Cain James M. Libri

E' Il più celebre romanzo di James M. Cain, di una bellezza aspra e ardente. La realtà anche se spesso repulsiva, vi è affrontata con grande coraggio; il coraggio umano e civile che ritroviamo nelle più belle pagine di Faulkner , di Caldwell, di Hemingway, di Steinbeck. Né c'è mai in questa rappresentazione piena di un severo senso della fatalità , compiacimento malsano. E' la storia soprattutto, di una passione, in cui i due protagonisti dela vicenda bruciano le loro esistenze.Dalla materia, che pure si sarebbe prestata alle più torbide soluzioni, lo scrittore si svincola sempre con perfetta padronanza. Il giudizio che ne dà è implicito. Ma ciò che più conta per la poesia è la verità con cui lo scrittore assolve, pur condannandoli, Frank Chambers e la sua Cora.

These three classics from the master of the noir novel, along with five otherwise unavailable short stories, are electric with the taut narrative voice, the suspense, and the explosive violence and eroticism that were James M. Cain’s indelible hallmarks. The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cain’s first novel–the subject of an obscenity trial in Boston, the inspiration for Camus’s The Stranger–is the fever-pitched tale of a drifter who stumbles into a job, into an erotic obsession, and into a murder. Double Indemnity–which followed Postman so quickly, Cain’s readers hardly had a chance to catch their breath–is a tersely narrated story of blind passion, duplicity, and, of course, murder. Mildred Pierce, a work of acute psychological observation and devastating emotional violence, is the tale of a woman with a taste for shiftless men and an unreasoned devotion to her monstrous daughter. All three novels were immortalized in classic Hollywood films. Also included here are five masterful stories–“Pastorale,” “The Baby in the Icebox,” “Dead Man,” “Brush Fire,” “The Girl in the Storm”–that have been out of print for decades.

Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men, and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter. Out of these elements, Cain creates a novel of acute social observation and devastating emotional violence, with a heroine whose ambitions and sufferings are never less than recognizable.

The sultry young wife of a diner owner conspires with an aimless drifter to murder her husband

The torrid story of Frank Chambers, the amoral drifter, Cora, the sullen and brooding wife, and Nick Papadakis, the amiable but inconvenient husband, has become a classic of its kind, and established Cain as a major novelist with a spare and vital prose style and a bleak vision of America.