Raymond Chandler fue, junto con Dashiell Hammett, el renovador y el maestro indiscutido del género policiaco. Sus siete novelas tienen una categoría literaria sorprendente en un campo en el que nadie, hasta aquel momento, esperaba calidad. Y es que Chandler era, ante todo, un escritor inteligente. Despedido de su empleo como ejecutivo de una compañía petrolera por su afición a la bebida, el hombre que reveló el lado oscuro de la opulenta sociedad...

Howard Norman spent the fall of 1977 in Churchill, Manitoba, translating into English two dozen "Noah stories" told to him by an Inuit elder. The folktales reveal what happened when the biblical Noah sailed his Ark into Hudson Bay in search of woolly mammoths and lost his way. By turns startling, tragic, and comical, these inimitable narratives tell the history of the Arctic and capture the collision of cultures precipitated by the arrival of a hapless...

A startling and at times unsettlingly prescient collection of J.G. Ballard's greatest interviews. J.G. Ballard was a literary giant. Best known for his controversial bestseller 'Crash' and the memoir 'Empire of the Sun', he was a writer of unique talent - always surprising, frequently prescient. Such acuity was not exclusive to his novels and, as this book reminds us, Ballard's restive intelligence sharpened itself in dialogue. He entertained many...

This 1878 volume in the English Men of Letters series explores the life of Edward Gibbon, author of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. According to a contemporary review by Mark Pattison in the Academy, "Future numbers of the series may imitate, they cannot surpass, the present specimen." A splendid perspective on the life of an intriguing man.

Mariano Santiago de Jesús de la Bárcena Ramos fue, al igual que muchos personajes del siglo xix, un hombre multifacético que se desarrolló en un sinfín de oficios talabartero, artista, ingeniero, profesor, paleontólogo, geólogo, delegado en exposiciones industriales y científicas, director de un museo industrial y de un observatorio meteorológico, hacendado y político. Destacó a nivel internacional en geología y paleontología, al grado...

Cuando tenía veintisiete años, se hundió la bolsa. Cuando tenía veintiocho, me hundí yo. Entonces, supongo, me desperté. De este modo, cuando estaba a punto de cumplir los treinta, empecé a ganarme la vida escribiendo. Esta es la historia de un negro que quiso ganarse la vida con sus poemas y sus cuentos. Divago mientras vago, la segunda de sus autobiografías, es un libro de viajes en el que su autor pone de manifiesto su perspicacia para...

Henry Dumas (1934-1968) was a writer who did not live to see most of his fiction and poetry in print. A son of Sweet Home, Arkansas, and Harlem, he devoted himself to the creation of a black literary cosmos, one in which black literature and culture were windows into the human condition. While he certainly should be understood in the context of the cultural and political movements of the 1960s-Black Arts, Black Power, and Civil Rights-his writing,...

Published in 1881, this volume of the English Men of Letters series was written by a man who had been both friend and editor to Thomas De Quincey. As such, it is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the life of one of Victorian England's most unusual writers, the author of ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” (1821).

L'écrivain du Maine, comme beaucoup l'appellent, était prédestiné à devenir le meilleur écrivain d'horreur de l'Histoire. C'est ce que nous démontre sa carrière littéraire. En dépit des centaines de refus qu'il dut essuyer à l'époque de ses premières nouvelles et de ses premiers romans, le destin était écrit : le clou qui tenait les lettres de refus finit par tomber. Stephen King commença à écrire à l'âge de huit ans et il publierait...

Raise the windsock. Read the compass. Ride where the wind wills it. Late 2010. From the end of fall to the beginning of winter, Daniel Canty becomes a wind seeker. Aboard the Blue Rider, a venerable midnight-blue Ford Ranger crested with a weathervane and a retractable windsock, he surrenders himself to the fluidity of air currents. The adventure leads him and artist driver Patrick Beaulieu from the plains of the Midwest up to Chicago, the Windy City,...