Collects:
CRIME NOVELS: AMERICAN NOIR OF THE 1930s & 40s
"The Postman Always Rings Twice" by James M.?Cain
"They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" by Horace McCoy
"Thieves Like Us" by Edward Anderson
"The Big Clock" by Kenneth Fearing
"Nightmare Alley" by William Lindsay Gresham
"I Married a Dead Man" by Cornell Woolrich
990 pages - 978-1-883011-46-8 Library of America volume #94
CRIME NOVELS: AMERICAN NOIR OF THE 1950s
"The Killer Inside Me" by Jim Thompson
"The Talented Mr. Ripley" by Patricia Highsmith
"Pick-Up" by Charles Willeford
"Down There" by David Goodis
"The Real Cool Killers" by Chester Himes
892 pages - 978-1-883011-49-9 Library of America volume #95
This adventurous two-volume collection presents a rich vein of modern American writing too often neglected in mainstream literary histories. Evolving out of the terse and violent hardboiled style of the pulp magazines, noir fiction expanded over the decades into a varied and innovative body of writing. Tapping deep roots in the American literary imagination, the novels in this volume explore themes of crime, guilt, deception, obsessive passion, murder, and the disintegrating psyche. With visionary and often subversive force they create a dark and violent mythology out of the most commonplace elements of modern life. The raw power of their vernacular style has profoundly influenced contemporary American culture and writing.

This title, first published in 1987, comprises of three essays which examine Lord Byron's poetry. Some of Byron's most famous poems are examined, including Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

This title, first published in 1987, comprises of three essays which examine Lord Byron's poetry. Some of Byron's most famous poems are examined, including Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

Hollywood & God is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing - even lurid-hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today's Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton (an impersonator of a different sort), Robert Polito tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who we think we are, fade in and out of consciousness, like flickers of light dancing tantalizingly on the silver screen. Mixing lyric and essay, collage and narrative, memoir and invention, Hollywood & God is an audacious book, as contemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious.

This adventurous volume, with its companion devoted to the 1950s, presents a rich vein of modern American writing too often neglected in mainstream literary histories. Evolving out of the terse and violent hardboiled style of the pulp magazines, noir fiction expanded over the decades into a varied and innovative body of writing. Tapping deep roots in the American literary imagination, the novels in this volume explore themes of crime, guilt, deception, obsessive passion, murder, and the disintegrating psyche. With visionary and often subversive force they create a dark and violent mythology out of the most commonplace elements of modern life. The raw power of their vernacular style has profoundly influenced contemporary American culture and writing. Far from formulaic, they are ambitious works which bend the rules of genre fiction to their often experimental purposes.

"Doubles" is at once tough-minded and urbane, veering from lyricism to street slang, oscillating with the beat of the American city. As his title suggests, Polito's world is one of doubling, simulation, impersonation, and mimicry--a shrewd vision of urban life.

The three classic novels published here in one volume are rich with the crisp prose, subtle characters, and intricate plots that made Dashiell Hammett one of the most admired writers of the twentieth century.

A one-time detective and a master of deft understatement, Hammett virtually invented the hard-boiled crime novel. In THE MALTESE FALCON, Sam Spade, a private eye with his own solitary code of ethics, tangles with a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. THE THIN MAN introduces Hammett's wittiest creations, Nick and Nora Charles, who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. And in RED HARVEST, Hammett's anonymous tough-guy detective, the Continental Op, takes on the entire town of Poisonville in a deadly war against corruption.

"Hollywood & God" is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing - even lurid - hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today's Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton (an impersonator of a different sort), Polito tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who (we think) we think we are, fade in and out of consciousness, like flickers of light dancing tantalizingly on the silver screen. Mixing lyric and essay, collage and narrative, memoir and invention, "Hollywood & God" is an audacious book, as contemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious.

"Such was the battle that raged between Cousin K and me: good done badly; evil done well." And such is the twisted logic of good and bad, right and wrong, knitted into this novella by one of the most powerful voices to emerge from North Africa in our time. With his father brutally killed as a traitor during a national liberation war and his older brother an army officer far away, the young narrator lives reclusively with his mother, who scorns him. He turns to his young cousin for affection, only to be mocked and humiliated so deeply that his love becomes hopelessly entangled with hatred. Fate places a young woman in the narrator's path when he rescues her from a violent attack, and the reawakening of his confused passions proceeds toward terrible vengeance. In this nameless narrator's tormented reflections, played out against the backdrop of an indifferent world, Yasmina Khadra plumbs the mysteries of the crippled heart's desires.

Robert Polito recounts Thompson's relationship with his father, a disgraced Oklahoma sheriff, with the women he adored in life and murdered on the page, with alcohol, would-be censors, and Hollywood auteurs. Unrelenting and empathetic, casting light into the darker caverns of our collective psyche, Savage Art is an exemplary homage to an American original. A National Book Critics Circle Award winner. 57 photos.