Geoffrey O'Brien

Each of these poems is some sort of story about stories. A crowded city undergoes a spell of enforced confinement. In a war of rumors and conspiracy theories, identities are stolen and shapeshifting outsiders infiltrate urban parks. New fiefdoms consolidate under the sign of pervasive unease. A landscape of dry rivers and toxic weeds reveals itself. Within the zone of isolation, all the stories play out again in the mind, through memory or dream or unexpected waking flash-spectral trespasses, plays staged in empty theaters, messages concealed in drowned books, lives that might have been lived but weren't, hermetic histories, lost paradises continuing to unreel in a subterranean screening room. The stories hang at last on a thread of melody, resolving themselves into a connecting filament that persists even at the core of silence. SAMPLE POEM: The BedThere are momentswhen the sun is nothingorange glowstaining a blank walland the dying see doorwaysnot visible to othersbut cannot enter themor even stir from the bedwhere they beat their hands against the barrier

Library of America presents a deluxe edition of unforgettable crime thrillers of the 1960s Here in two volumes are 9 timeless novels, including 4 lost classics now restored to print In the 1960s a number of gifted writers--some at the peak of their careers, others newcomers--reimagined American crime fiction. Here are nine novels of astonishing variety and inventiveness that pulse with the energies of that turbulent, transformative decade: Fredric Brown's The Murderers (1961), a darkly comic look at a murderous plot hatched on the hip fringes of Hollywood. Dan J. Marlowe's terrifying The Name of the Game Is Death (1962), about a nihilistic career criminal on the runCharles Williams's Dead Calm (1963), a masterful novel of natural peril and human evil on the high seas. Dorothy B. Hughes's The Expendable Man (1963), an unsettling tale of racism and wrongful accusation in the American Southwest. Richard Stark's taut The Score (1964), in which the master thief Parker plots the looting of an entire city with the cool precision of an expert mechanic. The Fiend (1964), in which Margaret Millar maps the interlocking anxieties of a seemingly tranquil California suburb through the rippling effects of a child's disappearance. Ed McBain's classic police procedural Doll (1965), a breakneck story that mixes murder, drugs, fashion models, and psychotherapy with the everyday professionalism of the 87th Precinct. Run Man Run (1966), Chester Himes's nightmarish tale of racism and police violence that follows a desperate young man seeking safe haven in New York City while being hunted by the law. Patricia Highsmith's ultimate meta-thriller, The Tremor of Forgery (1969), a novel in which a displaced traveler finds his own personality collapsing as he attempts to write a novel about a man coming undone. Each volume features an introduction by editor Geoffrey O'Brien (Hardboiled America), newly researched biographies of the writers and helpful notes, and an essay on textual selection.

A genre-bending novel of 1001 nights of no-holds-barred, pre-code American movies distilled into a single fevered dreamworld. Arabian Nights of 1934 is a journey through the fevered dreamworld embodied in American movies of the early 1930s: an era that closed abruptly with the enforcement of the Production Code in July 1934. It distills a thousand and one nights of Depression-era movie-going--plotlines, closeups, cityscapes, wisecracks, backchat, and frantic outbursts--into a haunting parallel life, the stories bleeding into one another as they did in the minds of the viewers whom they helped sustain. Two of those viewers, it so happens, are O'Brien's own parents in their restless youth--one impatient to experience the world beyond the screen, one ready to take it on--and the glimpse we're afforded into the darkened theaters of their minds frames the book with an act of imagination at once tender and audacious.

More than 150 years after its initial publication, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations now enters its nineteenth edi­tion. First compiled by John Bartlett, a bookseller in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a commonplace book of only 258 pages, the original 1855 edition mainly featured selections from the Bible, Shakespeare, and the great English poets. Today, Bartlett's includes more than 20,000 quotes from roughly 4,000 con­tributors. Spanning centuries of thought and culture, it remains the finest and most popular compendium of quotations ever assembled. While continuing to draw on timeless classi­cal references, this edition also incorporates more than 3,000 new quotes from more than 700 new sources, including Alison Bechdel, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Pope Francis, Atul Gawande, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hilary Mantel, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Claudia Rankine, Fred Rogers, Bernie Sanders, Patti Smith, and Malala Yousafzai. Bartlett's showcases the thoughts not only of renowned figures from the arts, literature, politics, science, sports, and business, but also of otherwise unknown individuals whose thought-provoking ideas have moved, unsettled, or inspired readers and listeners throughout the ages. Bartlett's makes searching for the perfect quote easy in three ways: alphabetically by author, chrono­logically by the author's birth date, or thematically by subject. Whether one is searching for appropriate remarks for a celebration, comforting thoughts for a serious occasion, or simply to answer the question "Who said that?" Bartlett's offers readers and schol­ars alike a stunning treasury of words that have influ­enced

Prolific, award-winning translator of classical and modern Japanese poetry Hiroaki Sato recorded his thoughts on American society in mainly two columns across 30-plus years, collected here for the first time. This anthology of over 60 of Sato’s commentaries reflect the writer’s wide-ranging erudition and his unsentimental views of both his native Japan and his adopted American homeland. Broadly he looks at the Pacific War and its aftermath and at war (and our love of it) in general, at the quirks and curiosities of the natural world exhibited by birds and other creatures, at friends and mentors who surprised and inspired, and finally at other writers and their works, many of them familiar—the Beats and John Ashbery, for example, and Mishima—but many others whose introduction is welcome. Sato is neither cheerleader nor angry expatriate. Remarkably clear-eyed and engaged with American culture, he is in the business of critical appraisal and translation, of taking words seriously, and of observing how well others write and speak to convey their own truths and ambitions.

 We watch what is moving fast from a platform that is also moving fast," writes Geoffrey O'Brien in the beginning of Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows. This collection gathering the best of a decade's worth of writing on film by one of our most bracing and imaginative critics ranges freely over the past, present, and future of the movies, from the primal visual poetry of the silent era to the dizzying permutations of the merging digital age. Here are 38 searching essays on contemporary blockbusters like Spider-Man and Minority Report; recent innovative triumphs like The Tree of Life and Beasts of the Southern Wild; and the intricacies of genre mythmaking from Chinese martial arts films to the horror classics of Val Lewton. O'Brien probes the visionary art of classic filmmakers von Sternberg, Fod, Cocteau, Kurosawa, Godard and the implications of such diverse recent work as Farenheit 9/11, The Passion of Christ, and The Sopranos. Each of these pieces is alert to the always-surprising intersections between screen life and real life, and the way that film from the beginning has shaped our sense of memory and history.

The Walworth family was the very symbol of virtue and distinction for decades, rising to prominence as part of the splendor of New York's aristocracy. When Frank Walworth travels to New York to "settle a family difficulty" by shooting his father at point blank range, his family must reveal their inner demons in a spectacular trial to save him from execution. The resulting testimony exposes a legacy of mania and abuse, and the stately reputation of the family crumbles in a Gothic drama which the New York Tribune called "sensational to the last degree." The Fall of the House of Walworth gives us both the intimate history of a family torn apart by violent obsessions, and a rich portrait of the American social worlds in which they moved. In the tradition of Edith Wharton, this is a riveting true story which "rival s] the most extravagant Gothic novels of the day" (The Chicago Tribune).

In his intense and mysterious evocation of (seemingly) every kind of movie ever made, Geoffrey O'Brien erases the distinction between spectator and commentator and virtually reinvents film writing in our time.

Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, David Goodis , these are a few of the masters of noir responsible for the great lurid paperbacks of the thirties, forties, and fifties. With titles like The Big Sleep, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, and Street of the Lost, with racy cover lines like "My gun-butt smashed his skull!" and "Ruthless terror ripped away the mask that hid cold fear," and with some of the most extraordinary cover illustrations ever to grace American literature, these paperbacks held the ingredients of American nightmares. In Harboiled America ,lavishly illustrated with 135 paperback covers, and expanded with new material on Thompson, Goodis, and others,Geoffrey O'Brien masterfully explores the art, history, and ideas of the American paperback.