It’s been awhile since I cleaned out the traps so its a big one this time. Here are a bunch of links of what’s happening elsewhere around the community.
Check them out after the jump.
-On April 26th, 2011 we will have a new Jean-Patrick Manchette book called Fatale!
-Jed Ayres reviews Animal Kingdom
-Bookslut needs a new Mystery Strumpet
-Adrian McKinty on A Prophet
-How the Paris Review conducts an interview
-How the British came to dominate Batman
-On unintentional literary biases
There are ways that our reading is shaped and limited by the biases of the dominant literary gatekeepers–maybe without realizing it, we’ve only read books by people of a certain race, or who write in a certain language, or who follow the conventions of a certain genre (including the unnamed genre of Anglo-American Serious Fiction). To some people this is the great opportunity in the coming bookquake, the chance to disintermediate some of those gatekeepers and their peculiar, ossified biases. But the real bias may be inside of us, as readers, and we might have to force ourselves out of them to take advantage of these new opportunities. How exciting is it to consider that there are worlds of literature out there that you may not have tapped into, undiscovered countries of books to explore that might yet tell you something new in a new way?
-Nick Mamatas on Steig Larsson
-The plot for your next heist novel
-Matthew Cheney reviews Mother
-The Caustic Cover Critic on Larsson
-A review of the script for Drive
-In praise of movies for adults
They tell stories about people and situations that children (and the childishly minded) either cannot understand or aren’t interested in. And they tell them in ways that demand engagement from the viewer, rather than slack-jawed spectatorship. These aren’t “shows.” They’re situations involving somewhat believable adults involved in emotional and sometimes moral conundrums. And you don’t always know whom to root for, or if you should root for anyone.
-Hal Duncan’s three rules for writers and a fourth
The whole thing is interesting (as Duncan’s posts tend to be) but as someone who has said before that the mystery/crime genre worships at the altar of transparent prose I found the following section interesting.
3b. Is that one paragraph or two, two paragraphs or one? If you were reading the opening of a scene to an audience, how many paragraphs in would you stop? That’s a passage. Work on it as a unit.
Style is not an adornment of prose. Transparent prose is not the absence of style but a style in its own right, a strategy of selecting and structuring words by the logic of referential effect, the basic mechanics of meaning. It eschews the more complex dynamics of phonetic patterning and figurative use, the logic of poetic/rhetorical effect; but even in transparent prose the basic dynamics of sentence rhythm are required, or prose will fail as: a) clunky where it is too rhythmically uneven; b) flat where it is too rhythmically even. Passages will not flow.
3c. If you read a passage aloud do you feel like you’re stumbling or trudging?
Style is not a surface finish. The opposite of a transparent prose style is not a decorative prose style, simply a notable one. It is any set of strategies that includes applying the logic of poetic/rhetorical effect, any style that highlights its own medium with phonetic patterning and figurative use of language. A notable prose style may be terse rather than lyrical, imagistic rather than florid. Improving one’s style does not mean striving for poetic/rhetorical effect without logic, but more likely striving to excise it. A passage bloated by overwriting betrays a failure to think stylistically.
-Mysterious Matters has a list of forgotten books (some of which I haven’t heard of before)
-Dan Fleming of My Year in Crime is doing a month of noir. So far he has covered Lady in the Lake , The Asphalt Jungle, Blast of Silence , Crossfire, The Desperate Hours, The Damned Don’t Cry!, D.O.A., He Walked By Night, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers (1946), Kiss Me Deadly
-The Groovy Age of Horror reviews Lucky at Cards by Lawrence Block
-Pimps put up fake posters for non-existent Bollywood movies to raise the prices of their hookers?
-The AV Club interviews James Ellroy
-Out Of The Gutter Vs Pulp Press the teams have been selected
-J.J. Abrams reteams with Lost writer for Alcatraz drama.
-Vince Keenan on “the holy grail of missing noir films,” New York Confidential.
-The Night Club Map of Harlem, 1932
-“Devotees of noir are a nasty bunch.”
-Jason Aaron talking about the newest SCALPED arc
Who won the pay the bitch back competition?