This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
During the 75th-anniversary year of what Billy Wilder called "the swimming pool story" during its development, Ready for My Closeup: The Making of Sunset Boulevard and the Dark Side of the Hollywood Dream by David M. Lubin offers a lovingly detailed look at the production of the classic film.
Lubin, professor of art at Wake Forest University and former writer for Rolling Stone, begins with writer-director Billy Wilder's youth and coming-of-age in Vienna during the heyday of silent movies. He presents a thorough yet chattily accessible history of the people involved in Sunset Boulevard and how they came together in a film that dances on the line between reality and fiction. Recounting how Gloria Swanson had gone from silent-film "it" girl to low-budget talk-show host, how William Holden's failure to break out of handsome but bland secondary roles fostered in him a sense of desperation, and how Erich von Stroheim's directing career abruptly ended after his sole collaboration with Swanson, Lubin sets forth a clear case for how these actors portrayed funhouse-mirror versions of themselves to create an incisive Hollywood satire. Lubin's examinations of film conventions found in crime thrillers and screwball comedies also illustrate how Wilder played with genres and maintained suspense in a movie that depicted its narrator as dead in its first scene.
Aficionados of movie classics and those intrigued by storytelling will enjoy peeling back the layers of one of the great films of its era. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: This loving look at Sunset Boulevard shows film fans how one of the great cross-genre classics was produced.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
A professor of probability whose life was shattered by a cataclysm known as the "Low-Probability Event" makes one last attempt at doing something meaningful in Lucky Day, a wildly inventive horror novel by Chuck Tingle (Bury Your Gays; Camp Damascus).
On the day that Vera Norrie comes out to her mother as bisexual and announces her engagement at her book-release party, an outbreak of terrifyingly absurd violence kills nearly eight million people. Four years later, she remains in the grips of depression. Then Agent Layne from the Low-Probability Event Commission asks for assistance investigating a casino that Vera wrote about in her book. The casino should be statistically impossible to operate at a profit and may be connected to the LPE. Vera's anger is enough to go back into the world.
In his erotica, Tingle has long been an expert at using the absurd to startle his readers into new ways of thinking. Never has he done so more thoroughly in his horror work than in Lucky Day. Scenes such as an attack by a typewriter-wielding chimpanzee dressed as William Shakespeare are as brutal as they are surreal. The central characters, Vera and Layne, are affected by their respective experiences during the LPE in markedly different ways. Layne, with his startlingly contrasting combination of ruthless Machiavellianism and enjoyment of simple things such as different kinds of ice cream, is simultaneously a delightful foil and a menace. As Vera discovers how to find meaning in the face of powerlessness, Tingle once again reminds readers that love is real. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: In Lucky Day, Chuck Tingle's absurdist horror novel about the randomness of disaster, a professor learns how to find meaning in a world where it seems like nothing matters.