This is the real deal, too, no latter-day imitators, so don’t expect any whitewashed tales. The writers of these stories weren’t always kind to women or anyone with an accent. It’s like an action fiction master class with a little social history piled on top. Otto Penzler poured over yellowed and cracked copies of vintage ten-cent magazines with names like Dime Detectives, Gun Molls, Black Mask Magazine, and Detective Fiction Weekly to come up with these stories and illustrations. He even managed to track down a never-published Dashiell Hammett story, which oughta mean something to anyone who was knocked out by the noir classic The Maltese Falcon.

In his introduction to the first section of the book, Harlan Coban claims, “Ninety percent of the writers out there admit they [read pulp fiction]. Ten percent lie about it.” ? This stuff is so good you’ll never lie about it. Hell, you’ll be proud of it–you’ll be bragging to all your friends that while they may be able to quote Samuel L. Jackson-as-Jules-quoting-Ezekiel 25:17, you’re tight with “The Girl Who Knew Too Much,” “The Invisible Millionaire,” and “The Devil’s Bookkeeper.”

The film will open wide in the US on November 21st. What to do in the meantime? Well, I’ve got this trailer…

What’s in a name? Colson Whitehead addresses this age-old question in his intriguingly-titled Apex Hides the Hurt, a novel that focuses primarily on the character and experiences of a nomenclature consultant who travels to a small rural town undergoing a name-changing crisis. The town’s history, future growth potential, and race relations all fall central to the debate as three different sects of residents clash over what the town should be renamed. Caught in the crossfire, the nameless protagonist must, as an outsider, struggle to uncover the truth about the town’s history and spirit. Interwoven throughout the narrative of the town is the personal story of the consultant’s past. As the story progresses, this conjoining of past and present reveals an inherent connection between the tale of the town and the tale of the protagonist until it gradually becomes apparent that, for the consultant, to rename the town is to rediscover his own soul.

Particularly in a story that centers around the power that words can hold, the author’s poetic descriptions, unusual metaphors, and refreshingly comic phrasings are the true gems of this novel. While the storyline itself is not particularly meaty, the novel never becomes a chore to drudge through, thanks to Whitehead’s fluid, lyrical writing, which trumps the sparseness of the plot. Neither does the writing feel stilted or presumptuous at any point; rather, it flows effortlessly and demonstrates fully Whitehead’s appreciation for and true command of written language. Especially fascinating is the author’s continual use of language to analyze the notion of how names affect perceptions (and, ultimately, the realization of the true character) of the object, place, or person bearing the name. For both connoisseurs of words and lovers of humanity, this carefully crafted novel holds much delight and can honestly be described as a work of literary art.

Reviewed by Ryan Bradley

An old millionaire named General Sternwood lies on his deathbed. His two daughters rack up gambling debts, fall into blackmail plots, get men killed and see men killed. They giggle, bat their eyelashes, sway their hips, and jump into bed with all the racketeers and two-bit hoodlums that populate the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles circa 1939. Rain pours, daylight rarely comes, and Philip Marlow—private eye—attempts to undo the damage the Sternwood girls have wrought. “The Big Sleep” is death. That is, to sleep the big sleep is to die. It is a hard, harsh world that Raymond Chandler manifests, one in which the hero (Marlow) limps home, alone, to nurse a bottle of whiskey and never gets the girl.
Chandler is the master of the hard-boiled detective novel; only Dashiell Hammet approaches such a tightly constructed plot that unravels at such a breakneck pace. Chandler’s style has inspired such varied talents as Charles Bukowski, Paul Auster, and Haruki Murakami (all of them male but more on this in a moment). In the neo-noir film “Brick” (2005, Focus Features) writer/director Rian Johnson mines Chandler and Hammet to construct a modern day hard-boiled detective story set in a Southern California high school. Seven years after “The Big Sleep” was published in 1939, the film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and directed by Howard Hawks hit screens. The feeling of Chandler’s novels is even evoked in Hong Kong cinema—in the films of Wong Kar Wai and the recent, genre-bending “Kung Fu Hustle” by Stephen Chow. Point is, Chandler’s world is as popular, and relevant, as it was nearly 70 years ago. And it’s not just because brogues (wingtips) and fedoras are in style.

Chandler writes with a pop sensibility. There are few pretenses and the voice he gives to his narrator hero is nothing if not straightforward. Marlow says: this is what it is, it is nothing more. His sentences issue forth like bullets from a tommy-gun. Many are startlingly beautiful. Take this example, when Marlow is knocked-out and drifting into unconsciousness:

“There was no sensation in my head. The bright glare got brighter. There was nothing but hard aching white light. Then there was darkness in which something red wriggled like a germ under a microscope. Then there was nothing bright or wriggling, just darkness and emptiness and a rushing wind and a falling as of great trees.”

In Marlow we have a classic hero: One who would just as well his fists do the talking but manages breathtaking precision in his words. He says the right thing always. This is why we love this hard-hearted bastard. He speaks for and to all men who never got the girl, who’d like to say the right thing, who live outside the law yet (mostly) abide it. For men who’d like to win a fistfight and maybe lose a few. Through Marlow, Chandler speaks to every down on his luck bum, barroom philosopher, and general screw-up. In other words, Chandler speaks to men.

Women may, or may not, enjoy “The Big Sleep” too.

 Hottest State Soundtrack

Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an ominously dreamlike and contemplative look at the powerful reach of evil and those who are scarred by its effects. The story begins with the seemingly ordinary disappearance of a household cat. Toru Okada, an unemployed man uncertain of his purpose in life, is given the task of finding the cat by his malcontented and distant wife, who also takes off without any explanation shortly after the novel starts.

In his search for his cat and reasons behind his wife’s departure, he encounters adventures that bring him closer to his purpose as well as many people who each bring to light their various encounters with evil and how they have molded them into the people they are. Through these tales from those who have been “defiled” and his own introspection, Okada gains the power to purify the “defiled” and ultimately overcome the evil in his own story.

Murakami skillfully weaves present-day stories and tales from Japanese-controlled China during World War II into several unified themes. However, these threads can be rather difficult to understand as one. Murakami never gives any overt explanations to the tales or how they link together, and he masks his meanings in surrealist visions. Like Okada, the reader feels as if he or she were wandering in a maze, uncertain of the purpose of everything that is occurring. Despite all this, the story is undeniably compelling and gripping all the way through because of Murakami’s beautiful language and the mysteriousness of its surrealism.

Still, the story becomes truly rewarding if the reader is willing to find his or her own interpretation and piece the puzzle together. Otherwise, it is an arresting but confusing jumble. Murakami’s brilliance is not only in forcing the reader to contemplate the meaning of the story through his use of symbolism and surrealism but he masters the pulpy novel language in his descriptions of violence. While some readers may argue that it is completely unnecessary, the language is so powerfully descriptive and horrifying that it puts the reader straight into the shoes of Okada and those who directly witnessed evil and are ultimately unable to recover from it or erase it from their memory. Similarly, anyone who reads the book will not be able to erase those descriptions from his or her mind, especially if you were one of those people who nearly lost their lunch over one particularly memorable scene.

All in all, a book very much worth your time.

Let’s face it – I’m a sucker for novelty. That, in fact, is what first piqued my interest in Walter Kirn’s : its format is so utterly unique. Kirn first published the novel in January 2006, not in hard-copy format, but as an “Internet novel”, with new updates added every week. Taking full advantage of all the bizarre, interesting, and slightly creepy phenomena available on the Internet, Kirn provides links at certain phrases throughout the story to different videos or websites, some of which seem totally irrelevant and others absolutely crucial to the understanding of the plot. An interactive book! I thought. If nothing else, this will be fun! And it certainly was fun; the prose is very accessible, the plot is infused with intrigue, the characters are quirky, and the web links provide their own continual entertainment.

But does The Unbinding have literary merit, aside from its innovative use of a new medium? When you glue a binding on The Unbinding and ask your readers to navigate to a web page that lists out all of the novel’s original links in chronological order, does it still hold the same appeal, even though it loses its intended format? Absolutely, I contend.

The story centers around Kent Selkirk, a young man who works for a satellite assistance agency, one where customers can purchase ear pieces that give them a constant connection to operators who provide help of all kinds, from driving directions to instructions on putting out gas fires to counseling for depression. At the other end of the spectrum is Rob Robinson, a man hired by the government to shadow Selkirk and determine whether or not he poses a threat to society. As the novel progresses, the lines blur in each man’s uses of technology to aid or observe others, ultimately leading to the question of at what point technologies invented to protect inevitably result in deceitful invasions of privacy. Thus, Kirn’s use of the Internet as the medium for his novel is not just for the sake of innovation. He uses it instead to incorporate directly into his story the precarious power, for better or worse, of modern technology. Though the story’s rhetoric sometimes becomes rather bogged down in obscure references and confusing subtleties, nevertheless Kirn’s novel is a fascinating exploration of both the beneficial and sinister uses of technology and the thin line that separates Big Brother from your guardian angel.

Margaret Atwood is correct when she claims that Orhan Pamuk is literally ‘narrating his country into being’ with the book Snow. More than anything else, this novel of a lost poet in search of love and inspiration in small town Turkey concerns itself with heady political, social, and spiritual questions unique to modern-day Turkey. The author treats these debates with care and prudence, and these debates in many ways reflect the ongoing debate about Turkey’s (in/ex)clusion to the European Union, making the novel incredibly relevant to Easterners and Westerners alike.

While the philosophical and spiritual deliberations in the novel are fascinating from a non-Turkish perspective, the storyline gets bogged down in these ongoing arguments. None of the characters, especially the protagonist poet Ka, stands on his or her own. They’re merely sketches of particular aspects of modern-day Turkey (i.e. Ka as the confused atheist, the revolutionary Blue as the radical Islamist, the actor Sunay Zaim as the artistic pro-Westerner). The characters speak with seemingly no inner monologue, commenting upon modern-day Turkey in prolonged soliloquies. While the debating remains far from tiresome, the storyline suffers immensely at its expense. The novel eventually concludes with a ludicrous faux play/assassination. Despite its narrative shortcomings, this remains essential reading in today’s post-colonial world, but be forewarned: the novel is all head, no heart.

Mason LaVerle sets out from an isolated Montana commune seeking to replenish the gene pool of his dwindling, inbred religious sect, the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles. What he finds is that the only people willing, or even likely, to come back with him could use some pretty serious help themselves. In Walter Kirn’s book everyone is in need of being saved. Besides the Apostles tucked away in Bluff, there are teenage Wiccans, new-age environmentalists, trust-fund ranchers, a harried writer, a failed actress, even a herd of buffalo; all seem perfect candidates for a little earthly salvation as prescribed in the pages of the Apostles’ newsletter, Luminaria (except the buffalo, who of course can’t read).

Then there’s Mason’s partner, Elder Stark, whose venture into America finds him lacking in moral and dietary fiber. It’s Mason’s pairing with Stark that allows a novel stuffed with the low-brow schlock Americans digest these days—served up both through television sets and drive-thru windows—to read so fresh. The Apostles have lived for over a century with a healthy diet, matriarchal leadership and an aversion to the free market. Kirn flings his characters onto the American highway with minimal introduction, beyond rumor, to life outside of Bluff. Their attempts at humor and at dressing fashionably—to say nothing of attracting mates—forces the pair to come up against life, real life, with all the expectations and cynicism of toddlers.

As Elder Stark falls prey to buckets of fried chicken and reality t.v., Mason is left to comb the Colorado ski town in which they’ve landed for someone receptive to his message, all the while fearing that the way of life he extols is being eviscerated by the very man funding the mission (with his winnings from a reality t.v. show, it so happens). Stark, angling for a big donation, becomes the landowning Effinghams’ gopher; Mason falls in love with a woman and is asked to destroy, rather than save, a buffalo; the tenets that hold together Bluff, if Mason can believe the piecemeal reports, are crumbling. What starts as a simple story about good and less good becomes a not-so-simple one along the same lines: everyone stil