Fireworks: The Lost Writings

Here, on the heels of Hardcore and More Hardcore, which created a rediscovery of Jim Thompson, whom Stephen King has called “my favorite crime novelist,” comes Fireworks: The Lost Writings, edited and introduced by Robert Polito and Michael McCauley.Fireworks is a stunning survey of Jim Thompson’s writing beginning with the earliest magazine work of the 1920s and ending with his last unpublished manuscripts of the 1970s. This volume is a virtual panorama of six decades of Thompson’s singular literary career, encompassing his short fiction, true crime reporting, and autobiographical pieces. This dazzling compendium of the master’s writing features some of his boldest, most chilling performances, including an astonishing array of gritty short stories (among them, “Time Without End,” “The End of the Book,” and “The Flaw in the System”) and Thompson’s last completed work, the fierce novella This World, Then the Fireworks (published without editorial emendation here for the first time). Scattered throughout are glimpses of personal reminiscence—“A Road and a Memory,” “Death Missed a Bet,” and the harrowing “An Alcoholic Looks at Himself.” At once a compendium of brilliant “lost” pieces and a comprehensive posthumous autobiography, Fireworks covers the familiar terrain of Jim Thompson’s remarkable novels even as it discovers fresh landmarks of his achievement.