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James Ellroy

    March 4, 1948

    James Ellroy is a master of the hardboiled crime genre, renowned for his distinctive telegraphic style that omits unnecessary words and often employs sentence fragments. His works are noted for their dark humor, dense plotting, and a relentlessly pessimistic worldview. Ellroy delves into the depiction of American authoritarianism, earning him the moniker the "Demon Dog of American crime fiction." His novels are celebrated for their incisive gaze into society's underbelly and their unmistakable stylistic urgency, pulling readers into a vortex of suspense and cynicism.

    James Ellroy
    L.A. Confidential
    Perfidia, English Edition
    Fifty years of painting
    L.A. Confidental
    American Tabloid
    The Big Nowhere. Blutschatten, englische Ausgabe
    • This novel is set in Los Angeles, the city of angels that has become the city of the Angel of Death. It is about communist witch-hunts and about insanely violent killings which are terrorising the community.

      The Big Nowhere. Blutschatten, englische Ausgabe
      4.3
    • American Tabloid

      • 352 pages
      • 13 hours of reading

      A novel of the Kennedy era, portraying the president in a far from flattering light. There are three protagonists: a CIA agent who pimps for JFK, another agent who trains anti-Castro rebels, and a lawyer who is a Mafia hunter. Through their eyes are seen the conflicting interests of the Kennedys, the director of the FBI, organized crime, organized labor, Castro and Cuban exiles.

      American Tabloid
      4.2
    • It is Christmas, 1951, Los Angeles. A city where the police are as corrupt as the criminals, six prisoners are beaten senseless in their cells by cops crazed on alcohol. For the three L.A.P.D. detectives involved, it will expose the guilty secrets on which they have built their corrupt and violent careers

      L.A. Confidental
      4.1
    • Foreword by Ralph Rugoff. Texts by James Ellroy, Ralph Rugoff, Alexandra Schwartz, Bruce Wagner and Ulrich Wilmes. Interview by Kristine McKenna Ed Ruscha ist einer der einflussreichsten Künstler der Gegenwart und hat einige der bekanntesten Bilder unserer Zeit gemalt und sich dennoch ein gewisses Misstrauen gegenüber der klassischen Malerei bewahrt. Er wusste ständig die Mittel und Wege des klassischen Malprozesses zu umgehen. Es gab Zeiten, in denen er kaum oder gar nicht gemalt hat, wie in den Jahren 1969–1981. Jede Art von Etikettierung der Pop Art oder Konzeptkunst lehnte er ab, obwohl er beiden Stilrichtungen wichtige Impulse gegeben hat. Der Katalog zeigt bedeutende Beispiele aus allen Schaffensperioden: Die großen, querformatigen Bilder der Standard Oil Tankstellen, die Schatten, Silhouetten und Segelschiffe, die des historischen Zugs, der Pioniere nach Westen des amerikansichen Kontinents, Präriewagen, Pferden, Kakteen und Koyoten. Viele jüngere Künstler schreiben seinen Fotobüchern der 1960er Jahre sowie seinen Zeichnungen und Gemälden bedeutenden Einfluss auf ihr Werk zu.

      Fifty years of painting
      4.0
    • Perfidia, English Edition

      • 692 pages
      • 25 hours of reading

      Nominated for the Folio Prize It is December 6 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal Japanese-Americans âe" but now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins. The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. William H. Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police. Heâe(tm)s superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith âe" Irish émigré, ex-IRA killer, fledgling war profiteer. Kay Lake is a 21-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. The investigation throws them together and rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm centre that brilliantly illuminates these four driven souls âe" comrades, rivals, lovers, historyâe(tm)s pawns. Perfidia is a novel of astonishments. It is World War II as you have never seen it, and Los Angeles as James Ellroy has never written it before. Here, he gives us the party at the edge of the abyss and the precipice of Americaâe(tm)s ascendance. Perfidia is that moment, spellbindingly captured. It beckons us to solve a great crime that, in its turn, explicates the crime of war itself. It is a great American novel.

      Perfidia, English Edition
      4.1
    • "L.A. is a city where it's hard to tell the good guys from the bad. At Central Police Station, Christmas 1951, cops beat up six suspects. This will change the careers of the three LAPD detectives involved"--http://trove.nla.gov.au

      L.A. Confidential
      4.1
    • The Cold Six Thousand

      • 669 pages
      • 24 hours of reading

      A young Las Vegas cop named Wayne Tedrow, Jr. travels through the 1960s, from JFK's assassination to Vietnam, unaware that J. Edgar Hoover is the one pulling the strings.

      The Cold Six Thousand
      4.1
    • From the widely acclaimed author of" L.A. Confidential" comes the absorbing story of three man caught in a massive web of ambition, perversion, and deceit. ""The Big Nowhere" "makes you feel as if you are really in the Hollywood of 1950".--"The Wall Street Journal".

      The big nowhere
      4.1
    • My Dark Places

      • 416 pages
      • 15 hours of reading

      America's greatest crime writer investigates his mother's murder. On 21 June 1958, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy left her home in California. She was found strangled the next day. Her ten year-old son James had been with her estranged husband all weekend and was informed of her death on his return. Her murderer was never found, but her death had an enduring effect on her son - he spent his teens and early adult years as a wino, petty burglar and derelict. Only later, through his obsession with crime fiction, triggered by his mother's murder, did Ellroy begin to delve into his past. Shortly after the publication of his groundbreaking novel WHITE JAZZ, he determined to return to Los Angeles and, with the help of veteran detective Bill Stoner, attempt to solve the 38-year-old killing. The result is one of the few classics of crime non- fiction and autobiography to appear in the last few decades; a hypnotic trip to America's underbelly and one man's tortured soul.

      My Dark Places
      4.0
    • White Jazz

      • 416 pages
      • 15 hours of reading

      L.A., 1958. Corrupt Lt. Dave Klein, rapidly into a morass of bribes, fixes, and murder, hunts a thief whose crime-family victims don't want him caught and agrees to dig dirt on a Howard Hughes starlet--all while struggling to duck the fallout from his latest killing. As controversy over the proposed stadium for the Dodgers in Chavez Ravine brings city politics to a boil, Dave gets the word from mobster Mickey Cohen to help Sanderline Johnson, a half-wit croupier picked up in a raid, out his ninth-floor window before he can testify. The official verdict is flipped-out suicide, but the murder squeezes Dave between his department patron, detective chief Ed Exley; his would-be patron, Capt. Dudley Smith, deep in the Organization's pocket; double-dealing D.A. Bob Gallaudet; and Welles Noonan, a politically-minded US attorney with blood in his eye. Meanwhile, Exley puts Dave in charge of a break-in to the home of mobster J. C. Kafesjian, who wants him off the case; and Dave falls in love with Glenda Bledsoe, the starlet whose contract Hollywood mogul Hughes wants to break--and vows to protect her from the man whose money he's taking to break her. As if all this weren't trouble enough, somebody (Exley? Gallaudet? Dud Smith?) frames Dave for a murder that's been captured on film.

      White Jazz
      4.0