Hardboiled crime fiction is a literary style, most commonly associated with detective stories, distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex. The style was pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s,[citation needed] popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined by Raymond Chandler beginning in the late 1930s. [1]

The Hardboiled detective: He works alone. He is between 35 and 45 years or so, and both a loner and a tough guy. His usual diet consists of fried eggs, black coffee and cigarettes. He hangs out at shady all-night bars. He is a heavy drinker but always aware of his surroundings and able to fight back when attacked. He always "wears" a gun. He shoots criminals or takes a beating if it helps him solve a case. He is always poor. Cases that at first seem straightforward, often turn out to be quite complicated, forcing him to embark on an odyssey through the urban landscape. He is involved with organized crime and other lowlifes on the "mean streets" of , preferably Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, or Chicago. A hard-boiled private eye has an ambivalent attitude towards the police. It is his ambition to save America and rid it of its mean elements all by himself.

In the gap between Reality A and Reality B, in the inversion of realities, how far could we preserve our given values, and, at the same time, to what kind of new morals could we go on to give birth? This is one of the themes of the work. I spent three years writing this story, during which time I passed its hypothetical world through myself as a simulation. The chaos is still there — in full measure.

You've heard that this is a book about boredom, and the potential for transcendence that exists beyond the featureless horizon of boredom's endless Midwestern field. That if we fight our instincts to distract ourselves from the reality of our adult lives, which are not by nature "fun," and instead pay complete and focused attention to that reality, boredom might reveal to the most focused of us a kind of heaven, a constant atomic bliss.

via Rands: Parker’s defining character is Spenser, a well-educated, smart mouthed chef who also happens to be a private detective. Parker’s mysteries are uncomplicated and mostly irrelevant. Where Parker shines is a deep focus on characters and the conversations that tie them together. That strength is far more important than the whodunit. You will care about the characters Parker defines; you will laugh with them; and you will wonder how you can know a person, who you will never meet, so well.

A short story about recession, attraction and data visualisation.

In the late seventies and early eighties, I worked in the topless hustle bars owned by “the Jewish Mafia.” The clubs thrived for a while, and then closed at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, when the New York City Department of Health shut down most of the bars, and all the gay baths.

Ricky Rice is a middle-aged hustler with a lingering junk habit, a bum knee and a haunted mind. The sole survivor of a suicide cult, he spends his days scraping by as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York. Until one day a letter arrives, reminding him of a vow he once made and a summoning him to Vermont's remote Northeast Kingdom to fulfill it.

With the death of David Foster Wallace, the author of “Infinite Jest,” who took his own life on Sept. 12, the world of contemporary American fiction lost its most intellectually ambitious writer. Like his peers Richard Powers and William T. Vollmann, Wallace wrote big, brainy novels that were encyclopedically packed with information and animated by arcane ideas. In nonfiction essays, he tackled a daunting range of highbrow topics, including lexicography, poststructuralist literary theory and the science, ethics and epistemology of lobster pain. He wrote a book on the history and philosophy of the mathematics of infinity. Even his signature stylistic device — the extensive use of footnotes and endnotes — was a kind of scholarly homage.

The narrative mode (also known as the mode of narration) is the set of methods the author of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical story uses to convey the plot to the audience. Narration, the process of presenting the narrative, occurs because of the narrative mode. It encompasses several overlapping areas of concern, most importantly narrative point-of-view, which determines through whose perspective the story is viewed; narrative voice, which determines the manner through which the story is communicated to the audience; narrative structure, which determines in what order events are presented; and narrative tense, which determines with what sense of time the story is expressed, whether in the past, present, or future.

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be. This isn’t that it’s fiction’s duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little Christians or Republicans; I’m not trying to line up behind Tolstoy or Gardner. I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art. We’ve all got this "literary" fiction that simply monotones that we’re all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like "Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!"

In a communication addressed to parents, (“Have you heard the great news? Your child has decided to write a novel….”) The Office of Light and Letters, the non-profit that runs the event, offered practical advice for the care of the young artist, who will be in friendly competition with students ages five to seventeen from twenty-eight countries around the world, including a cohort of diminutive scribblers from Kazhakstan. (Prose coming from all quarters – stand back!) The note closed with a run-down of the essentials, explaining that while the adult contenders must grind out 50,000 words to be declared “winners,” the children may choose the length of their work. All any of them have to do is finish.

For me, the end of October is always slightly tinged with dread -- provoked not by Halloween spooks, not even by election season, but by the advent of something called NaNoWriMo. If those syllables are nothing but babble to you, then I salute you. They stand for National Novel Writing Month.

Rife with political corruption, sex, jealousy and frustrated passion, The Skating Rink is a darkly atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona.

From a customer review: "I came across two of the stories among the material for an Open University course entitled "Start Writing Fiction" (my tutor was Ashley Stokes, the author of "Touching the Starfish"). None of the stories in this collection is longer than one page. Any-one who picks this book up and pronounces, "Any-one could have written this" is sadly mistaken. Like all good writing, every word and phrase is economically used and, despite their brevity, nearly all the stories have a recognisable build-up and conclusion. My favourite is "Hotel Waldhaus". It is the only work of prose fiction which I can honestly say I can recite in its entirety from memory, even when slightly drunk."

“What I know about writing I know from having read the work of the great writers.” More on how-to culture: http://instapaper.com/ztr0me01V

RT @longformorg: Interview w/ David Mitchell on stretching a fictional universe across centuries of real history: http://nyti.ms/bOM78e ...

More dfw from the forthcoming The Pale King.

Short story by David Foster Wallace.

"When daddy was hanging a door. Exceedingly short fiction from the author of Infinite Jest."