What are you reading?

[spress]

Meta-Fictionist Robert Coover's NOIR A Novel is a fun absurdist nightmare journey through the labyrinth of The City
(and all the hardboiled tropes) as a PI searches for the corpse of his client and keeps on losing himself!

I've read Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968) several times. It's one of my favorite books. Now I have to get my hands on Noir. And find out what meta-fiction is.

[spress]

A Married A Dead Man by William Irish/Cornell Woolrich. This one was adapted to film as No Man Of Her Own, starring Barbara Stanwyck. I'm marveled because the film is exactly like the novel, line by line till the tiniest detail so far.

Also remade as J'ai épousé une ombre aka I Married a Dead Man (1982), a French version directed by Robin Davis and starring Nathalie Baye.

[mkhand]

Also remade as J'ai épousé une ombre aka I Married a Dead Man (1982), a French version directed by Robin Davis and starring Nathalie Baye.

It was called I Married a Shadow when i saw it on video in the 80's

[mkhand]

I've read Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968) several times. It's one of my favorite books. Now I have to get my hands on Noir. And find out what meta-fiction is.

meta fiction is kinda self-conscious fiction, as much about telling the story, how stories are told, the genre and its
expectations, rather then just being the story as it is told.

[spress]

It was called I Married a Shadow when i saw it on video in the 80's

Yes, when I saw it too. My error on this.

[Movie Memories]

Recently returned from a vacation that afforded the opportunity for some reading. A modest library was available that had a title that may be familiar to many of you. For those for whom it may not be, I know the subject matter is one you would enjoy.

The book was titled Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett 1921 - 1960.

The book, thanks to the generosity of Hammett's daughter, Josephine Hammett Marshall, includes hundreds of letters written by her father throughout most of his adult life. The letters are grouped into five chapters each starting off with a description of the circumstances in Hammett's life for the time period covered.

The letters themselves are addressed to possibly 20 people, principally playwright Lillian Hellman, his daughters Josephine and Mary, and his wife Josephine.

The time period covers his life from the early short-story years, his military time, periods of success, periods of failure, which ultimately ended with poverty, his problems with alcohol and ill health, the time spent in jail for his defiance of the 1950's anti-communism sentiment, as well as the personal aspects of his life including marriage, fatherhood, divorce, and various romantic interludes and relationships. Most notably with Lillian Hellman.

Interesting also, is the vast reference to the books he read during his lifetime. There are somewhere around 50 photographs in the book. I wish there were many more.