In Sunlight or In Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper

by Lawrence Block (Editor)

Overview

A truly unprecedented literary achievement by author and editor Lawrence Block, a newly-commissioned anthology of seventeen superbly-crafted stories inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper, including Jeffery Deaver, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Lee Child, and Robert Olen Butler, among many others.

"Edward Hopper is surely the greatest American narrative painter. His work bears special resonance for writers and readers, and yet his paintings never tell a story so much as they invite viewers to find for themselves the untold stories within."

So says Lawrence Block, who has invited seventeen outstanding writers to join him in an unprecedented anthology of brand-new stories: In Sunlight or In Shadow. The results are remarkable and range across all genres, wedding literary excellence to storytelling savvy.

Contributors include Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Olen Butler, Michael Connelly, Megan Abbott, Craig Ferguson, Nicholas Christopher, Jill D. Block, Joe R. Lansdale, Justin Scott, Kris Nelscott, Warren Moore, Jonathan Santlofer, Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child, and Lawrence Block himself. Even Gail Levin, Hopper’s biographer and compiler of his catalogue raisonée, appears with her own first work of fiction, providing a true account of art theft on a grand scale and told in the voice of the country preacher who perpetrated the crime.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681775593
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	12/12/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	308,584
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. His novels include The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes, The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons, Hit Me, and A Drop of the Hard Stuff, featuring Matthew Scudder. He's well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies For Fun & Profit and Write for Your Life, and he has recently published The Crime of Our Lives, a collection of his writings about the mystery genre and its practitioners.

Editorial Reviews

"One of the most varied and yet rewarding story anthologies to appear in a long time. Belongs on the top of the reading pile of every crime, mystery, and horror fiction fan."

Bookgasm

"Block asked 17 writers to write a story generated by Hopper paintings. The combined effect is ingenious, engrossing, and at times deliciously menacing."

Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Without doubt, Alfred Hitchcock would be pleased. Hopper and Block, master mesmerists."

The Virginian-Pilot

"Superbly conceived and executed. With stunning imagination, narrative power and arresting prose, each story succeeds individually and contributes to the overarching excellence of Block’s anthology. A unique collection that blends art as literature and literature as art, In Sunlight or in Shadow also explores the origins of inspiration and showcases the brilliance that flows from the fertile psyches of the talented."

Richmond Times-Dispatch

"A great idea and a strong collection. This book is a must for Edward Hopper fans, and anyone interested in the intersection of visual art and fiction."

Crime Fiction Lover

"Block has assembled a superb and very varied group of writers to spin their own golden thread from Hopper's raw flax. It's a sumptuous production in beautiful hardback."

Belfast Telegraph

"Absolutely superb. A fascinating concept. Every story is superlative. Hopper deserves a tribute of this grace and sensitivity."

USA Today (4 out of 4 stars)

"An anthology of conspicuous brilliance. A grand, masterly anthology."

Buffalo News

"For anyone who has puzzled over the vividly evocative—yet frustratingly enigmatic—works of the beloved Edward Hopper, this little volume is the perfect gift. Short stories by 17 writers—some famous, like Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King, some less so—dramatically start where the paintings leave off."

San Francisco Chronicle

"If a picture is worth a thousand words, any of Edward Hopper’s paintings of American loneliness is worth an entire short story. Ekphrasis—seeing a story in a picture—was seldom so much fun."

The Washington Post - Michael Dirda

"Block invited fellow mystery writers and other literary luminaries to pick a Hopper painting and write a story inspired by it. The 17 results are searing and ensnaring, clever, erotic, and disquieting tales of anger and subterfuge, desperation and revenge. A lushly illustrated, darkly alluring, deliciously unnerving union of art and story."

Booklist (starred)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, any of Edward Hopper’s paintings of American loneliness is worth an entire short story. Ekphrasis—seeing a story in a picture—was seldom so much fun.

Michael Dirda - The Washington Post

For anyone who has puzzled over the vividly evocative—yet frustratingly enigmatic—works of the beloved Edward Hopper, this little volume is the perfect gift. Short stories by 17 writers—some famous, like Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King, some less so—dramatically start where the paintings leave off.

San Francisco Chronicle

10/24/2016
Iconic American painter Edward Hopper serves as muse for editor Block and an impressive array of 16 other writers—including Megan Abbott, Robert Olen Butler, Lee Child, and Jeffery Deaver—who select their favorite Hopper paintings to inspire a short story. In “The Music Room,” contributor Stephen King, who happens to own a reproduction of Room in New York, 1932, turns that work’s seemingly innocent domestic scene—a man at a table reading a newspaper, a woman nearby striking a note on an upright piano—into a gruesome tableau involving a macabre scheme to stay ahead of the Great Depression. In a similar noir vein, for Joyce Carol Oates, Eleven A.M., 1926 (which depicts a naked woman seated in a comfortable chair staring out of a city window) inspires a suspenseful duel of murderous intentions as a mistress waits for her married lover to appear in “The Woman in the Window.” In “The Preacher Collects,” Hopper historian Gail Levin weighs in with a fictional tale (in which she plays a minor role) based on her scholarly research, depicting the nefarious means by which Rev. Arthayer R. Sanborn comes to own a cache of Hopper’s works. Block tops off this remarkable collection with “Autumn at the Automat,” inspired by Automat, 1927, in which a young woman has a clever strategy that will keep her flush in rent money, possibly for years. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Block invited fellow mystery writers and other literary luminaries to pick a Hopper painting and write a story inspired by it. The 17 results are searing and ensnaring, clever, erotic, and disquieting tales of anger and subterfuge, desperation and revenge. A lushly illustrated, darkly alluring, deliciously unnerving union of art and story."

Booklist

With Lawrence Block, one of the most prolific mystery writers alive, it’s always been plotting, and a clever ear for dialogue, that illuminates the inner regions of his characters’ souls.

Philadelphia Inquirer [praise for Lawrence Block]

If there is one crime writer currently capable of matching the noirish legacies of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, it’s Lawrence Block.

San Francisco Chronicle [praise for Lawrence Block]

Block remains a true master of the crime genre.

Chicago Sun-Times [praise for Lawrence Block]

There is only one writer of mystery and detective fiction who comes close to replacing the irreplaceable John D. MacDonald. The writer is Lawrence Block.

Stephen King [praise for Lawrence Block]

Block is a mesmerizing raconteur, the kind who collects the stories he hears on the street and then reprises the voices of the storytellers, many of them long gone.

New York Times Book Review [praise for Lawrence Block]

With Lawrence Block, one of the most prolific mystery writers alive, it’s always been plotting, and a clever ear for dialogue, that illuminates the inner regions of his characters’ souls.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Block remains a true master of the crime genre.

Chicago Sun-Times

There is only one writer of mystery and detective fiction who comes close to replacing the irreplaceable John D. MacDonald. The writer is Lawrence Block.

Stephen King

Block is a mesmerizing raconteur, the kind who collects the stories he hears on the street and then reprises the voices of the storytellers, many of them long gone.

The New York Times Book Review

07/01/2016
In this well-curated collection, 17 authors submit stories inspired by paintings from American realist artist Edward Hopper (1882–1967). As Block notes in the foreword, various genres "or no genre at all" are represented; some "spring directly from the canvas"; others "rebound obliquely" from the chosen painting. Color plates accompany each tale. Standout stories include Jeffery Deaver's clever use of Hopper's Hotel by a Railroad in "The Incident of 10 November," told by a doomed Soviet apparatchik; Lee Child's "The Truth About What Happened," based on Hopper's Hotel Lobby, and rendered in the author's trademark terse, ironic style; Michael Connelly's "Nighthawks," which features Hopper's most famous painting and Connelly's Harry Bosch on assignment in Chicago; Joe R. Lansdale's gothic "The Projectionist," the longest and most fleshed-out entry (New York Movie); Craig Ferguson's wry Lansdale-esque elder-buddy story, "Taking Care of Business" (South Truro Church); and Joyce Carol Oates's excruciatingly interior will-she-or-will-he tale, "The Woman in the Window" (Eleven A.M.). Other contributors include Hopper biographer Gail Levin; Megan Abbott and Jonathan Santlofer, who both explore abusive relationships and the male gaze; Stephen King, with a cheerful murderous couple; and Block, whose perfect down-and-out tale ends the volume. VERDICT A nice-looking book for Hopper fans and short story readers, this title would also make a great gift.—Liz French, Library Journal

Library Journal

2016-09-19
Edward Hopper, the painter of American loneliness, inspires a selection of short stories from a host of notable writers.Whether rural or urban, the largely, sometimes fully unpopulated spaces of Hopper's canvases speak so deeply to the American yearning to belong that the images seem to have been plucked right from the country's collective unconscious. We know every one of these places even if we have never seen them. It's no surprise then that the work Hopper inspires in this volume is not cheerful, but the best of it goes deep. Joe R. Lansdale's "The Projectionist" takes the lone usherette in Hopper's 1939 "New York Movie" as the starting point for a story about unrequited love and revenge. It is, as with much of Lansdale, sometimes brutal but never underfelt. Stephen King lets his demon grin show in the brief and nasty "The Music Room," a slick sick joke of a tale. Kris Nelscott, author of the excellent Smokey Dalton detective series, turns in a vivid and melancholy period piece about race and the Great Depression with "Still Life, 1931." And in "Girlie Show," Megan Abbott opens the book and leaves everyone else trying to catch up to her. This bitter tale of marriage and jealousy and the sweetness of sex turning to poison has the authenticity of lived experience, the weariness and longing of the beaten-down characters you see in Hopper's work.This strong collection begins in a spirit of homage but winds up showing how powerful inspiration can be.

Kirkus Reviews