Emphasising the influence of Raymond Chandler's English background, Malcolm Noble encourages a new generation of Chandler readers to look further into this writer's life and work.    "There is so much in Chandler's work that deserves to be expanded, debated and, in most cases, celebrated.   I do hope that this one brief foray will encourage some new readers not only to enjoy that 'smell of fear' when they read his books but also to ask, 'What goes on around here?'...

This book asks how we can reclaim the university for the public good. The editors and contributors argue that the sector is in crisis, accelerated by the passing of the UK Higher Education Research Act in 2017 and made visible during the University and College Union strikes in April 2018. In response to this, there are widespread demands to reclaim the university and protect education as a public good, using co-operative structures. Taking an interdisciplinary and social justice perspectiv...

While composing what would become his most enduring and popular book, E. B. White obeyed that oft-repeated maxim: "Write what you know." Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats-White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favorite hours as a child and adult. Painfully shy, "this boy," White once wrote of himself, "felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people." It's all the more impressive, therefore, how many people have felt a kinsh...

"This is a book for everyone, anyone who likes mystery novels or good writing or wit and passion and intelligence."— The New York TimesOver the course of a fifty-year career, Donald E. Westlake published nearly one hundred books, including two long-running series starring the hard-hitting Parker and the hapless John Dortmunder. With The Getaway Car, we get our first glimpse of another side of Westlake the writer: what he did when he wasn't busy mak...

Ray Bradbury was long the most influential sci-fi writer in the world, the poetic and visionary author of such classics as Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and The Illustrated ManBut he also lived a fascinating life outside the parameters of sci-fi, and was a masterful raconteur of his own story, as he reveals in his wide-ranging and in-depth final interview with his acclaimed biographer, Sam Weller. After moving t...

"Professor Davidson---an accomplished literary critic---offers a focused and balanced analysis of poetry, film, and the arts honed with his excellent knowledge of the latest advances in disability studies. He is brilliant at reading texts in a sophisticated and aesthetically pleasurable way, making Concerto for the Left Hand one of the smartest books to date in disability studies."---Lennard Davis, University of Illinois, Chicago"Moving elegantly among social theori...

Travis McGee & Me is D. R. Martin’s book-by-book personal take on the famous boat bum hero created by John D. MacDonald. The twenty-one McGee novels have been continuously in print since their original publication dates, from 1964 to 1985. Not only have they been tremendously popular with readers, they have inspired generations of crime fiction writers.These essays are partly book reports, and partly Martin’s analyses of McGee and his adventures. They originally appeared—sometimes ...

James M. Cain wrote some of the grittiest novels in American literature, including such classics as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce. James M. Cain: Hard-Boiled Mythmaker is a critical overview of the author's life, work, and legacy. An updated and expanded edition of two of David Madden's scholarly works on Cain, this new book improves upon the previous works by collecting the most essential writing on Cain by Madden into one volume. In addition to meld...

The first fully annotated edition of Raymond Chandler’s 1939 classic The Big Sleep features hundreds of illuminating notes and images alongside the full text of the novel and is an essential addition to any crime fiction fan’s library.One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsA masterpiece of noir, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep helped to define a genre. Today it remains one of the most ce...

Elizabeth Bishop represents a full-scale examination of Bishop's work—poetry, prose, and selected unpublished material—to reveal how personal loss becomes implicated in her vision of self as fluid and unfixed and, at the same time, how gender and sexual identity inform the experience of loss in the act of writing. Susan McCabe argues that Bishop counters modernist claims for an autonomous art object and an impersonal artist; Bishop's writing never represents an escape into perfect...

During the twentieth century, the rise of the concept of Americanization—shedding ethnic origins and signs of "otherness" to embrace a constructed American identity—was accompanied by a rhetoric of personal transformation that would ultimately characterize the American Dream. The theme of self-transformation has remained a central cultural narrative in American literary, political, and sociological texts ranging from Jamestown narratives to immigrant memoirs, from slave narratives to G...

The conflation of the hard-boiled style and war experience has influenced many contemporary crime writers, particularly in the traumatic aftermath of the Vietnam War. Yet, earlier writers in the genre, such as Raymond Chandler, remain overlooked when it comes to examining how their war experience affected their writing. Sarah Trott corrects this oversight by examining Chandler alongside the World War I writers of the Lost Generation as well as highlighting a melding of very different style...