Download or read book A Swell Looking Babe written by Jim Thompson and published by Mulholland Books. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was supposed to be only a temporary job -- something to pay the bills until Dusty could get his feet back on the ground and raise enough money for medical school. After all, there's nothing wrong with being a bellboy at a respectable hotel like the Manton -- that is, until she came along. Marcia Hillis. The perfect woman. Beautiful. Experienced. Older and wiser. The only woman to ever measure up to that other her -- the one whose painful rejection Dusty can't quite put from his mind. But while Dusty has designs on Marcia, Marcia has an agenda of her own. One that threatens to pull the Manton inside-out, use Dusty up for all he's worth and leave him reeling and on the run, the whole world at his heels. A richly-imagined crime narrative of the Oedipal and betrayal, A Swell-Looking Babe is Thompson at his very best -- a cornerstone in Thompson's enduring legacy as the Dimestore Dostoyevsky of American fiction.
Download or read book A Swell looking Girl written by Erskine Caldwell and published by . This book was released on 196? with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Killer Inside Me written by Jim Thompson and published by Mulholland Books. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Killer Inside Me, America's "Dimestore Dostoevsky" Jim Thompson goes where few novelists have dared to go, giving us a pitch-black glimpse into the mind of the American Serial Killer years before Charles Manson and Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho, in the novel that will forever be known as the master performance of one of the greatest crime novelists of all time. Everyone in the small town of Central City, Texas loves Lou Ford. A deputy sheriff, Lou's known to the small-time criminals, the real-estate entrepreneurs, and all of his coworkers — the low-lifes, the big-timers, and everyone in-between — as the nicest guy around. He may not be the brightest or the most interesting man in town, but nevertheless, he's the kind of officer you're happy to have keeping your streets safe. The sort of man you might even wish your daughter would end up with someday. But behind the platitudes and glad-handing lurks a monster the likes of which few have seen. An urge that has already claimed multiple lives, and cost Lou his brother Mike, a self-sacrificing construction worker fell to his death on the job in what was anything but an accident. A murder that Lou is determined to avenge — and if innocent people have to die in the process, well, that's perfectly all right with him.
Download or read book The Transgressors written by Jim Thompson and published by Mulholland Books. This book was released on 2012-07-01 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deputy sheriff Tom Lord knows by now that far-west Texas is the place he'll always call home. He's spent too much time in the region's small towns to adapt to another place. And that's all right with him. What's not all right is being a deputy sheriff, where if it weren't for family misfortune, he might have been a doctor instead. Lord's got one ace-in-the-hole -- the land deed that makes him the biggest landowner in the county, just as the oil companies have started to move in. When Tom's approached by Aaron McBride of Highlands Oil and Gas with a contract to set up pipelines on his property, he's more than happy to sign on the dotted line with barely more than a cursory glance at the paperwork -- it just might be Lord's way out of a life he never wanted in the first place. But when Lord finds out just what that contract entailed, things start to go sour for Aaron McBride -- and fast. Because in this Texas town, Lord's the law -- and there's nothing more dangerous than a cop with nothing left to lose.
Download or read book Love and Other Wounds written by Jordan Harper and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-07-07 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the hard-edged tradition of Hubert Selby Jr., Daniel Woodrell, and Donald Ray Pollock, and with the fresh, complex humanity of Breaking Bad and Reservoir Dogs, a blistering debut collection that unsparingly confronts the extreme, brutal parts of the human heart. A man runs away from his grave and into a maelstrom of bullets and fire. A Hollywood fixer finds love over the corpse of a dead celebrity. A morbidly obese woman imagines a new life with the jewel thief who is scheming to rob the store where she works. A man earns the name “Mad Dog” and lives to regret it. Denizens of the shadows who live outside the law—from the desolate meth labs of the Ozark Mountains to the dog-fighting rings of Detroit to the lavish Los Angeles mansions of the rich and famous—the characters in Love and Other Wounds all thirst for something seemingly just beyond their reach. Some are on the run, pursued by the law or propelled relentlessly forward by a dangerous past that is disturbingly close. Others are searching for a semblance of peace and stability, and even love, in a fractured world defined by seething violence and ruthless desperation. All are bruised, pushed to their breaking point and beyond, driven to extremes they never imagined. Crackling with cinematic energy, raw and disquieting yet filled with pathos and a darkly vital humor, Love and Other Wounds is an unforgettable debut from an electrifying new voice.
Download or read book Pop 1280 written by Jim Thompson and published by Mulholland Books. This book was released on 2011-12-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nick Corey is a terrible sheriff on purpose. He doesn't solve problems, enforce rules or arrest criminals. He knows that nobody in tiny Potts County actually wants to follow the law and he is perfectly content lazing about, eating five meals a day, and sleeping with all the eligible women. Still, Nick has some very complex problems to deal with. Two local pimps have been sassing him, ruining his already tattered reputation. His girlfriend Rose is being terrorized by her husband. And then, there's his wife and her brother Lenny who won't stop troubling Nick's already stressed mind. Are they a little too close for a brother and a sister? With an election coming up, Nick needs to fix his problems and fast. Because the one thing Nick does know is that he will do anything to stay sheriff. Because, as it turns out, Sheriff Nick Corey is not nearly as dumb as he seems. In Pop. 1280, widely regarded as a classic of mid-20th century crime, Thompson offers up one of his best, in a tale of lust, murder, and betrayal in the Deep South that was the basis for the critically acclaimed French film Coup de Torchon.
Download or read book A Swell looking Girl American Girl written by Erskine Caldwell and published by New York : New American Library. This book was released on 1950 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Thinner written by Stephen King and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The 'extraordinary' (Booklist) novel of one man's quest to find the source of his nightmare and to reverse it before he becomes...nothing at all. This #1 national bestseller from Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman, "pulsates with evil...it will have you on the edge of your seat" (Publishers Weekly)"--
Download or read book America Noir written by David Cochran and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In America Noir David Cochran details how ten writers and filmmakers challenged the social pieties prevalent during the Cold War, such as the superiority of the American democracy, the benevolence of free enterprise, and the sanctity of the suburban family. Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone featured victims of vast, faceless, bureaucratic powers. Jim Thompson's noir thrillers, such as The Grifters, portrayed the ravages of capitalism on those at the bottom of the social ladder. Patricia Highsmith, in The Talented Mr. Ripley, placed an amoral con man in an international setting, implicitly questioning America's fitness as leader of the free world. Charles Willeford's pulp novels, such as Wild Wives and Woman Chaser, depicted the family as a hotbed of violence and chaos. These artists pioneered a detached, ironic sensibility that radically juxtaposed cultural references and blurred the distinctions between “high” and “low” art. Their refusal to surrender to the pressures for political conformity and their unflinching portrayal of the underside of American life paved the way for the emergence of a 1960s counterculture that forever changed the way America views itself.
Download or read book Professional Feature Writing written by Bruce Garrison and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-10-16 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professional Feature Writing provides the basics of news media feature writing and establishes a solid foundation for students and writers making feature writing their career. This fifth edition offers a thorough and up-to-date look at newspaper, magazine, newsletter, and online publications, with emphasis on daily newspapers and consumer magazines. It serves as a comprehensive introduction to feature writing, emphasizing writing skills, article types, and the collegiate and professional writing life. With a wide variety of perspectives and experiences of both young and experienced writers, editors, publishers, and professors, the text is filled with practical guidance for writing a wide variety of features. Emphasizing writing values to strengthen a new writer's journalistic practices, author Bruce Garrison offers insights and expertise based on his own experience and the advice of professionals. He also includes lists of tips, observations, guidelines, sources, and story ideas, and gives a solid tour of the forms and approaches to feature writing. New for this edition are: Updated examples of feature writing, integrated throughout the text Profiles of young newspaper and magazine feature writers, highlighting their experiences and paths to success in the profession Coverage of computer-based research tools for writers, including discussion of on-line computer-based research tools with specific focus on the World Wide Web Discussion of online newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and original online publications and the role of feature writing for electronic publications. Each chapter includes excerpts and complete articles from the nation's leading publications. Building on introductory writing and reporting skills, this text is appropriate for upper-division journalism students learning feature writing and advanced writing topics. It will also serve as a valuable resource for freelance writers.
Download or read book On Kubrick written by James Naremore and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Kubrick provides an illuminating critical account of the films of Stanley Kubrick, from his earliest feature, Fear and Desire (1953), to the posthumously-produced A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001). The book offers provocative analysis of each of Kubrick's films, together with new information about their production histories and cultural contexts. Its ultimate aim is to provide a concise yet thorough discussion that will be useful as both an academic text and a trade publication. James Naremore argues that in several respects Kubrick was one of the cinema's last modernists: his taste and sensibility were shaped by the artistic culture of New York in the 1950s; he became a celebrated auteur who forged a distinctive style; he used art-cinema conventions in commercial productions; he challenged censorship regulations; and throughout his career he was preoccupied with one of the central themes of modernist art – the conflict between rationality and its ever-present shadow, the unconscious. War and science are key concerns in Kubrick's oeuvre, and his work has a hyper-masculine quality. Yet no director has more relentlessly emphasized the absurdity of combat, as in Paths of Glory (1957) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), the failure of scientific reasoning, as in 2001 (1968), and the fascistic impulses in masculine sexuality, as in Dr Strangelove (1964) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The book also argues that while Kubrick was a voracious intellectual and a life-long autodidact, the fascination of his work has less to do with the ideas it espouses than with the emotions it evokes. Often described as 'cool' or 'cold,' Kubrick is best understood as a skillful practitioner of what might be called the aesthetics of the grotesque; he employs extreme forms of caricature and black comedy to create disgusting, frightening yet also laughable images of the human body, creating a sense of unease that leaves viewers unsure of how to react.
Download or read book Violent Screen written by Stephen Hunter and published by Bancroft Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gun buff, movie critic and bestselling author of Dirty White Boys, Stephen Hunter takes aim at 13 years of violence on the big screen, hitting the highlights and the lowlifes, the thrills, the chills, and the kills, with deadly precision, explosive prose and devastating good humor.
Download or read book Gumshoe America written by Sean McCann and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-12-06 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Gumshoe America Sean McCann offers a bold new account of the hard-boiled crime story and its literary and political significance. Illuminating a previously unnoticed set of concerns at the heart of the fiction, he contends that mid-twentieth-century American crime writers used the genre to confront and wrestle with many of the paradoxes and disappointments of New Deal liberalism. For these authors, the same contradictions inherent in liberal democracy were present within the changing literary marketplace of the mid-twentieth-century United States: the competing claims of the elite versus the popular, the demands of market capitalism versus conceptions of quality, and the individual versus a homogenized society. Gumshoe America traces the way those problems surfaced in hard-boiled crime fiction from the1920s through the 1960s. Beginning by using a forum on the KKK in the pulp magazine Black Mask to describe both the economic and political culture of pulp fiction in the early twenties, McCann locates the origins of the hard-boiled crime story in the genre’s conflict with the racist antiliberalism prominent at the time. Turning his focus to Dashiell Hammett’s career, McCann shows how Hammett’s writings in the late 1920s and early 1930s moved detective fiction away from its founding fables of social compact to the cultural alienation triggered by a burgeoning administrative state. He then examines how Raymond Chandler’s fiction, unlike Hammett’s, idealized sentimental fraternity, echoing the communitarian appeals of the late New Deal. Two of the first crime writers to publish original fiction in paperback—Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford—are examined next in juxtaposition to the popularity enjoyed by their contemporaries Mickey Spillane and Ross Macdonald. The stories of the former two, claims McCann, portray the decline of the New Deal and the emergence of the rights-based liberalism of the postwar years and reveal new attitudes toward government: individual alienation, frustration with bureaucratic institutions, and dissatisfaction with the growing vision of America as a meritocracy. Before concluding, McCann turns to the work of Chester Himes, who, in producing revolutionary hard-boiled novels, used the genre to explore the changing political significance of race that accompanied the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Combining a striking reinterpretation of the hard-boiled crime story with a fresh view of the political complications and cultural legacies of the New Deal, Gumshoe America will interest students and fans of the genre, and scholars of American history, culture, and government.
Download or read book Savage Art written by Robert Polito and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1996-10-01 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book New Deal Modernism written by Michael Szalay and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-12-29 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVArgues that the writers of the 30s and 40s--Hemingway, Ayn Rand, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, Wallace Stevens et al. -- identified and understood the formal problems of literary modernism through an idea of the social and an idiom of s/div
Download or read book A Checklist of Jim Thompson written by and published by Ultramarine Publishing. This book was released on with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bedelia written by Vera Caspary and published by The Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “You must read Bedelia”, the seductive black-widow thriller by the author of the classic film noir, Laura (The New York Times). Charlie Horst has returned with his new bride, Bedelia, to his family home in Connecticut. Indulgently infatuated, Charlie is the luckiest man alive. What’s not to love about Bedelia? She’s gorgeous and complacent. She’s also a gracious and ideal party host—luscious and decorative in blue velvet. And in public, she plays the part of worshipful wife to perfection. In private, even more so. Who can blame Charlie for overlooking her little deceptions? Or for not paying any mind to her contradictory claims about her past? When Charlie falls ill due to a freak poisoning, Charlie knows that Bedelia will be right his side, watching him closely. But who’s watching Bedelia? “Vera Caspary wrote thrillers—but not like any other author of her time, male or female. Her specialty was a specific type that she pioneered—the psycho thriller” (Huffington Post) and this “sinister entertainment” (The New Yorker), is Caspary at “her most chilling” (SistersinCrime.com). Filmed in 1946, and starring Margaret Lockwood, it’s “a tour de force of psychological suspense . . . Desperate Housewives meets Double Indemnity in Bedelia” (Liahna Armstrong, President Emeritus, Popular Culture Association).
