Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude) joins Judith Freeman and Rich Cohen in celebrating Raymond Chandler's classic detective novel, The Big Sleep.

A page-turning, existential romp through the life and times of the world's most polarizing punctuation mark. The semicolon. Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest it. Herman Melville, Henry James, and Rebecca Solnit love it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care? In Semicolon, Cecelia Watson charts the rise and fall of this infamous punctuation mark, which for years was the trendiest one in the...

During the 1930's and 1940's, Raymond Chandler gave life to the detective Philip Marlowe, perhaps the most memorable character of the hardboiled crime fiction tradition. Marlowe took center stage in Chandler's influential novels, The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. And, before too long, he started appearing in adaptations for radio and cinema. Humphrey Bogart played Marlowe in 1946, and Elliot Gould tackled the character in 1973. Meanwhile, The Adventures...

The Sternwood family, immortalized in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, is in trouble again. Lovely Vivian's psychotic sister, Carmen, has disappeared from the sanitarium, and Vivian herself has once again fallen into the clutches of the shady underworld character Eddie Mars. Enter Philip Marlowe, the original tough-but-tender private eye. He saved the Sternwoods once before. The question is: Can he do it again?

Move over Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. There's a new gumshoe named Brute Ballingham. Together with secretary Moolada and nephew Pinky, this hard drinking private detective is sucked into the seedy 1940s New York crime underworld. The Excruciating Hello is a five hour wild and bizarre post-modern pastiche of such hardboiled crime noir fiction as The Long Goodbye, The Maltese Falcon, To Have and Have Not, The Red Wind, The High Window, Trouble is...

Scott Mitchell, the toughest private detective in England, is about to find that kidnapping and murder go hand in hand in this classic hardboiled mystery. Even over the telephone, Scott Mitchell can tell the caller is more beautiful than any woman he's ever met. Her name is Stephanie Miller, and from the tremor in her voice, it sounds like a matter of life and death. Miss Miller works for Crosby Blake, one of the most powerful, and dangerous, men...

When Philip Marlowe takes on a search for an ex-convict's girlfriend and investigates the murder of a client, he finds himself in danger after discovering a connection between the two cases; private eye Philip Marlowe gets caught up in a twisted tale of blackmail and murder.