TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY: April 4 Maya Angelou American author, poet, and civil rights activist was born. “Building Great Collections One Fine Book at a Time” Check us out at www.BlindHorseBooks.com
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When literary critics had a negative reaction to Spillane's writing, citing the high content of sex and violence, Spillane answered with a few terse comments: "Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar... If the public likes you, you're good." In July 2006, at the age of 88, Mickey Spillane, the last major mystery writer of the twentieth century, passed away. He stood among a select few in the genre—Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler—who achieved such iconic status. Spillane’s place in literary history is unique. Though often criticized by mainstream critics and even envied by his contemporaries, he had a profound influence on mystery fiction and popular culture as a whole. Spillane’s success, particularly through the paperback reprints of his violent and sensual novels, helped ignite the rise of “paperback originals,” a market that would dominate for the next 25 years. His redefin...
Having previously written shorter fiction and screenplays, García Márquez sequestered himself away in his Mexico City home for an extended period of time to complete his novel Cien años de soledad, or One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967. The author drew international acclaim for the work, which ultimately sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. García Márquez is credited with helping introduce an array of readers to magical realism, a genre that combines more conventional storytelling forms with vivid, layered fantasy. Whether in fiction or nonfiction, in the epic novel or the concentrated story, Márquez is now recognized in the words of Carlos Fuentes as "the most popular and perhaps the best writer in Spanish since Cervantes". He is one of those very rare artists who succeed in chronicling not only a nation's life, culture and history, but also those of an entire continent, and a master storyteller who, as The New York Review of Books once said, "...
