Hi, Joy--
I'm guessing you didn't encounter Goodis in the library
because his books were Gold Medal paperbacks, and unlikely to
make it into the stacks. Only recently, with a series of
Black Lizard reprints from the late 1980s, early 90s have I
seen his work creeping into public libraries. But if you
lived in Port Richmond, I can't recommend Goodis enough,
especially SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, which you is the one
Goodis that you can still find in bookstores. His most recent
reprint, OF TENDER SIN, takes place in the lower
Northeast.
Good guesses about where I'm from. It's Frankford, though my
mother comes from Bridesburg. I left to work in New York City
for a few years, and lived in NYC's version of the Great
Northeast: Brooklyn. (Or maybe that's Queens?) But I moved
back to take an editing job with Philadelphia Magazine, and
now live near the Art Museum. See, some Frankford kids do
escape.
How about you, Joy? When did you split Philly?
--Duane Swierczynski
>
> More books for the list, which I'll be too poor to
buy because I'm not
> getting my work out. How comes I lived in Port
Richmond for 20 years and
> never heard of this guy? I read just about
everything classified mystery in
> the PR library when I was broke and not
that.
> Maybe it's another case of library policy. My
novel-writing teacher
> denounced Swiftian adverbs, and sent me to the
library for a Tom Swift when
> I asked for a definition. The librarian told me the
library didn't buy
> series novels for children because they were low
quality, and that if I gave
> them Nancy Drews, the library wouldn't accept
them.
> So where'd you live, Duane? Bridesburg? Kensington?
Fishtown? And
> where'd you go in the meantime?
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 09 Feb 2002 EST