Word: pulp
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...explain exactly how they were going to kill Bond (and take over the world) gave him enough time to kill them. Although the novels and the early Bond movies took place during the Cold War, their villains were rarely Soviet operatives; they were closer to those freelance fruitcakes of pulp fantasy fiction, Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless. Issuing dreadful warnings, plotting mass destruction from remote redoubts and sending their thugs to do the dirty work, the Scaramangas and Ernst Stavro Blofelds of Bond fiction could have been the secular antecedents of Osama bin Laden...
Charles Ardai was born too late. He's a dotcom success story--founder and CEO of Juno--but his first love was pulp fiction: those seamy, seedy, hard-boiled paperbacks from the 1940s and '50s, the kind with a hot broad and a cold, stiff drink on the cover. Ardai, 36, missed the great age of pulp, so after Juno merged with a competitor in 2001 and he had time and money to burn, he founded his own press, Hard Case Crime. Now he makes 'em like they used...
...effective books that dispensed with stylistic foofaraw and hooked the reader from the get-go with pure plot. (Sample first line, from David Dodge's The Last Match: "The guy who was waiting for me in my room merely wanted to blow my head off, that's all.") "Pulp fiction was written at high velocity by people who had a bill collector waiting at the door," Ardai says. So far, he has signed up some A-list talent, including Madison Smartt Bell and Stephen King. He has also done some sleuthing of his own and rediscovered long-lost novels...
...about union politics, a flu epidemic, immigration, baseball, an Irish cop and a black fugitive in Boston in 1919? He's gone big and literary on us, and the results are part home run and part homework. But he hasn't forgotten where he came from: there's great pulp storytelling in here...
...been his prime by curling inside the legend of the Difficult Star, acquiring an odor as rowdy and unreliable. And since he wasn't a box office magnet, why take the chance? Bio stats on the Internet Movie Database synopsize Rourke's 90s: "Turned down Bruce Willis' role in Pulp Fiction ... Filmed a role in [Terrence Malick's] The Thin Red Line, that eventually got cut.... Walked off the set of Luck of the Draw when the producers refused to let him include his pet chihuahua in the movie." Instead, Rourke, who had been a serious amateur boxer...