Noir/Hardboiled
James Ellroy Reveals the Real Reason He Writes
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“A literature that cannot be vulgarized is no literature at all, and will not last.” Frank O’Connor laid it out. He wrote the words at the cusp of the 20th century. Said words prophesied the hard-boiled novel. Hard-boiled scorched its artistic debut on February 1, 1929. Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, hit bookstores. Hammett’s…
Joyce Carol Oates on Women and the Roots of Body Horror
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Of mythological figures of antiquity, none are more monstrous than harpies, furies, gorgons—Scylla and Charybdis, Lamia, Chimera, Sphinx—nightmare creatures representing, to the affronted male gaze, the perversion of “femininity”: the female who in her physical being repulses sexual desire, rather than arousing it; the female who has repudiated the traditional role of submission, subordination, maternal…
The Backlist: Revisiting Vicki Hendricks’ ‘Miami Purity’ with Alex Segura
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I didn’t know what to expect from a novel called Miami Purity. Was it about nuns, or one of those creepy abstinence-only pledges for teens? I had no idea that the novel was a neo-noir cult classic, one that Megan Abbott in her introduction lauds for “its audacious and subversive play with a tradition it…