Upcoming Events:
Wednesday, 8 July, noon - Book Talk, An Apartment in Paris, Mount Horeb Rotary Club, Mount Horeb, Wisconsin
Monday, 13 July, 11:15 am - Book Talk, An Apartment in Paris, Verona Community Center, 108 Paoli Street, Verona, Wisconsin
Tuesday, 14 July, 7 pm - A Dialog on Writing with Dave Wood, Whitehall Public Library, 18560 Scranton Street, Whitehall, Wisconsin.
Videos:
“GabTalk” with Gabby Olczak
Gabby Olczak, co-founder of the Independent Press Association (IPA) and the vivacious hostess of her “GabTalk” videos has done a series of interviews with Last Kid Books author David Benjamin.
NEW from Last Kid Books:
Upstairs
Sixth in the Award-Winning Jim Otis Smalltown Crime Series!
There’s a curse on the Kuckuck building.
It’s been abandoned for more than a decade. It’s boarded up and slated for demolition. In other words, it’s a magnet for kids to break, enter, climb the stairs and explore. Which is exactly what Riley Hawkins, grade-school bully, decides to do …
… Until the building strikes back!
Benjamin at BookCamp
July 2024 •
“GabTalk” with Gabby Olczak
At the Independent Press Awards “BookCamp” this year, the IPA’s vivacious Gabby Olczak chatted with David Benjamin about Cheat (Mystery), one of Benjamin’s four 2024 Distinguished Favorite award-winning books, including The Voice of the Dog (Crime Fiction), The Melting Grandmother and Other Short Works (Short Stories) and Bistro Nights (Literary Fiction). These honors increased the total number of literary awards garnered by Last Kid Books to 46, since its 2019 launch.
Here’s Benjamin, holding his haul of medals, with Book Camp impresario Ted Olczak. Click to view Benjamin’s “GabTalk” conversation.
Last Kid News:
Award-Winning Author David Benjamin Says Writing Comedy Is One of Literature's Most Difficult—and Most Undervalued—Arts
Belleville Book Festival keynote highlights the unique power of humor to connect writers and readers
This month’s Last Kid Books dispatch, produced in collaboration with Boundless Media, focuses on my appearance as keynote speaker at the first Belleville (Ill.) Book Festival, sponsored by Rob Eckman and Steve Mathews, proprietors of Belleville Books—one of the most elegant book shops in America. My topic was
“What’s So Funny? The ironic importance of taking funny authors seriously”.
In the photo (left to right), Rob, Steve and me, posed in front of the “vault” at Belleville Books, reminiscent of the bookstore’s previous life as a bank.
"If the mood of the story is not serious, it's often assumed not to be serious writing. But works infused with humor have a unique power to stay with readers." -David Benjamin
NEW...
Upstairs
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.”
Last Kid Books is Benjie’s showcase.
