THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA
The Library of America, a nonprofit publisher and educational outreach entity, was founded in 1979 with grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Although its mission was a well-grounded and no-nonsense business approach to publishing, it essentially was fulfilling a long-held dream by the great critic Edmund Wilson and others. The United States of America, they felt, ought to have a publications series of high standards and high quality of production for its national literature, and it ought to reflect the diversity and traditions of all of its writing.
The first books appeared in 1982, when I first began selling new books in an independent book store here in Carlisle. (The founding of Whistlestop Bookshop was three years away.) I still have my copies of Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. I won’t tell you how many of the 300+ to date I have acquired, but I am happy to say I never regretted one. The books are remarkably beautiful and efficient and scholarly and finely-made. They are sometimes the only respectable edition available (beware of photo-offset print-on-demand editions!). The accompanying chronologies and notes and textual discussions of every volume are a joy and an education. I cannot praise them too highly.
This listing is what I carry in the store. If you would like other volumes, send me an e-mail or call the store. Enjoy browsing, buying, and owning landmark definitive editions of great writers or great American subjects.
The listings are alphabetical by author except for new or recent anthologies at the top. Older anthologies are at the bottom of the page.
All James Baldwin titles and Ursula K. Le Guin titles are on the respective pages of the authors.
Jim Thompson: Five Noir Novels of the 1950s and 60s
Jim Thompson: Five Noir Novels of the 1950s and 60s
A straight flush of 5 noir masterworks by America’s “Dimestore Dostoevsky”—the crime fiction legend who revolutionized the genre with his experimental style.
“My favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated.” —Stephen King
Here in one deluxe clothbound volume are five chilling crime classics from the writer who blew the top off the conformity of postwar American life in novels of shocking violence and stunning psychological depth. His experimental style was as shattering as his dark stories, infusing the pulp crime novel with the energies of underground writers like William Burroughs and Hubert Selby. Already represented in the Library of America’s American Noir collection with The Killer Inside Me, Thompson now joins the masters of American crime fiction featured in the series with this volume collecting five of his best novels:
A Hell of a Woman (1954), a haunting, mesmerizing portrait of a mind unraveling under the weight of abuse endured and inflicted
After Dark, My Sweet (1955), a sucker punch of a story about an ex-fighter who gets involved in a kidnapping scheme that goes catastrophically awry
The Getaway (1959), about a bank heist that leads to a descent into a hell worthy of Dante or Bosch
The Grifters (1963) a taut drama that sets a master of the short-con on a collision course with the one person he can’t fool: his mother
Pop. 1280 (1964), which unleashes a dangerously messianic sheriff on a small southern town.
Vividly cinematic, all five novels in this collection have been adapted for film, one of them twice. Rounding out this deluxe edition is a selection of Thompson’s early shorter works, including experimental nonfiction for the Federal Writers’ Project. At last, “the best suspense writer going, bar none,” (The New York Times) gets his due.