#leo guild

[lemecquirit]

60 books read in 2025

And I thought, 18 last year was fantastic. Unthinkable, just a few years ago.

Things I learned:

I tend to not like short stories, but I like novellas

The more I read, the less I can say what genres I really prefer

Orbital by Samantha Harvey was the most pretentious and insufferable piece of rambling BS and it made me really angry

I Am Not Ashamed by Barbara Payton blew me away - the way it was (ghost-)written by Leo Guild was certainly sleazy and exploitative, but somehow appropriately so and made the whole thing feel so real and relatable - even some 80 years later. R.I.P. Barbara

Did books by Machiavelli or Sartre or Hemingway fascinate me? Some of it, kind of, but it's certainly cool to be able to say I've actually read some of their stuff.

I forced myself and finally succeeded in finding some access to poetry. Steven Jesse Bernstein and Dennis Cooper really did it for me. You'll never get me to go to a Slam, though.

[oldshowbiz]

Pulp Comedy by Leo Guild

[heyjbwhatareyoureading]

Notes From the Unashamed

Barbara Payton was gracious enough to let Leo Guild into her apartment. That’s one way of looking at this sleazy/sad alliance, a union of two hustlers making a fast buck, pushing forward in spite of their scummy shambling lives and, in the end, perpetually losing. But as Guild reported later, Payton, though polite on the phone, was in person, gross: “pig fat” as he indelicately...

[seanhowe]

STREET OF HO'S (Holloway House, 1976) by Leo Guild