6-19-08: There's a blurb about Dead Boys in the O.C. Weekly.

5-28-08: The Academy of Arts and Letters has posted the official photo of the awards ceremony. Click on the photo for a full seating chart.

5-26-08: Richard traveled to New York to pick up his award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The luncheon and ceremony were fantastic, and Richard was thisclose to many of his heroes. Below is a shot of him with William Vollmann to prove that he was really there.

5-08-08: The Italian edition of Dead Boys (Come Morti) is out from Einaudi. Cool cover.

5-06-08: BookFox has posted Part Two of its video from the Festival of Books, and there's more footage of Richard spouting off. 

4-29-08: Richard appears very briefly in a video of authors at the Festival of Books at BookFox.  

4-25-08: Just a reminder about the panel Richard is on at the L.A. Times Festival of Books this weekend at UCLA. It's called "L.A. Fiction: City of Neighborhoods" and takes place Saturday, April 26, at noon in the Fowler Museum Lenart Auditorium. For a full schedule of events and all the details, go here: http://www.latimes.com/extras/festivalofbooks/. Drop by and say hey if you're attending.

3-24-08: Richard will be participating in this year's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA. He's on a panel called "L.A. Fiction: City of Neighborhoods," which takes place Saturday, April 26, at noon in the Fowler Museum Lenart Auditorium. For a full schedule of events and all the details, go here. Get there early, because the panel before Richard's in the same venue is also a goodie, featuring Richard Price, Janet Fitch, Scott Simon and Charles Bock.  

3-20-08: Richard is this year's recipient of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Check out the winners of all the academy's awards here. Click on "announcements" and then "2008 Literature Award winners." It's a great honor, and Richard will be traveling to New York at the end of May to attend the ceremony.  

2-18-08: On Sunday, March 2, at 6pm, Richard will be doing a brief reading at a benefit for the Edendale Library, his local branch. It's part of a big event that includes wine tasting, music from Bobby Matos, and readings from other authors. The shindig takes place at the Echoplex in Echo Park, and you can get info here.

1-24-08: Dead Boys tops the year-end list at junejulyblue.

1-03-08: Dead Boys tops the year-end list at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and is No. 3 at the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The book also made the list at Iwilldare.com.

12-27-07: Dead Boys makes the year-end list at the Omaha World-Herald and Clayton Moore's blog, Bang! The book also got a nice, long review in the Metapsychology Online Review.

12-21-07: Great piece in the Inland Empire Weekly, and Dead Boys makes the Notable Books list at the San Francisco Chronicle.

12-20-07: Nice mention in Poets & Writers. Go to the site and search "Dead Boys."

12-17-07: Janet Fitch chooses Dead Boys as her favorite book of the year at E! Online.

12-14-07: Richard's list of favorite books is up at The Millions. Also, Dead Boys makes George Pelecanos' list at the Crime Fiction Dossier. And stop by Chevalier's Books tomorrow, if you're in the nieghborhood. Richard will be signing books from 2-4pm (address below).

12-13-07: Another Best Books of the Year list: the Vancouver Sun.

12-12-07: Dead Boys makes a couple more year-end lists: Baby Got Books' and Tod Goldberg's. Also, Richard's Italian translator has been in touch, and work has begun on the Italian edition of Dead Boys.

12-11-07: Richard will be signing books this Saturday (12-15) at Chevalier's Books, 126 N. Larchmont, Los Angeles, CA, from 2-4pm.

12-03-07: Dead Boys is reviewed in The Rogue Voice.

11-28-07: Dead Boys is one of the Rocky Mountain News' 50 Favorite Books of the Year. Also, the story "Dead Boys" has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Opium magazine. 

11-09-07: Part two of the Baby Got Books interview is up.

11-08-07: Part one of an interview with Richard is up at Baby Got Books. Also, the great George Pelecanos gives Dead Boys a nice shout-out at Spinetingler Magazine. 

11-07-07: PopMatters reviews Dead Boys.

10-29-07: There's an interview with Richard at Slushpile. Also pick up the new issue of Opium magazine, which features the story "Dead Boys" and lots of other interesting stuff.  

10-27-07: Dead Boys is a Pick of the Week at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.

10-15-07: The reading at Metropolis went great. Richard's friends, old and new, turned out in force. There's a new interview up, at Things I'd Rather Be Doing. Check it out.  

10-10-07: Come see Richard read tomorrow night at Metropolis Books downtown. Info below.

10-04-07: A reminder that, one week from today (Thursday, Oct. 11), Richard will be reading at Metropolis Books in downtown Los Angeles. The reading will take place at 7pm, during the monthly Art Walk, when all the galleries stay open late. Grab some friends, come down and hear Richard read, and look at some art. Metropolis is located at 440 S. Main Street.  

10-01-07: There's a nice writeup of Dead Boys at E! Online.

9-03-07: Hipster Book Club has reviewed the book.

9-02-07: Nice piece in the the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review today.

8-28-07: A nice, long review appeared on the Compulsive Reader website.

8-27-07: There was a review in the Omaha World-Herald, and Steve Salardino of Skylight Books, where Richard will be reading on Friday, Sept. 7, did a nice writeup about the book on the store's blog.

8-25-07: The Rocky Mountain News ran a great piece on Dead Boys, by Clayton Moore. Also, check out Moore's blog, Bang!

8-20-07: The San Francisco Chronicle ran a great review today. 

8-19-07: Check out the review in the Free Lance-Star out of Fredericksburg, VA.

8-17-07: The L.A. Times has weighed in on Dead Boys.

8-16-07: A few more reviews have come out: a great one in Time Out New York, another in the Marshfield, Wisconsin News-Herald, and one in the Velocity Weekly in Louisville, KY.  

8-13-07: FiveChapters.com is serializing "The Hero Shot" from Dead Boys all this week.

8-11-07: Richard was asked by Writers Read to write about the books he is currently reading. Check it out.

8-10-07: The Entertainment Weekly review is out, and it's great: "'I haven't read a book in years,' reflects one of the bitter dudes in Lange's gutsy new collection. 'I stopped because no one was writing about me.' Now someone has. In these potent tales, unhappy males hang on to dismal jobs in cubicles, kill time in seedy doughnut shops, and cling to pathetic dreams of escape. The only beauty to be found in this grim volume is Lange's extraordinary craftmanship." A-. Can't beat that!

8-09-07: Richard has been getting reports from across the country of sightings of the book in various bookstores, so go out and get yourself one. He also did a thing for Largeheartedboy.com where he picked out a song to go with each story in the book. Check it out.

8-01-07: Looks like the book is shipping early from Amazon. Those who pre-ordered should get it by Friday. It might also start showing up in bookstores soon. Wow! 

7-27-07: Richard received his first two copies of the finished book yesterday. Very exciting. Looks like it's really going to be published! 

7-14-07: Two new reviews, from this month's Details and Los Angeles magazines:

     Los Angeles: "Noir heroes tend to come in two categories: hard-boiled guys tougher than we could ever be, or shell-shocked joes who, when times get tough, 'man up.' L.A. author Richard Lange noodles with the genre in his short story collection Dead Boys. In one story, a cuckold in Culver City kidnaps his lover's son, who goes happily with him. In another, a a widower tries to seduce an underage speed freak so that his wife's ghost will kill him. The protagonists we think are the joes are actually the tough guys, or at least not as gooey-centered as we had initially thought." --Robert Ito

     Details: "Lange brings Raymond Carver's minimalism to the back alley with tales of California drifters, salesmen and bank robbers. Violence and crime are never far away, though Dead Boys focuses not on the perfect heist but on the emotional wreckage it can leave behind."  --Timothy Hodler

7-09-07: Clayton Moore has written a great piece about Dead Boys for Bookslut. 

7-05-07: Little, Brown has put up the first story in the book, "Fuzzyland," on its website.

6-26-07: Here's the starred review from Kirkus: "A debut story collection about Los Angeles’s various hopeless classes.

"An alcoholic is haunted by the wife who killed herself and their daughter in 'Love Lifted Me.' A failed actor moves back to his mother’s house in 'The Hero Shot.' Insanity overwhelms a stalker in 'Everything Beautiful is Far Away.' And, in the title story, a moderately successful and deeply numb office dweller jerks back to life. Like the rest of Lange’s protagonists, these men are misfits, screw-ups and sociopaths, and these stories capture them at the moment when their brittle, circumscribed lives finally shatter. The one exception is 'Bank of America,' which depicts a sublimely average family man looking forward to relaxing after he completes his final heist. This superbly crafted tale was chosen for The Best American Mystery Stories 2004, and, in its current company, it presents the reader with a pleasing irony: The gun-toting bank robber is the most gentle, least violent character in the collection. That Lange is equally adept at creating lowlifes, nice guys and all the men who fall somewhere in between says a great deal about his abilities and his style. He provides his vividly real characters with a space in which they can finally release all the emotions—the rage, the longing, the bewilderment—that they work so hard to suppress, and he compels his creations to a level of honesty they’ve evaded with drugs, alcohol and paranoid delusions. Even when this release is self-destructive, it’s also a kind of grace. The men who people this collection may engage in macho posturing, but their author never does.

"Superlative short fiction, and an arresting debut."

6-22-07: Here's the review in the August issue of Men's Health: "This stark collection of short stories is essential reading for any fan of gritty, macho, West Coast noir. It's the stuff of wayward deliverymen and hard-up strippers, something you'd see in a Tarantino film or a bad dream."

6-05-07: Here's what Booklist had to say about Dead Boys: "In the dozen heartbreaking stories collected here, Lange homes in on a group of twentysomething slackers living in the markedly less-prosperous suburbs of L.A. These bereft young men don’t seem to suffer so much from a lack of ambition as from a surfeit of emotion. Frayed nerves and broken hearts have kept them from realizing even the smallest of dreams; they’re always 'between jobs or between marriages, between runs of good luck.' In the title story, the nameless narrator is beset by a host of worries—he thinks his wife is having an affair and that one of his office colleagues is about to commit suicide. Little wonder, then, that he can barely keep his mind on his job—pushing a new brand of yogurt. The yawning divide between his sterile work environment and his chaotic emotions prompts him to remark, 'I’m full to bursting and empty at the same time.' Lange’s slice-of-life scenarios, emotionally wrecked characters, and piercingly funny dialogue make for a powerful combination that recalls the work of Thomas McGuane and Denis Johnson." — Joanne Wilkinson

5-31-07: Here's an excellent review from Bookforum. 

5-29-07: Dead Boys appears on the San Francisco Chronicle's guide to "Simmering Summer Reading." Also, here's a link to something Richard wrote for the Little, Brown website.

5-27-07: Kirkus Review's First Fiction issue featured a piece on Dead Boys (see Page 10). The guy who wrote it, Clayton Moore, also had some nice things to say about the book on his blog, Bang! 

5-12-07: See what Publishers Weekly had to say about Dead Boys.

5-09-07: It's official: Richard will be reading at Skylight Books in Los Feliz at 7:30 on Friday, September 7. Also, his editor loved the first six chapters of the novel, which means he gets to keep being a full-time writer for a while longer, which means hip hip hooray! Also, if you can't wait for the book to come out, a couple of people are selling galleys at ABE Books. 

5-04-07: The French rights to Dead Boys have sold to Albin Michel.

4-17-07: Richard's friend Pam Sellers has created a Wikipedia entry for him. Check it out.

4-09-07: Here's a review of Dead Boys on Ain't It Cool.com.

4-06-07: Also, buy Mr. Doerr's books:

      "Welcome to Richard Lange's Los Angeles: 7-Elevens, bank branches, donut shops, Hollywood yearning, all of it somehow both monstrous and eerily beautiful. His narrators tear themselves apart with fear and longing, and yet something visionary and sparkling and deeply human runs through each of them. These are searing, ferocious, terrific 
stories." -- Anthony Doerr

3-21-07: Again, buy these people's books:

     "Once per decade a first book of short stories arrives that blows everything out of the water.  Dead Boys is that book.  The characters are fiercely rooted in a Los Angeles that few people know about. They face desperate situations in which the best option is often a wrong turn that leads to another. Richard Lange has the courage and skill to depict those moments without judgment or apology.  Every story is solid--bold, lyric, honest--told with compassion and wisdom. This book is great." -- Chris Offutt

     "These twelve stories set in Los Angeles slice open the lives of contemporary men the way a saw opens a geode.  Inside, we find secret hope and a yearning for tenderness in tectonic opposition to an innate pessimism and the struggle to maintain self-respect. Profoundly revealing, a rough-edged, dead-pan, haunting debut." -- Janet Fitch

3-15-07: Buy every book by every one of these great writers:

     "Dead Boys is a great collection, let that be stated first. Richard Lange knows about moral uncertainty, failure, heartache and the constant yearning for redemption from the depths. He knows so much about the varieties of anguish waiting for us all and the little victories that sometimes see us through. His details of sadness, poverty, despair, all convince, often related by a narrator who is at the very least a bubble off plumb. This is simply masterful writing, tough and tender, emotionally potent, and, best of all, fresh." -- Daniel Woodrell

     "With the gritty stories in Dead Boys, Richard Lange breathes new life into the mythology of Los Angeles. The stories are achingly accurate and always telling of the hardscrabble lives caught on the grid work of the big city sprawl. This is the work of a writer who has come to know well the territory he is exploring." -- Michael Connelly

     "Any writer who draws a gritty portrait of L.A. will inevitably be compared to the great Nathanael West. Richard Lange is that rare author who actually earns such an accolade. This is a fantastic collection of stories:  both heartfelt and unflinching.  If you're an admirer of Raymond Carver's writing--or Tobias Wolff's, or Denis Johnson's, or Joy Williams's--I suspect you'll love Richard Lange's, too." -- Scott Smith

      "Lange's stories are knockouts. Gritty, humane, and utterly urban. I can't wait to see what he does next." -- Alice Sebold

     "The comparisons with Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson are apt.  Richard Lange's stories combine the truth-telling and immediacy of Carver with the casual hip of Johnson.  There is a potent artistic sensibility at work here." -- T.C. Boyle

     "Funny, tough and tragic, with earned humanity, street style, and a shooter's eye for detail . . . a story collection to savor.  Mr. Lange has talent to burn." -- George Pelecanos

     "Dead Boys by Richard Lange is the genuine article - great stories - the stunning type of book you read more than once, that only comes along a handful of times in your reading life. Gritty Los Angeles is made alive and Lange doesn't blink at anything - he captures violence and action and there are diamonds of dialogue and character in all of these stories, like a beautiful shotgun pattern. The City of Angels has a lot of hell in it and Richard Lange has handrawn us a map of the whole thing." --Scott Wolven

3-06-07: Amazing blurbs are still coming in for Dead Boys. Right now there's T.C. Boyle, George Pelecanos, Alice Sebold, Scott Wolven, Scott Smith, Michael Connolly and Daniel Woodrell. Richard also did his first interview, for Kirkus Review. It'll be online next month. 

2-24-07: Dead Boys is now available for pre-order at Amazon.

2-02-07: Check out the Myspace page for Dead Boys.

1-25-07: The bound galleys for Dead Boys and chapbooks of "Bank of America" are done. Richard has been in contact with his publicist at LB, and the machine is gearing up to get the word out about the book. The novel is now about half done.  

1-8-07: The page proofs have arrived from LB and look great. Richard has also approved the flap copy for the jacket. Next up is sending out copies of the proofs to various authors in hopes of securing blurbs. The wish list is long and varied.

12-2-06: The entire copyedited manuscript is back with Little, Brown, and Richard expects to see galleys at the beginning of next year. The Italian rights to the book have sold to Stile Libero, an imprint of Einaudi based in Rome.

11-9-06: Richard returned the copyedited ms for "Bank of America," one of the stories in Dead Boys, early at Little, Brown's request. They are going to create a chapbook of the story to help generate interest in the collection.   

10-17-06: The jacket design for Dead Boys has been approved and is displayed on this page. Richard is very happy with it. He is now reviewing the copyedited manuscript, which is the last step before page proofs. The novel is now about a third done.

9-22-06: Richard has approved the internal design of the book and is now waiting for the jacket design, which should be arriving soon.

8-30-06: Richard sent in two pics to Little Brown, and they are going to use both for various publicity purposes. The one on this page, however, is the jacket photo.

7-25-06: All edits are done on the manuscript. It took about three weeks to get everything straight. The manuscript is being turned over to the copyediting and design departments this week. They are also starting on the jacket design. Richard saw the catalog copy for the book, which was exciting. He is currently trying to get a decent photo of himself. The book will now be released in August of '07, to allow more time to try for reviews. It will consist of 12 stories, two of which have never been published before. Work on the novel continues.

5-16-06: The first edits to the manuscript for Dead Boys have arrived from Richard's editor at Little, Brown, Asya Muchnick. He's taking a break from work on his novel to deal with them. He has also secured the rights to a Neil Young lyric to use as the epigraph for Dead Boys. 

4-1-06: Richard has officially begun work on his novel, which is due to Little, Brown in April '08.

2-10-06: Richard has signed a two-book deal with Little, Brown, Inc. His short-story collection Dead Boys will be out in Spring '07, and a novel will follow when he finds time to write it....

10-10-04: Richard's story "Bank of America" is included in Best American Mystery Stories 2004, in stores now.