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Thursday, 19 September, 6:30 pm
Book Talk, “Why Books, and Why This Book?”, Oregon Public Library, 200 N. Alpine Parkway, Oregon, Wis.
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Now Available at Last Kid Books:
Cheat
by David Benjamin
Something is rotten at Hercules High School. Student Heather Sundergard has been caught cheating on the state’s most prestigious scholarship exam. One of Heather’s teachers, Carol Demeter, has been implicated—and fired by the school board. But Carol happens to be police chief Jim Otis. fiancée. Otis sees the fine hand in this scam of teenage femme fatale Josie Dobbs. But Josie’s “back east,” in college.
Or is she?
Jim Otis’ struggle to exonerate Carol sends him into his own small town’s underworld and into the snakepit of school board meetings. Accused of having an affair with Frank McAllister, a corrupt test proctor in Madison, Carol falls victim to the malignant mercies of board chairwoman Fiona Wills. Otis’ mission to clear Carol’s name moves into the teeth of a brawl between the violent Konicek brothers and on to a dive bar in the state capitol to buttonhole Frank McAllister.
July 2024 •
“GabTalk” with Benjamin
At the Independent Press Awards “Book Camp” in June, the IPA’s vivacious Gabby Olczak interviewed author and publisher David Benjamin about two of his award-winning Last Kid Books titles, Dead Shot (in Crime Fiction) and Bistro Nights (in Romantic Suspense). Both books were honored at the Book Camp’s awards gala in June as “Distinguished Favorites” in the 2024 Independent Press Awards.
Here’s Benjamin with Book Camp impresario Ted Olczak. Click below to view Benjamin’s “Gab Talk” conversation.
Last Kid News:
Author David Benjamin is in Paris doing a little bit of research and a lot of typing on his memoir, An Apartment in Paris, which recounts—with a wealth of local color and frequent digressions—the agony and ecstasy of buying a garret, almost thirty years ago, in the Latin Quarter.
“I wrote it right after we bought the place,” Benjamin recalls, “and then put away the manuscript. Then, I pretty much forgot about it. Lately, however, I went back—to edit, revise and embellish—under pressure from my wife and from our Paris ‘guardian angel,’ Roberta Beardsley. As I work on it, I’ve gone from reluctance to enthusiasm.” The author, in his alter ego as publisher, has slated the release of An Apartment in Paris on 1 April 2025, the sixth anniversary of the launch of Last Kid Books.
Last Kid Books, by the way, passed a threshold last month, with its 40th literary award (and its 41st and 42nd). The NYC Big Book Awards recognized four of David Benjamin’s LKB titles with five “Distinguished Favorites”, a designation comparable to “Finalist” or Top Three. Benjamin’s Paris-based novel, Bistro Nights was honored in the Literary Fiction genre. His short story anthology, The Melting Grandmother, won in Short Stories. Benjamin’s Brooklyn-based tale of serial murder, The Voice of the Dog, scored in Crime Fiction, and Cheat, fifth in the Jim Otis smalltown crime series, won two NYC Big Book Awards, in Mystery and for its Cover Design, by artist Greg Holfeld and book designer Kristin Mitchell.
Bistro Nights and The Melting Grandmother have now both received four awards from independent press organizations.
Meanwhile,. Benjamin is pushing hard to get his anthology offbeat Christmas stories—an accumulation that began when he was sixteen—off the press. He has proofed the galleys of Christmas in a Jugular Vein assembled by Ms. Mitchell and all he needs is a book number from the Library of Congress (a process that’s always suspenseful!). So, watch this space.
Last Kid Books
is a publishing house with a sense of humor. Dedicated — at its outset — to publishing the works of prolific storyteller David Benjamin, LKB embodies Benjamin’s wry wit and narrative adventurousness.
Last Kid Books takes its name from David Benjamin’s beloved Midwestern coming-of-age story, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked (published by Random House in 2002). Benjamin is also author of SUMO: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Japan’s National Sport, a Charles E. Tuttle title, revised in 2010, that has been in print since 1990. Two previous Benjamin novels, Three’s A Crowd (a noir comedy) and A Sunday Kind of Love (a football romance), have been added to the Last Kid Books imprint, as well as Black Dragon, released in July 2019.
David Benjamin is a novelist, journalist, provocateur and habitual humorist who has lived his life — occasionally to his chagrin — by the words of Nobel laureate Juan Ramon Jimenez: “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”