Geoffrey O'Brien – författare

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 Harboiled America ,lavishly illustrated with 135 paperback covers, and expanded with new material on Thompson, Goodis, and others,Geoffrey O'Brien masterfully explores the art, history, and ideas of the American paperback.

More than 150 years after its initial publication, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations now enters its nineteenth edi­tion. First compiled by John Bartlett, a bookseller in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a commonplace book of only 258 pages, the original 1855 edition mainly featured selections from the Bible, Shakespeare, and the great English poets. Today, Bartlett's includes more than 20,000 quotes from roughly 4,000 con­tributors. Spanning centuries of thought and culture, it remains the finest and most popular compendium of quotations ever assembled.While continuing to draw on timeless classi­cal references, this edition also incorporates more than 3,000 new quotes from more than 700 new sources, including Alison Bechdel, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Pope Francis, Atul Gawande, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hilary Mantel, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Claudia Rankine, Fred Rogers, Bernie Sanders, Patti Smith, and Malala Yousafzai. Bartlett's showcases the thoughts not only of renowned figures from the arts, literature, politics, science, sports, and business, but also of otherwise unknown individuals whose thought-provoking ideas have moved, unsettled, or inspired readers and listeners throughout the ages.Bartlett's makes searching for the perfect quote easy in three ways: alphabetically by author, chrono­logically by the author's birth date, or thematically by subject. Whether one is searching for appropriate remarks for a celebration, comforting thoughts for a serious occasion, or simply to answer the question "Who said that?" Bartlett's offers readers and schol­ars alike a stunning treasury of words that have influ­enced

In his intense and mysterious evocation of (seemingly) every kind of movie ever made, Geoffrey O'Brien erases the distinction between spectator and commentator and virtually reinvents film writing in our time.

“We watch what is moving fast from a platform that is also moving fast,” writes Geoffrey O’Brien in the beginning of Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows. This collection—gathering the best of a decade’s worth of writing on film by one of our most bracing and imaginative critics—ranges freely over the past, present, and future of the movies, from the primal visual poetry of the silent era to the dizzying permutations of the merging digital age. Here are 38 searching essays on contemporary blockbusters like Spider-Man and Minority Report; recent innovative triumphs like The Tree of Life and Beasts of the Southern Wild; and the intricacies of genre mythmaking from Chinese martial arts films to the horror classics of Val Lewton. O’Brien probes the visionary art of classic filmmakers—von Sternberg, Fod, Cocteau, Kurosawa, Godard—and the implications of such diverse recent work as Farenheit 9/11, The Passion of Christ, and The Sopranos. Each of these pieces is alert to the always-surprising intersections between screen life and real life, and the way that film from the beginning has shaped our sense of memory and history.

A genre-bending novel of 1001 nights of no-holds-barred, pre-code American movies distilled into a single fevered dreamworld.Arabian Nights of 1934 is a journey through the fevered dreamworld embodied in American movies of the early 1930s: an era that closed abruptly with the enforcement of the Production Code in July 1934. It distills a thousand and one nights of Depression-era movie-going—plotlines, closeups, cityscapes, wisecracks, backchat, and frantic outbursts—into a haunting parallel life, the stories bleeding into one another as they did in the minds of the viewers whom they helped sustain.Two of those viewers, it so happens, are O'Brien's own parents in their restless youth—one impatient to experience the world beyond the screen, one ready to take it on—and the glimpse we're afforded into the darkened theaters of their minds frames the book with an act of imagination at once tender and audacious.