Black Clock # 10

Black Clock #10

by Steve Erickson (editor), Bruce Bauman (editor)

Born out of the despair of the Great Depression, flourishing in the first radioactive blush of the nuclear age, noir is more than just a style, it's a sensibility. Black Clock 10 operates on the premise that Twenty-First Century noir is a mutated genre still bearing kinship with the original.

In Black Clock 10, Robert Polito traces early signs of noir back to Eighteenth Century America in "It Would Be a Queer World If," and Dana Spiotta takes a look at one of the classic Fifties film noirs in "First is First, Second is Nobody." In Diana Wagman's "The Five Elements of Noir," some noir archetypes find the movie they're in has taken them over. The genre gets decidedly weird with Michael Ventura's cross-dressing private-eye in "One Marilyn Too Many," and becomes altogether supernatural in stories by Denise Hamilton and Francesca Lia Block. Amid work by major contemporary authors Scott Bradfield, Brian Evenson, Geoff Nicholson and others. Black Clock 10 also identifies 70 essential noir movies, novels, comics, poems, paintings, performances and pieces of music.

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Steve Erickson is the author of ten novels: Days Between Stations, Rubicon Beach, Tours of the Black Clock, Arc d'X, Amnesiascope, The Sea Came in at Midnight, Our Ecstatic Days, Zeroville, These Dreams of You and Shadowbahn. He also has written two books about American politics and popular culture, Leap Year and American Nomad. Numerous editions have been published in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Greek, Russian and Japanese. Over the years he has written for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Conjunctions, Salon, the L.A. Weekly, the New York Times Magazine and other publications and journals, and his work has been widely anthologized. For twelve years he was editor and co-founder of the national literary journal Black Clock, and currently he is the film/television critic for Los Angeles magazine and teaches writing at the University of California, Riverside. He has received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and twice has been nominated for the National Magazine Award for criticism and commentary.