Author of The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential, James Ellroy is one of the most celebrated novelists of recent times. We’re giving you the chance to discover the mad genius of the Demon Dog of American letters with this fantastic repackage set of his entire LA Quartet epic.

To win this fantastic prize, answer the following question:

Which book from the LA Quartet was made into a film starring Josh Hartnett?

Send your answers to windmill@randomhouse.co.uk, winners will be picked tomorrow (25th May). Good luck!

Terms and conditions

It’s been five whole days since the weekend people. I know, brutal right? But never fear, the FRIDAY FEELING IS HERE!

I love my spidery friends, not in a keeping them in a tank and petting them way, but in a tolerant, live and let live, thanks for killing the flies way. For all the humans that disagree, young and old, show them this comic, and perhaps they’ll change their minds.

Getting all science in your face with this incredible ultra-high-definition photo of the night’s sky. Plus, this demonstration of nuclear fission using ping pong balls and mousetraps is fun and eductational. It’s funcational! Or how about the slightly less sciencey but no less cool slow motion gelatin cube.

One for fans of Back to the Future and flat-pack furniture, with Sci-Fi IKEA Manuals.

And finally, a musical painting…lovely.

Good weekends all, happy reading!

Today we’re giving you the chance to win three lovely paperbacks by the acclaimed author Tim Pears. A true master in his evocations of family life and the English countryside, this is a fantastic chance to discover the author about whom The Times said: ‘Early nineteenth-century France had Balzac, we have Pears to trace our fortunes and follies.’

We are giving three people the chance to win a set of Tim Pears paperbacks, and all you have to do is answer the following question:

What is the title of Tim Pears’ latest hardback book?

Email your answers to windmill@randomhouse.co.uk. Winners will be picked at 5pm today (Monday 9th May). Click here for the T&Cs.

But that’s not all! If you are lucky enough to be picked, we would like something from you. It’s a very small, but very valuable thing to us and our authors. Whichever of the three books you read first, please spend ten minutes writing a review of it and put it on your favourite online bookshop. We’re not asking you for positive, negative, or any other -ive reviews, just honest ones. Why? Because we care about our books, and we think after reading them, you will too.

Thanks all, and good luck!

A special edition of the usual Friday Feeling link-a-thon for all those getting in the mood for the Easter break.

The first link is Easter themed, though perhaps not how you think. Bunny rabbits: cute in real life, TERRIFYING IN COSTUME! Shudder.

Onto the rabbit’s friend and ally in the natual world, the llama, with this Llama font fun.

Reminiscent of the great Garfield minus Garfield, this is the Peanuts cartoons with the last panel removed, 3eanuts. The explanation is the best: “Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters’ expense. With the last panel omitted, despair pervades all.” Enjoy!

A stunning time-lapse project of Paris composed out of 2,000 photos here, Le Flâneur - lost count of how many times I’ve watched it.

Finally, I leave you with the fabulous Vintage podcast, the latest episode featuring David Lodge, Martin Amis, and many others. Lovely stuff.

Happy Easter!

Let’s tear open some steaming packets of culture and guzzle the finest links the internet has to offer - it’s the Windmill Friday Feeling!

A ludicrously fascinating feature on time, from the science and politics, to philosophy and history, on the BBC website. Nepal-time is 15 minutes ahead of India-time - who knew? (Thanks to Mr John Self of Asylum, one of the finest book bloggers around, for pointing that out.)

This is a rather lovely advert, a ‘xylophone forest’.

Humour and how-not-to with this, the worst submission cover letter ever written.

This bookish t-shirts are brilliant, though I may not be able to wear them into the office without being mocked. And don’t forget, you can win your own t-shirt with Waterstone’s for the publication of John Niven’s The Second Coming.

A fascinating and thought provoking essay on ‘reader’s block’ by Geoff Dyer, which at once shows the frustrations and revelations from a life of reading.

It’s here people, that moment you’ve all been waiting for (right?) - the Windmill Friday Feeling! *fireworks* *parades* *champagne*

Alot of these links come from that bastion of interesting things and faff, Twitter, and this one from @DaveGorman is gold: “Whatever today brings you’ll be happier if you spend a minute looking at pictures of Basset Hounds running: http://bzfd.it/gGuHOc I promise.”

The eagle eyed among you will notice I spelled ‘a lot’ like an absolute tool in that last paragraph, which this time is because I’m looking for an excuse to share this wonderful comic from Hyperbole and a Half, ‘The Alot’. Read it, then read everything else on there, then come back here for more links.

Back? Hello? Anyone? Ah, there you are. Now, it is common knowledge that publishing types are generally fond of a drink or two. This is not true. We are also fond of three, four, and numbers upwards of four drinks as well. This brilliant essay on the art of writing about drinking shows the long and (mostly) honourable tradition of books and booze, “Drink what you know.”

Photos inside writer’s rooms: do they offer a window into the novelist’s soul? Hmm, maybe not, but what I do know is that if Will Self was to keel over today then the Post-It note industry would suffer a major hit. Wow.

And finally, this is a lovely post about writing that pushes blogging into an artform: “100 Things About a Novel”.

(Unless you’ve read The Day the Falls Stood Still.)

1. The Day the Falls Stood Still’s inspiration, legendary riverman William “Red” Hill (1888-1942), hauled 177 bodies from the Niagara River, rescued 29 people, and assisted a handful of daredevils.  He also shot the lower rapids in a barrel three times.

William “Red” Hill (right) - Niagara Falls (Ontario) Public Library

2. The amount of water flowing over Niagara Falls is usually only twenty-five percent of the natural flow. Up to seventy-five percent of the water is diverted for hydroelectricity.

The Queenston powerhouse, built over the course of The Day the Falls Stood Still, was the largest hydroelectric development in the world when it opened in 1922.

3. Captain Matthew Webb, the first recorded person to swim the English Channel, lost his life attempting to swim the Whirlpool Rapids below Niagara Falls in 1883.

Captain Matthew Webb - Niagara Falls (Ontario) Public Library

4. Niagara Falls has long been a source of inspiration:

“I have seen the falls and I am all rapture and amazement.” - Henry James

“Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an Image of Beauty.” - Charles Dickens

“Oh, it is lovelier than it is great; it is like the Mind that made it: great, but so veiled in beauty that we gaze without terror.” -Harriet Beecher Stowe

5. The term “the day the falls stood still” was coined back in 1848 to describe the day the Niagara River became jammed up with ice at its mouth and ceased to flow over the falls.  With the falls standing still, the local people woke to quiet rather than the thunder of the river plummeting from the brink. With the cliff face of their falls and the riverbed suddenly dry, some ducked into churches, praying for their salvation with Armageddon so close at hand, and others headed out onto the riverbed, salvaging lost timbers and collecting relics from the War of 1812.

6. Created in 1885, Niagara Falls State Park is America’s oldest state park.  The park was the result of a sixteen-year, hard-fought battle by a group of prominent men led by Frederick Law Olmsted, most widely known for designing New York City’s Central Park.

7. A barge with two men aboard became lodged in the rapids just above the falls in 1918.  A barge dredging the entrance of a hydroelectric canal on the American side of the river had broken free of its tug and drifted toward the Horseshoe Falls. After becoming snagged on a rock shoal, William “Red” Hill rescued the two deckhands. The scow still remains at the same spot where it became stuck in 1918.

8. Despite the warnings of William “Red” Hill, Charles Stephens of Bristol, England, attempted to conquer the falls in a barrel in 1920. 

Having strapped his arms to the sides of the barrel and tied his feet to the anvil that served as ballast, he plunged to his death.  All that was recovered of Charles Stephens was a severed, tattooed arm reading, “Forget me not Annie.”

9. A trolley route, described as the most scenic trolley ride in the world, used to run along the rim of the Niagara Gorge on the Canadian side of the river and then along the teeming rapids at the base of the gorge on the American side if the river.  The Great Gorge Route ceased operation in 1935 after decades of accidents and landslides made the route too deadly and too costly to operate.

Great Gorge Route - Niagara, copyright 1902 by A. Wittemann, Brooklyn, N.Y.

10. Niagara Falls was once felt to be at least as terrifying as it was beautiful.  In the mid-1800s many people believed Niagara Falls possessed the power to lure those who gazed at it too long into throwing themselves from the brink. Phrases like “awful grandeur” and “frightful beauty” were commonly used to describe the falls. In the oration delivered at the opening on the Niagara Falls State Park in 1885, the words “awful symbol of Infinite Power, in whose dread presence we stand” was used to invoke Niagara Falls.

A variation of this post originally appeared at Booking Mama.

The Day the Falls Stood Still is out now in Amazon, Play, Waterstone’s, and all good book shops.

Comin’ atcha like a Northern bullet, it’s the Windmill…Friday…FEELING!

We love a bit of TED here at the Mill (especially when it’s one of our authors), and this is a particularly good one: Nic Marks on The Happy Planet Index.

Dreamlike and disturbing, this animated short from Run Wrake, Rabbit, has been around for a while, but has a way of staying in your head. Warning: some disturbing scenes.

Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter - Mad Men style!

Amazing photos from the National Geographic’s 2010 Photography contest.

GEORGE WASHINGTON CROSBY BEGAN TO hallucinate eight days before he died. From the rented hospital bed, placed in the middle of his own living room, he saw insects running in and out of imaginary cracks in the ceiling plaster. The panes in the windows, once snugly pointed and glazed, stood loose in their sashes. The next stiff breeze would topple them all and they would flop onto the heads of his family, who sat on the couch and the love seat and the kitchen chairs his wife had brought in to accommodate everyone. The torrent of panes would drive everyone from the room, his grandchildren in from Kansas and Atlanta and Seattle, his sister in from Florida, and he would be marooned on his bed in a moat of shattered glass. Pollen and sparrows, rain and the intrepid squirrels he had spent half of his life keeping out of the bird feeders would breach the house.

George turned his head, hoping someone might be sitting just out of view, with a paper plate of potato salad and rolled slices of roast beef on her lap and a plastic cup of ginger ale in her hand. But the ruin persisted. He thought he called out, but the women’s voices in the kitchen and the men’s voices in the yard hummed uninterrupted. He lay on his heap of wreckage, looking up.

The second floor fell on him, with its unfinished pine framing and dead-end plumbing (the capped pipes never joined to the sink and toilet he had once intended to install) and racks of old coats and boxes of forgotten board games and puzzles and broken toys and bags of family pictures-some so old they were exposed on tin plates-all of it came crashing down into the cellar, he unable to even raise a hand to protect his face.

But he was nearly a ghost, almost made of nothing, and so the wood and metal and sheaves of brightly printed cardboard and paper (MOVE FORWARD SIX SPACES TO EASY STREET! Great-Grammy Noddin, shawled and stiff and frowning at the camera, absurd with her hat that looked like a sailor’s funeral mound, heaped with flowers and netting), which otherwise would have crushed his bones, dropped on him and fell away like movie props, he or they facsimiles of former, actual things.

There he lay among the graduation photos and old wool jackets and rusted tools and newspaper clippings about his promotion to head of the mechanical-drawing department at the local high school, and then about his appointment as director of guidance, and then about his retirement and subsequent life as a trader and repairer of antique clocks. The mangled brass works of the clocks he had been repairing were strewn among the mess. He looked up three stories to the exposed support beams of the roof and the plump silver-backed batts of insulation that ran between them. One grandson or another (which?) had stapled the insulation into place years ago and now two or three lengths of it had come loose and lolled down like pink woolly tongues.

The roof collapsed, sending down a fresh avalanche of wood and nails, tarpaper and shingles and insulation. There was the sky, filled with flat-topped clouds, cruising like a fleet of anvils across the blue. George had the watery, raw feeling of being outdoors when you are sick. The clouds halted, paused for an instant, and plummeted onto his head.

The very blue of the sky followed, draining from the heights into that cluttered concrete socket. Next fell the stars, tinkling about him like the ornaments of heaven shaken loose. Finally, the black vastation itself came untacked and draped over the entire heap, covering George’s confused obliteration.

Tinkers by Paul Harding is out now in Amazon, Waterstones.com, Play.com, and your local bookshop.

I started The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake shortly after a phone conversation with a composer named Harold Meltzer.  He had read some of my stories, and called me up to ask if I might be up for collaborating on a piece he was working on.  “Let me tell you my idea,” he said.

He wanted to do a take-off of an concept from a Brecht opera about the seven deadly sins, updating it, he said, to the ’seven abstemious sins’ (which I had to look up).  Basically, he felt the seven deadly sins needed modernizing, and that we were often so indirect in our wants these days– instead of gluttony, how about something on anorexia, about resisting food.  Instead of rage, how about all the passive-aggression?   Instead of greed-well, he figured I could fill in the blanks.  Was I interested?  “Yes!” I said, delighted.  I loved the idea.  And I thought he was truly onto something-it seems the vices of our time are often the covert vices, the ones that don’t quite express what we feel-not lust, but endless watching of hot stars on reality tv; not quite pride, but the inability to say thank you without endless self-deprecation, and on.   

I felt incredibly energized after the call and promptly went and wrote seven short paragraph/monologues.

The food one came easily.  It was about a woman who couldn’t eat the food she made. I didn’t know why.  She just refused to eat it.  But it wasn’t anorexia-I felt that territory had been well covered and there was something different in this woman.  It seemed she wasn’t eating it for a reason I didn’t understand yet.  A few days later, I opened a new file and began the voice that became Rose; I wrote two scenes-one of a food she loved dearly, and another of a food that revealed her own skill and burden to her.  And I could sense that there was something in this dilemma, this power– something I could write about for awhile.  

The piece for Meltzer became its own thing, and when I look at it now, that voice isn’t Rose at all.  He gave me an idea that led to a diving board that led into Rose.   I also have a friend who talks about feelings as something to digest-her own, or other people’s.   Or processed/unprocessed feelings.  Or metabolized/unmetabolized.  All these words for emotion that are the same words we use for food.  The two were matched up in my mind long before Harold’s call, but I do feel so glad and grateful that he called me up out of the blue and told me his idea that led to another idea that freed up this character!

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is out now in Waterstone’s, Amazon, Play, and all good bookshops.