Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, David Goodis ... these are a few of the masters of noir responsible for the great lurid paperbacks of the thirties, forties, and fifties. With titles like The Big Sleep, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, and Street of the Lost, with racy cover lines like "My gun-butt smashed his skull " and "Ruthless terror ripped away the mask that hid cold fear," and with some of the most extraordinary cover illustrations ever to grace American literature, these paperbacks held the ingredients of American nightmares. In...

The Phantom Empire is a brilliant, daring, and utterly original book that analyzes (even as it exemplifies) the effect that the image saturation of a hundred years of moving pictures have had on human culture and consciousness.

This is a prose poem about reading - a playful, epigrammatic nocturne upon the dream-state one falls into when lost in a book, and the uncanny, trancelike pleasure of making silent marks on paper utter sounds inside one's head. A meditation on reading, the book goes both far and deep, resisting easy summary and classification.