Sunday's New York Times Book Review made note of the "devoted following" for Alan Furst's espionage thrillers -- but before he wrote bestsellers, Furst's fiction was serialized on the pages of Seattle Weekly. Editor-in-Chief Knute Berger reminds readers on his blog that the Weekly printed installments of two Furst novels in the late '70s.
Alan Baer's "love for the obscure and the nontraditional led him to the alternative news weekly," Omaha Reader writes of its eccentric owner, who died of cancer Nov. 5. The paper remembers Baer as "the philanthropist and the gentle man with a quirky sense of humor, who never lost faith in those around him and in the city he loved."
"I'm full of hate and I love it." That's a sample of the secret writings of Columbine shooter Eric Harris, obtained by Westword. The story by Alan Prendergast reveals the explosive rage of a young killer -- and his power to manipulate others. The handwritten pages of Harris' diary "provide glimpses of a teenage terrorist who couldn't wait to carry out his violent fantasies, who was more virulently racist and more acutely psychotic -- batshit mad-dog crazy, in layman's terms -- than previously reported," Prendergast writes. Fully a year before the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, Harris had the plans for the massacre scribbled in his journal, along with his ambition to crash a plane into a New York City skyscraper, and his efforts to find a girlfriend before the coming apocalypse. Seized as evidence by police hours after the shooting and kept under wraps for more than two years, Harris' secret journal writings first saw light Tuesday on Westword's Web site.
