James Ellroy for the Pulitzer? WAS: Re: RARA-AVIS: Elmore Leonard

From: tieresias@att.net
Date: 22 Jan 2004


> If I had to pick any crime-ish or genre-ish writer today who deserves to
>win, or at least to be nominated, it'd be James Ellroy (in English) or Mario
>Vargas Llosa (in not English).

Well, although Ellroy would undoubtedly agree with you, I don't. I find his writing tortuous, which is disappointing, because I really enjoyed his "Black Dahlia" all those years ago. These days the guy seems enamored with the sound of his own voice. In fact, with the exception of "My Dark Places," the non-fiction piece he did on his own mother's murder, I find stuff like "The Big Nowhere" and "White Jazz" to read almost as self-parodies.

There are others here who are Ellroy fans, many of them might agree with you, though.

> I haven't discovered a new American writer I've been really excited about in
> ten years (when I simultaneously happened upon Cormac McCarthy and James
> Ellroy). But, then again, if Leonard or Ellroy don't deserve to win a
>Nobel, who in America really does?

Two words: Walter Moseley.

All the Best,

Brian

P.S. It's fun to bandy this stuff about, isn't it?

--
# Plain ASCII text only, please.  Anything else won't show up.
# 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 : 22 Jan 2004 EST