She’s back, pimpin’ out notable new releases to place on your radar!
PHILIP K. DICK: FIVE NOVELS OF THE 1960S & 70S by Philip K. Dick, edited by Jonathan Lethem — Philip K. Dick was a writer of incandescent imagination who made and unmade world-systems with ferocious rapidity and unbridled speculative daring. “The floor joists of the universe,” he once wrote, “are visible in my novels.” MARTIAN TIME-SLIP (1964) unfolds on a thinly colonized Red Planet where schizophrenia is a contagion and the unscrupulous seek to profit from a troubled child’s time-fracturing visions. DR. BLOODMONEY (1965) chronicles the interwoven stories of a multiracial community of survivors, including the scientist who may have been responsible for World War III. NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR (1966) explores the effects of JJ-180, a hallucinogen that alters not only perception, but reality. In FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID (1974), a television star seeks to unravel a mystery that has left him stripped of his identity. A SCANNER DARKLY (1977), the basis for the 2006 film, envisions a drug-addled world in which a narcotics officer’s tenuous hold on sanity is strained by his new surveillance assignment: himself.
VALFIERNO: THE MAN WHO STOLE THE MONA LISA by Martín Caparrós — On Aug. 22, 1911, the world was shocked by an audacious crime: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre. Although some people suspected subversive artists like Picasso of perpetrating the theft, no arrests were made. Two years later, an Italian named Vincenzo Perugia was detained after attempting to sell the Mona Lisa to an antiques dealer in Florence — but the mystery of the theft itself was never satisfactorily resolved. In tantalizing conversations with an American journalist, the Marqués de Valfierno sheds light on his past secrets, including his sordid origins as Bollino, son of a Buenos Aires servant woman, a man ultimately transformed into the most notorious con artist in the world. A sly and consummate entertainer, Valfierno reveals the shifting identities of the anonymous Argentine boy who has gone on to become a veritable artist, creating for himself the perfect role of wealthy aristocrat in Belle Époque Paris as he prepares for his crime.
THE MAN WITH THE IRON HEART by Harry Turtledove — What if V-E Day didn’t end World War II in Europe? What if, instead, the Allies had to face a potent, even fanatical, postwar Nazi resistance? In this imagined world, Nazi forces resort to unconventional warfare, using the quick and dirty tactics of terrorism–booby traps, time bombs, mortar and rocket strikes in the night, assassinations, even kamikaze-style suicide attacks–to overturn what seemed to be a decisive Allied victory. In November 1945, a truck bomb blows up the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, where high-ranking Nazi officials are about to stand trial for war crimes. None of the accused are there when the bomb goes off, but their judges, all of them present and accounted for, are annihilated. Worse acts of terrorism follow all over Europe.
STALKING SUSAN by Julie Kramer — TV reporter Riley Spartz is recovering from a heartbreaking, headline-making catastrophe of her own when a longtime police source drops two homicide files in her lap in the back of a movie theater. Both cold cases involve women named Susan strangled on the same day, one year apart. Last seen alive in one of Minneapolis’s poorest neighborhoods, their bodies are each dumped in one of the city’s wealthiest areas. Riley senses a pattern between those murders and others pulled from a computer database of old death records. She must broadcast a warning soon, especially to viewers named Susan, because the deadly anniversary is approaching. But not just lives are at stake — so are careers. When Riley suspects the killer has moved personal items from one victim to the next as part of an elaborate ritual, she stages a bold on-air stunt to draw him out.
Buy it at Amazon.
Posted July 23, 2008 
Comments(1) 
Step into the Wayback Machine with me, kids, back to the ’80s, where the only thing bad was the inexplicable hipness of the mullet. I loved the malls, the music, the television and the skinny ties. Of course, I was in my teens and not getting laid, so what did I know? 
All the news that’s fit to capsulize!
iLOVE IT
