Details
Synopsis
Philip Marlowe joins the ranks of Captain Ahab, Huckleberry Finn, and Antonia as Raymond Chandler's work is added to the Library of America.
| Details | | Series: | The Library of America Series |
| Size | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.5 in | | Weight: | 24.0 oz |
Industry Reviews
"Chandler's baroque Los Angeles, with its juxtaposition of jacaranda trees and call houses specializing in 16-year-old virgins, is as tangible a location as we have in our literature. No place is boring in Philip Marlowe's world. Nothing is unimportant....In Philip Marlowe, Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical, and rebellious--an innocent who knows better, a Romantic who is tough enough to sustain Romanticism in a world that has seen the eternal footman hold its coat and snicker. Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape. Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held.
New York Times Book Review - Robert B. Parker (10/08/1995)
"The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure."
Reference Books - Raymond Chandler
"What MacShane and the editors at the Library of America have achieved is a comprehensive edition of Chandler's work which will stand for some time as the standard. By including enough material for two volumes, the editors have assured that the first crime writer to be honored by them is not being slighted, and they have made the claim, if it still needs to be made, that the canon of American literature must be expanded to include all good writing in America, no matter what its subject matter or previous literary standing."
Armchair Detective - Charles L. P. Silet
"Does the inclusion of Raymond Chandler in the Library of America signal the mystery writer's official entry into the much-scrutinized canon of American literature? 'We try not to think of ourselves as canon makers,' says Max Rudin, the LOA's publisher. 'We tend to think of ourselves as canon followers.' The dust has already settled on Chandler's reputation, Mr. Rudin says. 'He has been accepted in the university environment as a canonical writer; he's now taught in courses in the novel. We decided that it was time to pay tribute to America's greatest mystery writer, who took a popular fiction genre and really turned it into a complex American art form.'"
Wall Street Journal - Tom Nolan
"Private investigator, private 'eye': the fantasy figure of Chandler's detective is not unlike that of an 'invisible' man or a supernatural being with fairy-like powers of observation, intuition, mobility, survival. Philip Marlowe is repeatedly 'sapped' on the head with blackjacks or gun barrels, shot at, beaten, kicked, shocked, drugged, trussed up and left for dead, yet he invariably recovers, and sometimes within the space of a few minutes takes his 'dispassionate' revenge on one or another of the caricatured thugs and bit players who populate, like vermin, the Los Angeles/'Bay City' sets of Chandler's novels....What is most appealing about Chandler is his characteristic tone, which is that of the bemused, neutral observer. Marlowe is the poet's--or the misanthrope comic's--eye for the precise metaphor, packing information in a figure of speech, an aphorism or a one-liner, a wisecrack."
New York Review of Books - Joyce Carol Oates (12/21/1995)
"Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since."
Advertisement - Paul Auster
"I could go on about Chandler's accomplishments, too cool and numerous to list here, but I won't. It's all here in these two very complete volumes. Simply consider this a rave review. If you love crime..., go out and buy these books without delay. And if you have to knock over the convenience store on the corner to do it, let me suggest an alternative plan: sell all the books you own written by the Chandler knock-offs, take the money, and buy these instead. It will be worth it to spend some time with an original, and, as the Library of America suggests by its publication of Chandler's total oeuvre, a great artist."
Boston Book Review - Gary S. Kadet (03/19/1996)
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