Both Flesh and Not: Essays by David Foster Wallce

 

Great funny essay on prose poems.

sex is never "bad," but it's also never casual. (from "Back in New Fire," his strange essay on sex in the aftermath of AIDS.)

He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty - a mind turned thus wholly in on itself. His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything. (from "Borges on the Couch."

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

 

Made the mistake of watching the delight THE THIN MAN 1934 film when I was halfway through reading this. It's been said that the film improves upon the novel, and I must agree. The book is good - the film is sublime.

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

 

A little hard to follow the plotting and action sometimes, because of Hammett's heavy gangster 1920s vernacular, and the level of deviance and betrayal by the  criminals and police. But still a primal source for much of the crime fiction I love.

The phrase "blood simple" originated here apparently. 

“It's an expression he used to describe what happens to somebody psychologically once they've committed murder,” Joel Coen told Time Out. “They go 'blood simple' in the slang sense of 'simple,' meaning crazy."

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

 

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Short Stories by Stephen Crane

 

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard

 

Beeswing by Richard Thomspon

 

Good if perfunctory. It stays on relative high impersonal ground, although I liked RT's insights on the folk songs and styles that inspired him. You do get a good sense of the "folk music circuity" in Britain in the 1960s.

Chronopolis: The Science Fiction of J.G. Ballard