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Published in USA
May 2007
192 pages
Genre: Biographies & Memoirs
Publication Information
In this powerful new book, Sara Paretsky explores the traditions of political and literary dissent that have informed her life and work, against the unparalleled repression of free speech and thought in the USA today. In tracing the writer's difficult journey from silence to speech, she turns to her childhood and youth in rural Kansas, and brilliantly evokes Chicago—the city with which she has become indelibly associated—from her arrival during the civil-rights struggle in the mid-1960s to her most extraordinary literary creation, the south-side detective V. I. Warshawski. Paretsky traces the emergence of V. I. Warshawski from the shadows of the loner detectives that stalk the mean streets of Dashiell Hammett's and Raymond Chandler's novels, and in the process explores American individualism, the failure of the American dream, and the resulting dystopia.
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"Paretsky's informed views illuminate her fiction and add dimension to discussions of the political responsibilities of the artist." - PW.
"Written with graceful economy,Writing in an Age of Silence is an urgent cry for dissent and a powerful reminder that liberties taken for granted may someday not be granted at all." - Booklist.
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Sara Paretsky is the creator of V. I. Warshawski and author of several mystery novels. She revolutionized the mystery world in 1982 when she introduced V I in Indemnity Only. By creating a believable investigator with the grit and the smarts to tackle problems on the mean streets, Paretsky challenged a genre in which women typically were either vamps or victims. Hailed by critics and readers, Indemnity Only was followed by fifteen more best-selling Warshawski novels.
As a contributor to the New York Times and the Guardian newspapers, and a speaker at such venues as the Library of Congress and Oxford University, Paretsky is an impassioned advocate for those on society's margins. After chairing the school's first Commission on the Status of Women as a Kansas undergraduate, Paretsky worked ...
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