Title: Crazy Author: William Peter Blatty File Type: Mobi Subject:Fiction:Humor Description:FromSassy humor and gentle nostalgia is the surprisingly effective combination employed by Blatty, master of the horror genre and the author of The Exorcist, in this fond look back at 1940s- era New York. As 80-year-old Joey El Bueno begins his memoirs while a patient at Bellevue Hospital, he introduces his adolescent alter ego, a wisecracking Peruvian-Irish kid with an affinity for driving the staff at St. Stephen’s Grammar School batty. But the nuns aren’t the only ones going a little crazy you see, lately Joey has struck up a friendship with a girl no one else seems to have seen or heard of, and Joey himself seems to know about things before they have happened. As readers attempt to puzzle out whether Joey has a fractured psyche or has broken through the time-space continuum, they will be treated to an entertaining romp through the Lower East Side conducted by an inimitable tour guide. --Margaret Flanagan Review“A superbly executed blend of  tenderness and satire that comes to a powerful and emotional crescendo, Crazy is a marvelous work of fiction that cements Blatty’s place of honor among great American authors.” -- Fears MagazinestrongFrom the Washington Poststrong_ Reviewed by novelist Elizabeth Hand_ Its hard to believe, but local horror meister William Peter Blatty once had a booming career as a funny guy. In addition to his comic novels, he worked with Blake Edwards on several films, including A Shot in the Dark, the second Inspector Clouseau movie he loved P.G. Wodehouse and he was even compared to S.J. Perelman. All this came before those looming steps in Georgetown forever linked Blatty with his best-known work, The Exorcist (1971). Which makes his new novel, Crazy, a return to form. Its a sweet-natured, often hilarious tale cast as the memoirs of an 82-year-old former screenwriter named Joey El Bueno. Joeys writing from a 10th-floor room at Bellevue Hospital, where the usually suspicious Nurse Bloor doesnt raise an eyebrow at his laptop because she has read Archy and Mehitabel and knows that sometimes even a rat can type. Joey is the son of an Irish beauty who died giving birth to him and an impoverished Peruvian immigrant who made his living pushing a hot dog cart. Joeys memoir takes us back to the year he was a seventh-grader at St. Stephens, on Manhattans Lower East Side, in 1941. Thats where he first meets Jane Bent, a street-smart, foul-mouthed transfer student from Our Lady of Sorrows. At first, Joey finds her nuttier than a truckload of filberts, but that changes when Jane flashes a $5 bill and suggests an afternoon at the movies. Many hours and three screenings of Gunga Din later, the two seem to have become an inseparable pair. Then they part, and Joey never sees her again. Not that Jane, anyway. I wont say more lest I spoil the pleasures of this lovely, time-shifting novel, which evokes a lost New York complete with a school excursion to Coney Island and side trips to The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Its like a classic Jean Shepherd anecdote with supernatural overtones. Blatty also cites Ray Bradbury and Robert Nathan as influences, and Crazy more than once invokes Kurt Vonnegut. Joeys memoir favors run-on sentences with a comedic payoff There was a breeze and these jillions of gulls all circling and squawking forlornly but with great agitation and high excitement as if they were in factions that were blaming one another for the loss of some unspoiled world, some paradise where every automobile was a convertible and where hats and awnings did not exist. Blatty has always been upfront about his Catholic faith. The opening of The Exorcist evokes Lucifer upward-groping back to his God, and Crazys poignant final pages make clear that, rather than an exercise in nostalgia, this novel is a reminder of Saint Pauls command, While we have time, let us do good. Or, as Joey puts it, What would Kurt Vonnegut do? _Hands most recent novel is Illyria. __Crazy _is terrific! A wonderful novel funny, touching and SO full of love!--Julie Andrews “Crazy left me with a smile on my face and a tear in my eye.”-- _Dread Central “With its wildly creative and humorous scenarios, Crazy is wise and witty, funny and sad. It’s a story of good and evil, of second chances, of coming to peace at the end of the road and welcoming the unknown.” --bookreporter.com “_There’s a certain vaudevillian flair to all of Blatty’s  work, but it’s the sort of vaudeville that powers the absurdist despair of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot one-liners and gags are just another way to deal with the inevitability of death. The difference is, there’s a core of faith and optimism at the heart of Blatty’s writing. Horror exists, as do evil and the monsters who perpetrate it, but there’s also God in his heaven, purpose, and at least the possibility of justice._” –-A.V. CLUB _

Title: Against a Dark Background Author: Iain M. Banks File Type: Mobi Subject:Science-Fiction Description:From Library JournalOn the run from a cult of intergalactic religious fanatics who want her death, the Lady Sharrow emerges from retirement to seek out a powerful artifact that may save her life--the legendary Lady Gun, a weapon that kills by altering the reality around it. The author of Consider Phlebas ( LJ 51588) and The Player of Games ( LJ 21589) has constructed a richly hued, far-future tapestry for his latest space adventure. Sophisticated prose, complex characters, and an unbridled imagination combine in this tale of high drama and intrigue. A good choice for most libraries. 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Sharrow was once the leader of a personality-attuned combat team in one of the sporadic little commercial wars in the civilization based around the planet Golter. Now she is hunted by the Huhsz, a religious cult which believes that she is the last obstacle before the faith's apotheosis, and her only hope of escape is to find the last of the apocalyptically powerful Lazy Guns before the Huhsz find her. Her journey through the exotic Golterian system is a destructive and savage odyssey into her past, and that of her family and of the system itself.