Lead stories from SPR’s ever-growing independent book portal
Review: The Slush Pile Brigade by Samuel Marquis
★★★★½ 
The Slush Pile Brigade, by Samuel Marquis, is a hilarious and exciting read filled with one crazy turn after another.
Nick Lassiter has just turned thirty and he’s in some serious trouble. His girlfriend has dumped him. He lost his job. He’s wanted by the police. And he discovers that his unpublished thriller has been stolen and turned into a blockbuster movie.
If that’s not bad enough, the author who stole his idea is Cameron Beckett, one of the biggest brand name authors.
Nick doesn’t want revenge. He wants a simple apology. When he and three friends show […]
Drachen by Brendan Le Grange is a classic treasure hunting story, with all the thrills and adventure such a labeling entails. Sorry, Indie fans. There’s no Ark of the Covenant at the end of this ancient bread crumb trail, no treasure of the Free Mason’s buried beneath national monuments, and not a single person stumbling through modern day Mexico in search of El Dorado. In Le Grange’s novel, Brett Rivera seeks the fabled treasure of the lost Hanseatic warship Drachen.
Hattie’s Place by Katherine Stillerman is a touching historical fiction novel set in the early 1900s in South Carolina.
This memoir of a childhood and young-adult life spent advancing inexorably toward disaster was written from federal prison. Jamila Davis is currently serving a 151-month sentence for bank fraud. This memoir serves as both cautionary tale (for young people as well as their parents) and sociological profile. The cautionary tale is powerful, the sociological profile perplexing.
In the beginning, there was a tribe of nomads that took only what they needed and lived as one with the world. As time grew, the tribe became the tribes, and the tribes’ three wisest argued the nature of things: one argued light was the true creator, one argued dark, and one argued both were unreasonable and would only believe in what could be proved. They split the tribes into factions and distanced each other to far corners, leaving the undecided to rot in the fields.
In the Shadow of St. Anthony: Being a somewhat detailed account of the coming of age of Tommy Santalesa, the neighborhood wiseass is a hybrid coming-of-age novel about being in a rock band in New York City – and a chilling horror novel.