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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy's Noir World

The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy's Noir World

Powell, Steven

Hardcover

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1501331337
ISBN13: 9781501331336
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Jul 12 2018
Pages: 224
Weight: 1.03
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Shortlisted for the H.R.F. Keating Award 2020

James Ellroy's identity as a crime writer is rooted in his extraordinary life story and relationship with his home city of Los Angeles. Beginning with the unsolved murder of his mother, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, in 1958, Ellroy's early life played a large role in shaping his obsessions with murder, the criminal underworld of L.A. and the redemptive power of the feminine. Ellroy's life could be seen as a brutal, visceral and emotionally exhausting realisation of the American Dream, a theme he has explored in his writing to the extent that he is credited with reinventing crime fiction.

The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy's Noir World is an in-depth, scholarly study of the work of James Ellroy, featuring leading Ellroy scholars such as Anna Flügge, Jim Mancall and Rodney Taveira. Moving from Ellroy's early detective novels to his later epic works of historical fiction, it explores how Ellroy found his place in the history of the genre by building on, and then surpassing, the works of authors who influenced him such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Joseph Wambaugh. It also examines Ellroy's impact on contemporary writers and on the cultural perception of L.A., which has been his legacy through the L.A. Quartet novels.

The 'Big Somewhere' is not a geographical location, but a conglomeration of the cinematic, historical and fictional worlds that influenced Ellroy, from film noir to the Kennedy era in American politics, and on which he, in turn, has left his mark.

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