Win a Copy of The Losing Role on Goodreads

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To celebrate the two novels coming out this fall, I’m giving away paperback copies of The Losing Role on Goodreads. Here's a shortcut:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Losing Role by Steve Anderson

The Losing Role

by Steve Anderson

Giveaway ends July 02, 2014.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

The Losing Role is a prequel to the second release coming in November: Liberated: A Novel of Germany, 1945. Down-and-out German actor Max Kaspar, the main character in The Losing Role, is the older brother of US Army Captain Harry Kaspar in Liberated. More stories involving the brothers Kaspar are in the works. 

Kindle Singles Now Out as Audiobooks

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My nonfiction Kindle Singles Sitting Ducks and Double-Edged Sword are now available as audiobooks, narrated by the talented Max Roll. It's a treat to hear the stories dramatized so well from an actor with such range and feel for characters. 

Produced by Audible Studios, the audiobooks can be downloaded from Audible, Amazon US and UK and iTunes (here and here) and are priced right owing to their relatively short length. Audible members can even get them for free, I'm told.

Enjoy the listen!

The Big News: Two Novels Coming in Fall 2014

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It's been a long time coming, but I'm pleased and excited as hell to finally announce that two of my novels are being released later this year from Yucca Publishing, a new imprint of Skyhorse Publishing in New York City. Look for print, e-book, and possibly audio versions. 

Under False Flags: A Novel releases in early September. The story is set in WWII, in 1944: An American GI and a German sailor, each pushed to their limits in grueling combat, desert together after being stranded during the Battle of the Bulge and team up to help the GI return to his lover in war-ravaged Belgium. More here. 

In early November comes Liberated: A Novel of Germany, 1945. In US-occupied Bavaria, an ambitious American captain, Harry Kaspar, aims to solve a grisly torture-murder, but the clues lead Harry to a corrupt American-run plunder racket he can only stop with a risky con that ends in a bloody showdown. More on that here. 

It's turning out to be a big year for new releases with more to come, including my translations of best-selling German fiction. 

Check back for the latest, join the email list if you like, and thanks for reading and passing the word. 

Big Translation Update: Kindle Single, Novels

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Along with own writing, I've been translating German works into English, by far the best excuse for a day job I've ever come up with. Releasing March 25 is my translation of the German Kindle Single Alexanderplatz, Berlin by the incomparable journalist and columnist Georg Diez.

Berlin's Alexanderplatz square has long survived as the symbol of a city burdened by its ruinous past. Author Diez pursues the mystery of Alexanderplatz in a narrative at once contentious and sincere. He portrays a city shaking free of the cultural pathos that defined it, even as its citizens wrestle with the legacies of Hitler and an East German regime that isolated the square before the Berlin Wall fell.

In his imaginative prose, Diez describes a historical icon unleashed in modern Germany, fueled by unbridled enterprise and consumerism. Along the way, he takes the status quo to task and unveils a provocative view of the German capital in a troubled era.

The original German version was nominated for the Reporter-Forum 2013 Reporting Prize in the "freestyle" (Freistil) category, rewarding innovative narratives and coverage that transcend conventional journalism. Georg Diez has contributed to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday edition, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Get Alexanderplatz, Berlin (Kindle Single) by Georg Diez at Amazon US or Amazon UK. Or, find the original Alexanderplatz at Amazon DE.

Published by AmazonCrossing, the Kindle Single is the latest of several translation projects. Recently I completed novels from German publisher Sutton Verlag, all currently on submission:

• Dunkle Tage (2006), Gunnar Kunz, historical mystery
• Westend Blues (2009), Helmut Barz, contemporary crime thriller
• Die Göring-Verschwörung (2010), Achim Müller Hale, historical espionage/mystery

Also, I'm happy to report that I'm translating bestselling German author Alexander Hartung's crime novel Bis alle Schuld beglichen (Until the Debt is Paid), the first in a series to be published by AmazonCrossing starting in 2014. 

Operation Greif as 1960s TV Drama

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At 5:15 a.m. on this day in 1944, a surprise and massive German attack drove through the complacent and thinly spread American front lines along the freezing, densely forested Belgian border. The Ardennes Offensive had sparked the Battle of the Bulge. It was total war distilled to all its bloody, bitter and monstrous elements. 

Amid the bloodletting, one obscure mission was more absurd than most. Hitler had ordered a unit formed that would impersonate American troops behind the lines, capture crucial bridges, and wreak general havoc. The overall plan was called Operation Greif. The angle: Find German soldiers who could speak English, dress them up like American GIs and officers, and send them over in captured American vehicles. It was cowboy stuff, a guerrilla swindle. At this late stage in a lost war, the crippled German military could only depend on shock and deception. 

In ensuing legend, this desperate last-ditch measure was a frightening and deadly ploy. The reality was far different, the operation more or less a disaster. Among the Germans taking part in Operation Greif, most could barely speak English and the few who could well enough had been waiters, dancers, writers, and students and were far from ideal soldiers let alone crack terrorists. Hitler and his commanders had resorted to throwing disguised dupes at the overwhelming enemy. On Germany's home front, millions had started believing in miracles, the wonder weapon that would still save them. This was the actual Wunderwaffe, their own form of kamikaze attack. 

The would-be Greif commandos were never really a threat apart from the panic they caused. Regardless, wartime and postwar accounts as well as popular histories have played up these reputedly notorious teams of false flag agents. The mantra has been rehashed in articles, books, movies. In the star-studded 1965 epic Battle of the Bulge, they are perfectly trained, American-speaking Teutonic machines. 

The other day I discovered another gem: an American TV dramatization from 1964 for the Kraft Suspense Theatre. Titled "Operation Greif," it lives up to most misconceptions about the mission and goes further to include a summertime French setting (instead of wintery Belgium) and correspondingly bogus stock footage: 

Sure, it's one-dimensional but not too bad, considering that this same era brought us Hogan's Heroes. It could have been far more campy. It has decent acting — from Robert Goulet and Claude Akins especially, but also offers a degree of realism. The plot is not all pat. The transformed hero isn't the obvious one. It's more along the lines of the hard-edged series Combat!. And yet, I suspect that these kind of shows spoke more to those who didn't quite reach the front lines, who just missed prolonged combat. For those vets who had been the real GIs "up on the line" (a tiny percentage of those near the front, in WWII or any war for that matter), nothing could ever come close to the true horror. Twenty years before, deep in the dark and the cold shit of their foxholes, they had not called it the "meat grinder" for nothing.

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I've written about Operation Greif in the novel The Losing Role and a brief nonfiction history, Sitting Ducks.

 

New Site, New "Latest"

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The new website has arrived! Look for the latest news and items of note here. The Latest archive includes select stories from the old website and years' past — have a look below and in the archive to the right. Thanks for stopping by. Please consider signing up for the email newsletter while you're here. 

Update May 28, 2014: Comments are now available for most entries.