Word Painting

The Pulp Magazines Project: Preserving Popular Fiction

The Pulp Magazines Project is a massive undertaking to preserve a vital aspect of American history—the pulp fiction magazines, magazines that launched the careers of legendary names in literary history including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dashiell Hammett, L. Ron Hubbard and Louis L’Amour, among others.

The Golden Gazette News recently interviewed Patrick Scott Belk from the Pulp Magazines Project, who gave us an in-depth and fascinating look at the history of the pulps, and the surprising ways they influence our culture today.

PSB: During the first half of the twentieth century, pulp magazines were produced in vastly greater numbers than literary magazines; yet, ironically, they are much, much rarer today. We view the archival and preservation mission of the Pulp Magazines Project as an ongoing twofold mandate: to bring sustained scholarly attention to this important literary and artistic form which has been ignored—at least by the university and traditional brick-and-mortar archive—and to develop an open-access digital archive and research hub as a means to repair that omission. A comprehensive archive of pulp magazines is an admittedly daunting task, but given their historic and cultural importance and how they have been written out of literary history, we think it is necessary and well worth the effort.

[Click the link to read the entire article]

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I’m shameless, I’ll read anything. Screw those people who think reading only ‘high-brow’ literature is what everyone should read. The point is to read and that’s what I do.

TBV (from a conversation I had with a good friend a few weeks back).

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Were DFW’s Favorite Books Mostly Thrillers?

The Christian Science Monitor ran a peculiar list of “David Foster Wallace’s 10 Favorite Books” recently, a ranking that’s since been picked up in places like Flavorwire. (The list was originally published without comment from the author in 2007, in the collection The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books.) The list isn’t what you’d expect from Wallace, or indeed any literary luminary, as DFW passes over names like Shakespeare and Pynchon and Joyce for Stephen King, Robert Harris, and Tom Clancy—and a couple of books (the Ed McBain 87^thPrecinct mystery and the natural horror titleAlligator) that seem to be out print:

The Screwtape Lettersby C.S. Lewis
The Stand by Stephen King
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
The Thin Red Line by James Jones
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
Fuzzby Ed McBain
Alligatorby Shelley Katz
The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy

What should we make of this? I don’t think Wallace was screwing with us. While his own fiction can be dense and difficult, he was a vocal advocate for straightforwardness—and just plain being nice; he wasn’t making light of these novels, nor, I think, simply being enigmatic, like Bob Dylan making a Christmas album.

[A must read if you are a DFW fan …click the link to read the entire article.]