A miscellany of links: Link Comes to Harlem
-They are a little late to the party and don’t say anything that we didn’t already know, but I pass it along any way. “There is a very good reason why some public libraries have separate shelves for literary and genre fiction: The average reader—along with many librarians, booksellers, publishers, critics, scholars, and fiction writers—tends to think of these categories as binary opposites, separated by a gulf of taste and ambition. One is high culture, the other low. One is respectable and serious (or, depending on your point of view, elitist and pompous), the other disreputable and shallow (or democratic and entertaining). The general—if somewhat unexamined—feeling is that ne’er the twain shall meet.
But the twain are meeting, more and more, in the books of some of America’s most celebrated novelists. Aspects of detective and crime novels, thrillers, science fiction and fantasy, horror, westerns, comics, and other subgenres are increasingly showing up in variously transmogrified forms, with and without ironic quotation marks, in works of literary fiction.”
-A funny anecdote about women visiting their men in jail
-For all of you collectors out there all about book repair
-Review: Health Agent by Jeffrey Thomas
-Scars by Warren Ellis goes into second printing.
-Over at The Big Adios they are talking about Watchmen (the lawsuit better not derail this)
-And they are also discussing the fifth season of The Wire
-Duane has a picture of David Goodis on the beach and points us in the direction an online photo album
-Review: The Mystery Class by Jincy Willett
-Review: Turing Hoppber A.I. by Donna Andrew’s. This sounds interesting.
-Down with the internet, long live the internet
-Crimespace is talking Goodis too
-Peter Rozovsky gives us the lowdown on Ian Sansom’s Mobile Library series
-Worth reading just for the final line
-Review: Volk’s Game by Brent Ghelfi
-Some thoughts on The Boy In The Striped Pajamas
-Review: Dark Canvas by Jody Summers
-The Blippr peeps are all over the map when it comes to both the book and movie adaptation of No Country For Old Men
August 26th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
I’m about to make a post that will touch on authors’ receptions as genre writers and just plain serious authors. As nearly as I can figure out, practical considerations, such as the ones you cite for libraries, are a prime reason for maintaining the distinction, at least for now. Most readers will look for Raymond Chandler in the mystery section of their library or bookshop even now that the Library of America has published him.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
“Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home”
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/