RECENTLY your humble blogger ventured to Point Reyes Station, a beautiful little town on the Marin Coast, where Philip K. Dick spent several reclusive and very productive years. They were also perhaps his greatest period, during which he wrote The Man in the High Castle and began The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich.The result is this New York Times story, which runs Tuesday and looks at a … [Read more...]
Announcing Postmodern Mystery
HERE at The Misread City we’re longtime fans of Ted Gioia, whose book West Coast Jazz recreated the worlds of Dexter Gordon, Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck and others, reframing the way we looked at postwar California music.Ted, who also writes on the blues and runs the blog Conceptual Fiction, which looks at the intersection of literature with fantasy and science fiction, has just launched Postmodern … [Read more...]
Jonathan Lethem Comes to California
JONATHAN Lethem is well known to readers of The Misread City one of the most consistently fascinating American novelists. Nearly all the writers we celebrate here are West Coast figures – Dick, Le Guin, Chabon, Chandler, Ross MacDonald – and Lethem has stood out as a kind of token Brooklyner. But Lethem, whose most recent novel was the Upper East Side-set Chronic City, has finally seen the light. … [Read more...]
Jonathan Lethem to the Southland
Novelist Jonathan Lethem, though firmly associated with New York bohemia and a kind of Brooklyn renaissance, will be coming to Pomona College to take over David Foster Wallace's old job.The author of the Brooklyn-childhood novel The Fortress of Solitude and, more recently, the Upper East Side-set Chronic City is well known to readers of The Misread City: He's among the site's core writers, along … [Read more...]
Philip K. Dick’s "Exegesis"
It's been decades. But at long last, the thousands of pages sf visionary Philip K. Dick wrote in the aftermath of his divine visions will see the light of day as a two-volume set edited by novelist/fanboy Jonathan Lethem and Dick scholar Pamela Jackson.(Dick was of course living in Orange County during those hallucinogenic visions of 1974, in which God supposedly spoke to him, as well as during … [Read more...]
Philip K. Dick’s Late Work
MY latest piece on Philip K. Dick is the only one built of all-new material: That is, none of this appears in the LA Times story about the writer's Orange County years that ran a couple of Sundays back.This latest piece, which just went up on the Hero Complex blog, looks at the impact Southern California had on Dick's work. Did it move him toward an interest in consumerism, religion, or change his … [Read more...]
Philip K. Dick and the Suburbs
THE science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was a bearded Berkeley bohemian -- the last guy you'd expect to move to Orange County, Calif., at a time when its John Birch reputation was still well-deserved. But after a disastrous year or so, the author relocated from the Bay Area to SoCal, and wrote some of his most important work.Dick has also become the first sf writer to land in the Library of … [Read more...]
Happy Birthday to Philip K. Dick
This blog has drifted into Africa and Italy recently, so let me return for a moment to our West Coast home ground: Today would be the birthday of one of America's most intriguing, frustrating and brilliant writers -- Philip K. Dick.It's hard to know where to start on a figure like this, but let me defer to David Gill, a Bay Area lecturer who runs the clever and instructive Total Dick-head site. … [Read more...]
Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles
BOOKS on chandler's LA have become a kind of cottage industry. still, i'm enjoying a new book of photographs called "daylight noir: raymond chandler's imagined city." the book could be a companion volume to judith freeman's "the long embrace," which visited the dozens of SoCal locations in which the novelist lived with his elusive wife cissy, tho the aesthetic of "daylight noir" is starker and … [Read more...]
"After the End of History"
IT'S the kind of phrase, however memorable, that the speaker probably wishes he could take back. when francis fukuyama responded to the fall of berlin wall -- the close of the cold war -- by calling it "the end of history" it seemed to make sense, and it fit into an argument by postmodern scholars -- fredric jameson especially -- that we were living in a context-free epoch that had no use for … [Read more...]