has witnessed the triumph of the sexual revolution. With the bedroom as the battlefield, and with scarcely a shot fired in anger, we have in uncountable ways revised our manners of thinking and acting about intercourse (premarital and plain marital), homosexuality (male and female), and those forms of behavior which in turn have been called perversion, deviations, and preferences... "In an extreme example of reportorial honesty, Wells manages to convey more ...

Turning 29 years old, Janet Giddings Kurland starts a journal and records her comfortably routine suburban lifestyle. But when she rolls the dice with her friend's husband, she starts down a path that will lead her to the hip streets of Greenwich Village. Amidst the sexually free, Janet blossoms and her housewife's journal turns into a sex diary filled with unexpected encounters, dangerous partners, and drug-fueled sexual escapades.

After spending her girlhood writing gentle and thoughtful novels of the lesbian experience (Shadows, Warm and Willing, Enough of Sorrow), Jill Emerson reinvented herself in the early 1970s, just when contemporary literature was experiencing an enormous flowering of sexuality.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to Born to Be Bad and experience the compelling world of erotica.

O Rose thou art sick. /The invisible worm, /That flies in the night /In the howling storm: /Has found out thy bed /Of crimson joy: /And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy. Those eight lines constitute the complete text of “The Sick Rose,” published by William Blake in Songs of Experience in 1794. I took to Blake early on, and thought Of Crimson Joy would make a dandy title. I accordingly fastened it on this novel when I sent the manuscript to Harry Shorten at Midwood.

Being single no longer means being alone! Today all America is turning into a Singles Society. Men and women alike are discovering that traditional marriage no longer satisfies their need to live a full life--especially in regard to sex. Never before have so many people been so open to seeking sensual fulfillment without legal entanglements or extraneous emotional trappings. This is what this book is all about. In it you will discover how different men and women crossed the line from being married to being single, from being square to swinging all the way, and have never life or love more ...

One morning in the spring of 1958 I woke up in my room at the Hotel Alexandria with a paralyzing hangover (which was not unusual) and an idea for a book (which was). I sat in front of my typewriter, and within a few hours I had produced a chapter-by-chapter outline of a novel. I had all the characters sketched out and knew how they'd relate to one another, and how the rather elementary storyline would resolve itself. I even had a title: Shadows.

When we first met Kit Tolliver, in “If You Can’t Stand the Heat,” we didn’t know her name. She walked into a bar in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, where a slightly sinister gentleman picked her up, took her home, and took her to bed. She had a good time. Then she killed him, took his money, and went on her way. In her fourth appearance, “Clean Slate,” we found out more about Kit. Her name, and how she got this way. And she in turn finds her mission in life. There were five men who slept with her and lived to tell the tale, and she’s determined to hunt them down and wipe them ...