January 28th, 2013 / 11:51 am
Snippets

Brian Allen Carr, from Texas, is awesome. Somebody gave his book Short Bus a 1-star review at Amazon, but he says it’s a crappy review. So he’s doing a “Lone Star” contest: write the best 1-star review of the book by the end of February, and he’ll give you all three of his books, including the newest, Edie and the Low-Hung Hands (Small Doggies Press).

8 Comments

  1. - GalleyCat

      […] has all the details: “he’s doing a ‘Lone Star’ contest: write the best 1-star review of the […]

  2. Novelist Seeks One-Star Amazon Reviews in New Contest - GalleyCat

      […] has all the details: “he’s doing a ‘Lone Star’ contest: write the best 1-star review of the […]

  3. Richard Grayson

      Amazon will remove them. I had fun writing really nasty one-star reviews of my own books (my favorite was barely adapting Nabokov’s description of Gaston Grodin in “Lolita” to characterize me) but eventually they disappeared. It was also embarrassing, since the editor of my first book in 1979, not realizing the devastating review was from me, ended up “replying” to it and defending me. It took a while but one by one, they caught them all and deleted them.

  4. Brian Carr

      Richard, I’m not writing them. But you seem like the perfect kind of person to write a one star review, so, by all means, enter the contest.

  5. Critical Linking: February 1st, 2012

      […] If you can’t beat ‘em, troll’em. […]

  6. Ladri, vandali e false citazioni

      […] Lone Star Contest. L'autore texano Brian Allen Carr ha notato su Amazon una recensione da una stella al suo romanzo Short Bus. E non l'ha presa bene. Anzi non gli è piaciuta proprio per niente. Pensando che si possa far di meglio ha indetto un concorso: scrivi la migliore recensione da una stella entro febbraio e vinci tutti e tre i suoi libri, incluso la nuova uscita Edie and the Low-Hung Hands. (via htmlgiant) […]

  7. Ferdie Nirgle

      Keep the contest going. Everything gets edited. Join the CIA and write a novel about your experiences and half of it gets blacked out. Sorry, I can’t do a one star for you.

      I was blown away by The First Henley. That was this guy’s winning short story in the Larry McMurtry judged Texas Observer short story contest. Then I picked up The Short Bus thinking….well, I don’t know what I was thinking….but when I got to the chapter Whisper To Scar I laughed and cried myself silly thinking “You can’t laugh at that! This is all kinds of twisted and here you are taking it in like a piece of pecan pie and a cup of coffee.

      I did want to ask Carr how after I read a Texas Observer interview on his take on another contest that compared Fallon to Penkov, how he can accuse Fallon of “just passing through” and not say the same about Miroslav Penkov from Bulgaria? Is “the border” where Carr and the others were writing a synonym for “just passing through” anyway? I guess what I mean is that what guys like McMurtry, McCarthy, Burroughs and even this guy’s writings do is find the border back drop a place rich is tensions that are inevitable wherever people are just passing through. Kind of like the Scottish battlefield lowlands or Rick’s cafe in Casablanca.

  8. Winky Luftlecker

      How will the winner be notified?