Bob
Jim Straub <rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com> wrote:
My man Pynchon is pretty out on the left, but with more apparent sympathies for anarchism than any particular brand of communism or whatever. Also his status as a secret recluse who may or may not exist prevents him from playing an active role as a public politically engaged intellectual I guess. Many of our contemporary fiction writers seem to be vaguely left, but none that I can think of hew to a particular organization or socialist tendency.
But the strangest, and in my opinion best, development at the nexus of politics and literature is the crew of crime writers who are mixing left critique, social realism and neo-noir to write some of the best novels and tv shows out there. Pelecanos, Price, Lippman, Simon, Lehane... besides the Wire, which I of course love fiercely, their crime novels are so great! I'm reading Clockers by Richard Price right now and I'm amazed it doesn't get more regard among leftists and literatis alike. Seriously one of the best novels I've read in years. Mike Davis emailed me once to say, "if you like the Wire so much, you need to read clockers". Right on the money.
Terry Eagleton is so cool! I wish the US had one of him.
> I'm racking my brains to think if any current American novelists qualify as radical in this article's sense.
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