So to celebrate my love for these two things, I have created two boards on Quora to collect great content from that site and elsewhere on the Internet (including mine) related to the works of Stephen King and the Coen Brothers. They are Kooky Stephen King and Why I Love the Coen Brothers. Please visit.

On a perfectly ordinary day in October, with no warning, millions of people around the world simply disappear. They come from all backgrounds, ethnicities, ages, religions. They are parents, spouses, children, friends. They are gone, with no explanation, and the question is: How do the people who are left behind — the “leftovers” — deal with it?

This is the premise of Tom Perrotta’s new novel. The setting is a small suburban New England town. The principal characters are people many of us would recognize, ordinary people. By getting into their heads, Perrotta explores each person’s reaction to this apparently random, unexplainable event, while following the course of their lives afterward.

Read the rest of my Book Review of The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta at Blogcritics Books.

Image by Laughing Squid via Flickr

Zombies. They never, ever go away. Why do we keep making movies and writing books about zombies? There’s not a lot of character development you can do with them, unlike vampires,  for instance. They only have one motivation. Perhaps it’s because the post-modern state is feeling like you’re surrounded by zombies. How else to explain the Republican primary process?

Let’s start the morning off with some zombies:

• How to survive the Zombie apocalypse using science (Wired)
• A history of zombies in America (i09)
• Steve Jobs: Vampire. Bill Gates: Zombie (NYT Magazine)
• The state of zombie literature: An autopsy (NYT Book Review)

People who join Amazon Prime say that they stop having to think about shopping. Whatever they want, they just go find it on Amazon and order it. That’s because shipping costs are no longer a factor, and you’ll get your stuff in two days. Without worrying about shipping, it doesn’t seem that big a deal to order something that only costs $5, especially if the alternative is an annoying trip to a big-box store or searching for just that one thing you need.

It seems that Amazon is on the track to dominate many major industries, including book publishing and selling, perhaps even all of retail. Like Google, they are positioning themselves to take over the world. When Amazon and Google become huge and there is literally nothing left, what will happen next? I see three possible futures:

a) Corporate war to end all wars (the apocalyptic scenario)

b) Hostile takeover (the depressing dystopia scenario)

c) Corporate merger (the blissful utopia scenario)

Anyway, I thought this piece on Amazon Prime was a fun read: The Cult of Amazon Prime.

“I truly believe that when men and women think about parking, their mental capacity reverts to the reptilian cortex of the brain,” he says. “How to get food, ritual display, territorial dominance—all these things are part of parking, and we’ve assigned it to the most primitive part of the brain that makes snap fight-or-flight decisions. Our mental capacities just bottom out when we talk about parking.”

This is a fascinating article about the vagaries of parking, complete with psychological analysis of human parking behavior, historical context and some colorful characters that remind me of the Five Families. 

Read: Between the Lines – Features – Los Angeles magazine.

“It’s easy to imagine the end of the world, but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism.”

Why is it so difficult to see outside the box we’ve currently put ourselves in?

The author of this article imagines four possible futures based on combinations of scarcity or abundance of resources and a hierarchical or egalitarian social structure. Like all fictional utopias and dystopias, these postulations are not meant to accurately predict the future, but to point toward extreme potential end points of our current path. He draws heavily on science fiction to guide him, including the works of Cory Doctorow, Charlie Stross, Orson Scott Card and Star Trek.

For more fictional future takes, see my Dystopian Reading List.

 Four Futures

Related articles

• Utopia by Charles Stross (readmorebooks.wordpress.com)