Dennis Palumbo

Formerly a Hollywood screenwriter (My Favorite Year; Welcome Back, Kotter, etc.), Dennis Palumbo is now a licensed psychotherapist and author of Writing From the Inside Out. As a fiction writer, his short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, The Strand, Written By and elsewhere, and are collected in From Crime to Crime.

Palumbo is also the author of the Daniel Rinaldi series of mysteries. The debut novel was Mirror Image, followed by Fever Dream, and the newly released Night Terrors.

Late last month I asked the author about what he was reading.  His reply:

As it happens, I’m reading two completely engrossing books at the moment, neither of which bears any similarity to the other.

The first is a terrific, intriguing and psychologically astute novel by Dan Chaon called Await Your Reply. It’s hard to define exactly, though, having just finished it, I guess I’d call it a literary thriller. More importantly, it’s a beautifully complex meditation on the illusion of personal identity, and how today’s technology can play havoc with that particular concept. Though it’s a publishing cliché, there’s no disputing that in this well-plotted novel, nothing and no one is what they seem!

The second book I’m reading is called Lives of the Novelists, by John Sutherland, and it’s a total delight. Its subtitle says it all: the book is “a history of fiction in 294 lives.” With wry wit and amazing erudition, Sutherland presents bite-sized biographies of novelists whose work he feels represents the best of fiction, from the 17th century up to our own. He covers every genre, from gothic to pornography, pop trash to high literature. A fun bedside book, into which you can dip for a few pages, learn something about a few of your favorite writers, and then, edified and enlightened, drift pleasantly to sleep.

Visit Dennis Palumbo's website.

My Book, The Movie: Night Terrors.

--Marshal Zeringue