Envy Apartment

I may not be a listener of audio books, but I know some readers are. This week, as I'm working on deadline, you've had reviews of several audio books. Thank you, Sandie, for this review of Juliet Blackwell's book. Give Up the Ghost Haunted Home Renovation series #6 Written by Juliet Blackwell, Narrated by Xe Sands Unabridged audiobook Listening Length: 7 hours and 51 minutes Publisher: Tantor Audio Release Date: December 1, 2015 There is a mansion in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, California known as the Crosswinds for sale at $29 million.  During renovation, pieces of the home were carelessly taken off in favor of newer items.  At least one ghost in the house is very upset that familiar items are gone and is making the same noises the items did.  For instance, the ghost makes the sounds of the squeaky weathervane which is now missing.   The only reason the owners care is because the noises and screaming the ghosts are making are scaring away possible b...

Lit Life “She is my alter ego,” says Sue Grafton of her fictional heroine, Southern California private detective Kinsey Millhone . “I’m an introvert, so doing half of what Kinsey is beyond my poor capabilities. But it’s fun to get to live her life without penalty!” Grafton, on the phone from her home in Montecito, California, is the best-selling author of what’s known to countless mystery fans as “the alphabet series .” The project has become Grafton’s life’s work, beginning with “A Is for Alibi” in 1982 and continuing through this month’s publication of “Y Is for Yesterday” (Putnam, $29). The final book in the 26-volume series, “Z Is for Zero,” will be out in 2019. And while the rest of us have aged several decades, Kinsey’s gotten only a few years older. Early on, Grafton said, she realized that even if she wrote a book a year, “after 26 years [Kinsey’s] going to be way too old to be running around hitting bad guys with her pocketbook. I thought I’d better keep her credibly young, ...

September 11, 2010 at 12:00 pm news By Kevin Plummer Every Saturday at noon, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today. One Sunday evening in 1959, after a screening of the Toronto Film Society , architect Gerald Robinson and engineer/builder Irwin Burns chatted over coffee. The two shared a common viewpoint that the city’s urban core was in decline. The same was happening in cities across Canada as municipal governments were more interested in improving traffic and encouraging sprawl rather than revitalizing their downtown districts. The very next day, Burns heard from real estate developer Murray Webber that a lot with Bloor Street West frontage was going to become available for a hundred-year lease from Victoria University. “There,” Burns told Robinson , as he recalled in the Globe and Mail of October 18, 1963, “is the place to demonstra...

Chris Kraus remembers the late writer, in life and in death. Kaucyila Brooke, Untitled #94 from Kathy Acker’s Clothes , 1998/2005, color photograph. From the cover of After Kathy Acker . Like everything in the past, everyone remembers it differently, and some of the people involved hardly remember at all. We’re talking about something that happened more than seventeen years ago . But on January 23, 1998, which was a Friday, friends of the late writer Kathy Acker drove from San Francisco to Fort Funston, about twenty-five minutes away, to scatter her ashes. She’d died two months earlier at an alternative clinic in Tijuana, where she received palliative care for late-stage, metastasized cancer. The ash scattering—like the wake at Bob Glück’s house on December 13 and the memorial reading at Slim’s Bar where Michelle Handelman was booed off the stage for no reason she can recall—devolved into a kind of black comedy, the way these things often do. I remember Cookie Mueller at Jackie Cur...

One day in August, 2016, the financier Carl Icahn made an urgent phone call to the Environmental Protection Agency . Icahn is one of the richest men on Wall Street, and he has thrived, in no small measure, because of a capacity to intimidate. A Texas- based oil refiner in which he had a major stake was losing money because of an obscure environmental rule that Icahn regarded as unduly onerous. Icahn is a voluble critic of any government regulation that constrains his companies. So he wanted to speak with the person in charge of enforcing the policy: a senior official at the E.P.A. named Janet McCabe . Icahn works from a suite of offices, atop the General Motors Building , in midtown, that are decorated in the oak-and-leather fashion of a tycoon’s lair in a nineteen-eighties film. During that decade, Icahn made his reputation as one of the original corporate raiders , pioneering the art of the hostile takeover and establishing himself as a human juggernaut—a pugnacious deal machine ...