Awards
- Short-listed for Macavity Award (Nonfiction) 2014
Overview
Widely known as the crime fiction writer whose work led to the movies Get Shorty and Out of Sight, Elmore Leonard had a special knack for creating ""cool"" characters. In Being Cool, Charles J. Rzepka looks at what makes the dope-dealers, bookies, grifters, financial advisors, talent agents, shady attorneys, hookers, models, and crooked cops of Leonard's world cool. They may be nefarious, but they are also confident, skilled, and composed. And they are good at what they do. Taking being cool as the highway through Leonard's life and works, Rzepka finds plenty of byways to explore along the way. Rzepka delineates the stages and patterns that characterize Leonard's creative evolution. Like jazz greats, he forged an individual writing style immediately recognizable for its voice and rhythm, including his characters' rat-a-tat recitations, curt backhands, and ragged trains of thought. Rzepka draws on more than twelve hours of personal interviews with Leonard and applies what he learned to his close analysis of the writer's long life and prodigious output: 45 published novels, 39 published and unpublished short stories, and numerous essays written over the course of six decades.
Full Product Details
Author: Charles J. Rzepka (Boston University)
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Imprint: Johns Hopkins University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.10cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.499kg
ISBN: 9781421410159
ISBN 10: 142141015
Pages: 238
Publication Date: 26 November 2013
Recommended Age: From 17
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.
Reviews
Few people are as versed in Elmore Leonard's world as Charles Rzepka. -- John O'Rourke BU Today 2013 Rzepka's close reading of Leonard's fiction is an insightful, thorough and timely addition to scholarship on the author. Library Journal
Rzepka's close reading of Leonard's fiction is an insightful, thorough and timely addition to scholarship on the author. Library Journal Few people are as versed in Elmore Leonard's world as Charles Rzepka. BU Today
Author Information
Charles J. Rzepka is a professor of English at Boston University and author of Inventions and Interventions: Selected Studies in Romantic and American Literature, History, and Culture; Detective Fiction; Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey; and The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats.
