Search results for ""Author James Sallis""

The Guitar in Jazz presents in rich, entertaining detail the history and development of the guitar as a jazz instrument. In a series of essays by some of jazz’s leading historians and critics, the volume traces the impressive evolution of jazz guitar playing, from the pioneering styles of Nick Lucas and Eddie Lang through the recent innovations of such contemporary masters as Jim Hall and Ralph Towner. Editor James Sallis has included essays that focus on individual guitarists, including Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, and JoePass. Other chapters vividly describe important jazz guitar styles, such as swing guitar and fingerstyle guitar. In all, The Guitar in Jazz provides a full and captivating portrait of the guitar’s place in jazz. The book also offers insights into the larger history of jazz—its development, the social contexts in which the music came into being, and its eventual recognition as "the American classical music." The essays will appeal to guitar players and enthusiasts, and to all jazz lovers.

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Winner of the 2019 H.R.F. Keating Award for the best biographical or critical book related to crime fiction Originally published by Gryphon Books in 1993, Difficult Lives was one of the earliest attempts to track the legacy of original paperback writers such as Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Chester Himes. The individual essays on these three first appeared in literary magazines. Difficult Lives visits a rare moment when daylight was showing around the seams of American society and visions quite in contrast to the sanctioned version drifted to the surface in books one bought off racks in drugstores and bus stations -- stark, bonelike, disturbing books. We're pleased to make Difficult Lives available again, doubling your pleasure by pairing it with Hitching Rides, an equal volume of new essays on other crime writers including Derek Raymond, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson.

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A hired killer on his final job; a burned-out detective whose wife is dying slowly and in agony; a young boy abandoned by his parents and living alone by his wits. Three people, solitary and disconnected from society. The detective is looking for the killer, Christian, though he doesn't know that. Christian is trying to find the man who stepped in and took down his target before he had the chance. And the boy, Jimmie, is having the killer's dreams. While they never meet, they are inextricably linked, and as their stories unfold, all find the solace of community. In what is at one and the same time a coming-of-age novel, a realistic crime novel and a novel of the contemporary Southwest, The Killer Is Dying is above all the story of three men of vastly different age and background, and of the shape their lives take against the unforgiving sunlight and sprawl of America's fifth largest city, Phoenix.

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When a middle-aged alcoholic is found brutally battered to death on a roadside in West London, the case is assigned to a nameless detective sergeant, a tough-talking cynic and fearless loner from the Department of Unexplained Deaths at the Factory police station. Working from cassette tapes left behind in the dead man's property, our narrator must piece together the history of his blighted existence and discover the agents of its cruel end. What he doesn't expect is that digging for the truth will demand plenty of lying, and that the most terrible of villains will also prove to be the most attractive. In the first of six police procedurals that comprise the Factory series, Derek Raymond spins a riveting, and vividly human crime drama. Relentlessly pursuing justice for the dispossessed, his detective narrator treads where few others dare: in the darkest corners of London, a city of sin plagued by unemployment, racism and vice, and peopled by a cast of low-lifes, all utterly convincing and brought to life by Raymond's pitch-perfect dialogue.

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'Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Later still, of course, there'd be no doubt. But for now Driver is, as they say, in the moment. And the moment includes this blood lapping toward him, the pressure of dawn's late light at windows and door, traffic sounds from the interstate nearby, the sound of someone weeping in the next room....' Thus begins Drive, a new novella by James Sallis. Set mostly in Arizona and L.A., the story is, according to Sallis, '...about a guy who does stunt driving for movies by day and drives for criminals at night.' In classic noir fashion, he is double-crossed and, though before he has never participated in the violence ("I drive. That's all."), he goes after the ones who doublecrossed and tried to kill him.

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At age eight, Jenny Rowan was abducted and kept for two years in a box beneath her captor's bed. Eventually she escaped and, after living for eighteen months on cast-offs at the local mall, was put into the child-care system. Suing for emancipation, at age sixteen she became a legal adult. Nowadays she works as a production editor for the local public TV station, and is one of the world's good people. One evening she returns home to find a detective waiting for her. Though her records are sealed, he somehow knows her story. He asks if she can help with a young woman who, like her many years before, has been abducted and traumatized.Initially hesitant, Jenny decides to get involved, reviving buried memories and setting in motion an unexpected interchange with the president herself. As brilliantly spare and compact as are all of James Sallis's novels, Others of My Kind stands apart for its female protagonist. Set in a near future of political turmoil, it is a story of how we overcome, how we shape ourselves by what happens to us, and of how the human spirit, whatever horrors it undergoes, will not be put down.

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Few American writers create more memorable landscapes - both natural and interior - than James Sallis. His highly praised Lew Griffin novels evoked classic New Orleans and the convoluted inner space of his black private detective. More recently - in Cypress Grove and Cripple Creek - he has conjured a small town somewhere near Memphis, where John Turner - ex-policeman, ex-con, war veteran and former therapist - has come to escape his past. But the past proved inescapable; thrust into the role of Deputy Sheriff, Turner finds himself at the centre of his new community, one that, like so many others, is drying up, disappearing before his eyes. As Salt River begins, two years have passed since Turner's amour, Val Bjorn, was shot as they sat together on the porch of his cabin. Sometimes you just have to see how much music you can make with what you have left, Val had told him, a mantra for picking up the pieces around her death, not sure how much he or the town has left. Then the sheriff's long-lost son comes ploughing down Main Street into City Hall in what appears to be a stolen car. And waiting at Turner's cabin is his good friend, Eldon Brown, Val's banjo on the back of his motorcycle so that it looks as though he has two heads. 'They think I killed someone,' he says. Turner asks: 'Did you?' And Eldon responds: 'I don't know.' Haunted by his own ghosts, Turner nonetheless goes in search of a truth he's not sure he can live with. James Sallis has been called by critics one of the best writers in America. 'It's a crime that a writer this good isn't better known,' wrote David Montgomery in the Chicago Tribune, while Marilyn Stasio in the New York Times Book Review called his Turner books 'a superior series... a keeper.' Salt River will take his reputation even higher and reach the wider audience he so richly deserves.

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Queneau's tragicomic masterpiece which retells in an array of styles the primal Freudian myth of sons killing the father.Queneau satirizes anthropology, folklore, philosophy, and epistemology while spinning a story as appealing as a fairy tale about a land where it never rains and a bizarre festival is held every Saint Glinglin's Day.

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