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Map Drawn by a Spy by Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Brooklyn. 2017. Archipelago Books. 9780914671787. Translated by Mark Fried. 240 pages. paperback. Translation of Mapa dibujado por un espía. 

DESCRIPTION - Found in an envelope in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's house after his death in 2005, Map Drawn by a Spy is the world-renowned writer's autobiographical account of the last four months he spent in his country. In 1965, following his mother's death, Infante returns to Cuba from Brussels, where he is employed as a cultural attache at the Cuban embassy. When a few days later his permission to return to Europe is revoked, Infante begins a period of suspicion, uncertainty, and disillusion. Unable to leave the country, denied access to party officials, yet still receiving checks for his work in Belgium, Infante discovers the reality of Cuba under Fidel Castro: imprisonment of homosexuals, silencing of writers, the closing of libraries and newspapers, and the consolidation of power. Both lucid and sincere, Map Drawn by a Spy is a moving portrayal of a fractured society and a writer's struggles to come to terms with his national identity."

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Guillermo Cabrera Infante (April 22, 1929 - February 21, 2005) was a Cuban novelist, essayist, translator, and critic; in the 1950s he used the pseudonym G. Caín. A one-time supporter of the Castro regime, Cabrera Infante went into exile to London in 1965. He is best known for the novel Tres Tristes Tigres (literally ‘three sad tigers', but published in English as Three Trapped Tigers), which has been compared favorably to James Joyce's Ulysses. Born in Gibara in Cuba's former Oriente Province (now part of Holguín Province), in 1941 he moved with his parents, to Havana, which would be the setting of nearly all of his writings other than his critical works. His parents were founding members of the Cuban Communist Party. Originally he intended to become a physician, but abandoned that in favor of writing and his passion for the cinema. Starting in 1950, he studied journalism at the University of Havana. In 1951 he founded the Cinemateca de Cuba, the Cuban Film Library, of which he remained director until its closure was ordered by Fulgencio Batista in 1956. Under the Batista regime he was arrested and fined in 1952 for publishing a short story which included several English-language profanities. His opposition to Batista later cost him a short jail term. He married for the first time in 1953. From 1954 to 1960 he wrote film reviews for the magazine Carteles, using the pseudonym G. Caín; he became its editor in chief, still pseudonymously, in 1957. With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 he was named director of the Instituto del Cine. He was also head of the literary magazine Lunes de Revolucion, a supplement to the Communist newspaper Revolucion; however, this supplement was prohibited in 1961 by Fidel Castro. He divorced and remarried in 1961 to his second wife, Miriam, an actress. Having fallen somewhat out of favor with the Castro regime (the government's ban on a documentary on Havana nightlife made by his brother led to him being forbidden to publish in Cuba), he served from 1962 to 1965 in Brussels, Belgium as a cultural attache. During this time, his sentiments turned against the Castro regime; after returning to Cuba for his mother's funeral in 1965, he went into exile, first to Madrid and then to London. In 1966 he published Tres Tristes Tigres, a highly experimental, Joycean novel, playful and rich in literary allusions, which also intended to do for Cuban Spanish what Mark Twain had done for American English, recording the great variety of its colloquial variations. It is little known that he was the Guillermo Caín who co-wrote the script for the 1971 cult film Vanishing Point. Although he is considered a part of the famed Latin American ‘Boom' generation of writers that includes his contemporary Gabriel García Márquez, he disdained the label. Always the iconoclast, he even rejected the label ‘novel' for his masterpieces, such as Tres Tristes Tigres and La Habana para un infante difunto. In 1997 he received the Premio Cervantes, presented to him by Spain's King Juan Carlos. He died February 21, 2005 in London, of septicemia. He had two daughters by his first marriage.

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Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972 by Alejandra Pizarnik. New York. 2016. New Directions. 9780811223966. Translated by Yvette Siegert. 384 pages. paperback. Translation of Extraccion de La Piedra de Locura (Colección Visor de poesía). 

DESCRIPTION - The first full-length collection in English by one of Latin America’s most significant twentieth-century poets. Revered by the likes of Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolaño, Alejandra Pizarnik is still a hidden treasure in the U.S. Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972 comprises all of her middle to late work, as well as a selection of posthumously published verse. Obsessed with themes of solitude, childhood, madness and death, Pizarnik explored the shifting valences of the self and the border between speech and silence. In her own words, she was drawn to "the suffering of Baudelaire, the suicide of Nerval, the premature silence of Rimbaud, the mysterious and fleeting presence of Lautréamont,” as well as to the “unparalleled intensity” of Artaud’s “physical and moral suffering.”. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Flora Alejandra Pizarnik (29 April 1936 – 25 September 1972) was an Argentine poet. Her idiosyncratic and thematically introspective poetry has been considered "one of the most unusual bodies of work in Latin American literature", and has been recognized and celebrated for its fixation on "the limitation of language, silence, the body, night, the nature of intimacy, madness, [and] death". Pizarnik studied philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires and worked as a writer and a literary critic for several publishers and magazines. She lived in Paris between 1960 and 1964, where she translated authors such as Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux, Aimé Césaire and Yves Bonnefoy. She also studied history of religion and French literature at the Sorbonne. Back in Buenos Aires, Pizarnik published three of her major works: Works and Nights, Extracting the Stone of Madness, and The Musical Hell as well as a prose work titled The Bloody Countess. In 1969 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and later, in 1971, a Fulbright Fellowship. On 25 September 1972, she died by suicide after ingesting an overdose of secobarbital. Her work has influenced generations of authors in Latin America.

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The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón. Brooklyn. 2024. Archipelago Books. 9781953861863. Translated by Robin Myers. 72 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - A wise, visionary debut on ecological and human resistance, perfect for readers of Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith, and fans of the earth-body artwork of Ana Mendieta The Brush is an incantatory, fearless exploration of collective trauma - and its horrific relevance in today's Colombia, where mass killings continue. Told from the voices Pablo, Ester, and the Brush itself, Hernández-Pachón's poem is an astounding response to a traumatic event in recent Colombian history: the massacre in the village of El Salado between February 16 and 21, 2000. Paramilitary forces tortured and killed sixty people, interspersing their devastating violence with music in the town square. Pablo Rodríguez steps thirteen paces out into the night and buries a wooden box. Its contents: a chain, a medallion, a few overexposed photographs, and finally, a deed. He burrows into the ground without knowing quite why, but with the certainty of a heavy change pressing through the air, of fear settling "like a cat in his throat." Meanwhile, his wife Ester - a sharpshooter and keeper of all village secrets - slips into her fifth dream of the night. As Ester tosses and Pablo pats his fresh mound of earth, another character emerges in Eliana Hernández-Pachón's vivid and prophetic triptych. The Brush is a tangled grove, a thicket of vines, an orchid pummeled with rain. It is also an extraordinary depiction of ecological resistance, of the natural world that both endures human cruelty and lives on in spite of it.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eliana Hernández-Pachón researches contemporary Latin American literature and visual art, gender studies, and environmental humanities. She received a BA in Anthropology from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. The Brush received the Colombia National Poetry Prize in 2020.

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 Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America by Frank J. Donner. Berkeley. 1990. University of California Press. hardcover. 503 pages. 0520059514.

DESCRIPTION - This landmark exposé of the dark history of repressive police operations in American cities offers a richly detailed account of police misconduct and violations of protected freedoms over the past century. In an incisive examination of undercover work in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia as well as Washington, D.C., Detroit, New Haven, Baltimore, and Birmingham, Frank Donner reveals the underside of American law enforcement. Protectors of Privilege spotlights the repressive police tactics of the past thirty years, particularly the urban intelligence operations and abuses that burgeoned during the political unrest of the 1960s and 1970s. Donner examines the open police violence and corruption in Chicago; the power-hungry Frank Rizzo, whose fear mongering polarized Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s; the ties between the police department and right-wing movements in Los Angeles; and the tarnished professionalism of New York's finest. Meticulously documented, Protectors of Privilege traces the history of countersubversion and police misconduct from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth, beginning with the Gilded Age repression of economic protest and anarchist activities. Donner exposes the machinations of City Hall to curb organized labor early in this century, overheated police behavior during World War I, the ideological response to the Depression and its consequences, and police misconduct during the Cold War. More than just a description of police intelligence and abuse of power, Protectors of Privilege demonstrates how patterns of police behavior accord with patterns of city politics as a whole and uncovers the ties between police departments, the CIA, and private right-wing groups. Donner first documents the shift in police interest from crime to countersubversion and then traces the connections between police corruption and countersubversive activities, probing, for example, the role of infiltrators and agents provocateurs in stimulating the violence they then exposed. Protectors of Privilege offers the most comprehensive account yet published of police misconduct and violations of protected freedoms in America. In a period when protest movements and ghetto unrest could spur a renewal of police abuses, this book speaks to all Americans.

 Frank Donner (November 25, 1911 – June 10, 1993) was a civil liberties lawyer, author and the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) Project on Political Surveillance. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Donner earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Wisconsin and a law degree from Columbia University. Donner worked for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from 1940 to 1945 before leaving for private practice, primarily representing the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America and the United Steelworkers of America. With attorneys Arthur Kinoy and Marshall Perlin he founded the New York firm Donner, Kinoy & Perlin, which specialized in representing progressive and leftist clients, including Soviet spy Morton Sobell and the Labor Youth League. In the 1950s, the firm represented numerous individuals, including labor officials, who refused to take loyalty oaths or to testify on their membership in communist organizations, as well as several who were prosecuted under the Smith Act. Donner, himself, was brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956, accused of membership in a Communist cell within the NLRB in the 1940s. He refused to testify, invoking his fifth amendment rights. Donner was a board member for the National Lawyers Guild. Beginning in 1980, Donner headed the Project on Political Surveillance for the ACLU. During that time he wrote several books outlining official use of domestic surveillance and the use of Red Squads, programs like COINTELPRO, and other agencies to infiltrate organizations suspected of political dissent. Donner also cited the government's use of scapegoats to divert attention from government criticism onto other political groups.

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Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003 by Roberto Bolaño. New York. 2011. New Directuons. 9780811218146. Edited by Ignacio Echevarria. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. 390 pages. hardcover. Cover by Rodrigo Corral Design. Originally published in Spanish as Entre parentesis.

DESCRIPTION - Between Parentheses collects most of the newspaper columns and articles Bolaño wrote during the last five years of his life, as well as the texts of some of his speeches and talks and a few scattered prologues. “Taken together,” as the editor Ignacio Echevarría remarks in his introduction, they provide “a personal cartography of the writer: the closest thing, among all his writings, to a kind of fragmented ‘autobiography.’” Bolaño’s career as a nonfiction writer began in 1998, the year he became famous overnight for The Savage Detectives; he was suddenly in demand for articles and speeches, and he took to this new vocation like a duck to water. Cantankerous, irreverent, and insufferably opinionated, Bolaño also could be tender (about his family and favorite places) as well as a fierce advocate for his heroes (Borges, Cortázar, Parra) and his favorite contemporaries, whose books he read assiduously and promoted generously. A demanding critic, he declares that in his “ideal literary kitchen there lives a warrior”: he argues for courage, and especially for bravery in the face of failure. Between Parentheses fully lives up to his own demands: “I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity at all levels.”

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile. At fifteen, he moved with his family to Mexico and there became a Trotskyite and a journalist. In 1973, he returned to Chile and enlisted in Allende’s party but was imprisoned for a week after the military coup. He then went to El Salvador, where he knew the poet Roque Dalton, then to Mexico, and finally Spain where he worked as a dishwasher, waiter, night watchman, garbageman, longshoreman, and salesman until the 80’s when he could make enough money to support himself by writing, and publishing. In 1999 he won the extremely prestigious Herralde & el Rómulo Gallego Award, considered the Latin American Nobel Prize (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa have been other winners.) He died of liver failure in Barcelona, and is survived by his wife and two children.

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A Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolaño. New York. 2014. New Directions. 109 pages.  hardcover. Jacket photograph by Allen Frame. Jacket design by Erik Rieselbach.  Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.  9780811223355.  

DESCRIPTION - Published in Spanish right before Bolaño's death, A Little Lumpen Novelita percolates with a fierce and tender love of women. ‘Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime’: so Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome. Orphaned overnight as a teenager—’our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us’—she drops out of school, gets a crappy job, and drifts into bad company. Her younger brother brings home two petty criminals who need a place to stay. As the four of them share the family apartment and plot a strange crime, Bianca learns how low she can fall. Electric and tense with foreboding, with its jagged, propulsive short chapters beautifully translated by Natasha Wimmer, A Little Lumpen Novelita delivers a surprising, fractured fairy tale of seizing control of one’s fate.

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile. At fifteen, he moved with his family to Mexico and there became a Trotskyite and a journalist. In 1973, he returned to Chile and enlisted in Allende’s party but was imprisoned for a week after the military coup. He then went to El Salvador, where he knew the poet Roque Dalton, then to Mexico, and finally Spain where he worked as a dishwasher, waiter, night watchman, garbageman, longshoreman, and salesman until the 80’s when he could make enough money to support himself by writing, and publishing. In 1999 he won the extremely prestigious Herralde & el Rómulo Gallego Award, considered the Latin American Nobel Prize (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa have been other winners.) He died of liver failure in Barcelona, and is survived by his wife and two children.

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The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African Elite by Chinweizu. New York. 1975. Vintage Books. 0394715225. 521 pages. paperback. V-522.

DESCRIPTION - The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African Elite is a 1975 non-fiction work by Nigerian critic Chinweizu. It originated as his doctoral dissertation at State University of New York in Buffalo (SUNY) and was self-published following academic disputes; he later received his PhD after publication. The book provides a sweeping critique of five centuries of Western imperialism and the complicity of African elites in perpetuating neo-colonial structures. Chinweizu earned a PhD in philosophy in 1976, after walking away from his SUNY dissertation and publishing it independently as The West and the Rest of Us in 1975. The work was later republished by NOK Publishers in Nigeria (1978) and Pero Press (1987), expanding the original text. The book critiques Western imperialism, tracing its impact on Africa and other colonised regions over five centuries. Chinweizu identifies how African political elites enabled domination by mimicking Western institutions and ideologies. He calls for epistemological decolonisation and autonomous development by learning from non-Western models such as Japan, China and Russia. 's key arguments are that Western powers are “predators” enslaving and economically exploiting Africa, and that African elites served as “black slavers” by sustaining neocolonial dependency. While under-recognised in mainstream Western academia, the 2023 African Studies Review described it as a “testament to his profound engagement with global geopolitics and cultural dynamics” and praised its critique of African elites. It remains influential in post-colonial and Afrocentric studies across the Global South.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chinweizu Ibekwe (born 26 March 1943), known mononymously as Chinweizu, and also by the pen-name Maazi Chinweizu, is a Nigerian critic, essayist, poet, and journalist. While studying in the United States during the Black Power movement, Chinweizu became influenced by the philosophy of the Black Arts Movement. He is commonly associated with Black orientalism and emerged as one of the leading figures in contemporary Nigerian journalism, writing a highly influential column in The Guardian of Lagos. Chinweizu was born in 1943 in the town of Eluoma, in Isuikwuato, in the part of Eastern Region of Nigeria that is known today as Abia State, located in the southeastern region of Nigeria. He was educated at Government Secondary School, Afikpo in Ebonyi State, and later attended college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he studied philosophy and mathematics, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in 1967, the year of the outbreak of civil war in Nigeria, which lasted two and a half years. At the time living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Chinweizu founded and edited the Biafra Review (1969–70). He enrolled for a Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo, under the supervision of political scientist Claude E. Welch Jr. Chinweizu apparently had a disagreement with his dissertation committee and walked away with his manuscript, which he got published as The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African Elite by Random House in 1975. He took the book to SUNY, Buffalo, where he demanded, and was promptly awarded, his Ph.D. in 1976, one year after he had published the dissertation. Thus, the publication settled his disagreement with his advisers in his favour. Chinweizu started teaching overseas, at MIT and San Jose State University. He had returned to Nigeria by the early 1980s, working over the years as a columnist for various newspapers in the country and also working to promote Black orientalism in Pan-Africanism. In Nigeria, he became a literary critic, attacking what he saw as the elitism of some Nigerian authors, particularly Wole Soyinka, and he was editor of the Nigerian literary magazine, Okike. Chinweizu's notable intervention on this theme came in the essay "The Decolonization of African Literature" (later expanded into the 1983 book Toward the Decolonization of African Literature), to which Soyinka responded in an essay entitled "Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Transition". Among Chinweizu's other works is Anatomy of Female Power, in which he discusses gender roles, masculinity and feminism. Chinweizu has argued that the Arab colonization and Islamization of Africa is no different from European imperialism. The violent conquests, forced conversions and slavery perpetrated by European Christians were also perpetrated by Arab Muslims. In fact, the colonization and enslavement of Africa by Arabs began before the Europeans and continues to this day in Sudan, Mauritania and other countries in the Sahel region. Recently he published a comparative digest that shows the parallel history of European and Arab atrocities against indigenous Africans. He has been critical of the popular illusion that Islam is free of slavery and racism. Islam and Arabian culture are just as much foreign invasive forces as Christianity and European culture.

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The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. New York. 1969. Ace.  286 pages. paperback. 47800. Cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon. 

DESCRIPTION - The Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction novel by the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. Published in 1969, it became immensely popular and established Le Guin's status as a major author of science fiction. The novel is set in the fictional universe of the Hainish Cycle, a series of novels and short stories by Le Guin, which she introduced in the 1964 short story "The Dowry of Angyar". It was fourth in writing sequence among the Hainish novels, preceded by City of Illusions and followed by The Word for World Is Forest. The novel follows the story of Genly Ai, a human native of Terra, who is sent to the planet of Gethen as an envoy of the Ekumen, a loose confederation of planets. Ai's mission is to persuade the nations of Gethen to join the Ekumen, but he is stymied by a limited understanding of their culture. Individuals on Gethen are ambisexual, with no fixed sex; this situation has a strong influence on the planet's culture, and it creates a barrier of understanding for Ai. The Left Hand of Darkness was among the first books in the genre now known as feminist science fiction, and it is described as the most famous examination of androgyny in science fiction.[8] A major theme of the novel is the effect of sex and gender on culture and society, explored particularly through the relationship between Ai and Estraven, a Gethenian politician who trusts and helps Ai. When the book was first published, the gender theme touched off a feminist debate over the depiction of the ambisexual Gethenians. The novel also explores the interaction between the unfolding loyalties of its two main characters; the loneliness and rootlessness of Ai; and the contrast between the religions of Gethen's two major nations. The Left Hand of Darkness has been reprinted more than 30 times, and it has received high praise from reviewers. In 1970, it was awarded the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel by fans and writers, respectively. Of the novel's impact, the literary critic Harold Bloom wrote, "Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high literature, for our time". The scholar Donna White wrote that the book was a seminal work of science fiction, comparing it to Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein.

 Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018) was an American novelist. She worked mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. She also authored children's books, short stories, poetry, and essays. Her writing was first published in the 1960s and often depicted futuristic or imaginary alternative worlds in politics, the natural environment, gender, religion, sexuality, and ethnography. In 2016, The New York Times described her as "America's greatest living science fiction writer", although she said that she would prefer to be known as an "American novelist". She influenced Booker Prize winners and other writers, such as Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell, and science fiction and fantasy writers including Neil Gaiman and Iain Banks. She won the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, and World Fantasy Award, each more than once. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2003, she was made a Grandmaster of Science Fiction, one of a few women writers to take the top honor in the genre.

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The Life of Herod the Great by Zora Neale Hurston. New York. 2025. Amistad. 9780063161009. 339 pages. hardcover. Jacket art: Akindele John. Jacket design: Stephen Brayda.

DESCRIPTION - A never before published novel from beloved author Zora Neale Hurston, revealing the historical Herod the Great—not the villain the Bible makes him out to be but a religious and philosophical man who lived a life of valor and vision. In the 1950s, as a continuation of Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston penned a historical novel about one of the most infamous figures in the Bible, Herod the Great. In Hurston’s retelling, Herod is not the wicked ruler of the New Testament who is charged with the “slaughter of the innocents,” but a forerunner of Christ—a beloved king who enriched Jewish culture and brought prosperity and peace to Judea. From the peaks of triumph to the depths of human misery, the historical Herod “appears to have been singled out and especially endowed to attract the lightning of fate,” Hurston writes. An intimate of both Marc Antony and Julius Caesar, the Judean king lived during the first century BCE, in a time of war and imperial expansion that was rife with political assassinations and bribery, as the old world gave way to the new. Portraying Herod within this vivid and dynamic world of antiquity, little known to modern readers, Hurston’s unfinished manuscript brings this complex, compelling, and misunderstood leader fully into focus. Hurston shared her findings about Herod’s rise, his reign, and his waning days in letters to friends and associates. Text from three of these letters concludes the manuscript in an intimate way. Scholar-Editor Deborah Plant’s "Commentary: A Story Finally Told" assesses Hurston’s pioneering work and underscores Hurston’s perspective that the first century BCE has much to teach us and that the lens through which to view this dramatic and stirring era is the life and times of Herod the Great.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist whose fictional and factual accounts of black heritage remain unparalleled. Her many books include DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD; THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD; JONAH'S GOURD VINE; MOSES, MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN; MULES AND MEN; and EVERY TONGUE GOT TO CONFESS.

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A Hell of a Woman by Jim Thompson. Berkeley. 1984. Black Lizard Books. 0916870774. 183 pages. paperback. Cover art by Nancy MacGregor. Originally published by Lion in 1954.

DESCRIPTION - Young, beautiful, and fearfully abused, Mona was the kind of girl even a hard man like Dillon couldn't bring himself to use. But when Mona told him about the vicious aunt who had turned her into something little better than a prostitute - and about the money the old lady has stashed away - Dillon found it surprisingly easy to kill for her.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Myers Thompson (September 27, 1906 - April 7, 1977) was an American author and screenwriter, known for his pulp crime fiction. Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications by pulp fiction houses, from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. Despite some positive critical notice, notably by Anthony Boucher in The New York Times, he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Only after death did Thompson's literary stature grow, when in the late 1980s, several novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction. Thompson's writing culminated in a few of his best-regarded works: The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman and Pop. 1280. A number of Thompson's books became popular films, including The Getaway and The Grifters. The writer R.V. Cassill has suggested that of all pulp fiction, Thompson's was the rawest and most harrowing; that neither Dashiell Hammett nor Raymond Chandler nor even Horace McCoy, author of the bleak They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, ever ‘wrote a book within miles of Thompson'. Similarly, in the introduction to Now and on Earth, Stephen King says he most admires Thompson's work because ‘The guy was over the top. The guy was absolutely over the top. Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the forgoing: he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.' Thompson admired Fyodor Dostoyevsky and was nicknamed ‘Dimestore Dostoevsky' by writer Geoffrey O'Brien. Film director Stephen Frears, who directed an adaptation of Thompson's The Grifters as 1990's The Grifters, also identified elements of Greek tragedy in his themes.

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