James Ellroy: Red Sheet
James Ellroy launches his new crime thriller Red Sheet at 92NY with a reading and conversation — the unrivaled master of American noir returns to the stage.
Why we picked this
Ellroy's prose is unlike anything else in American fiction — dense, percussive, almost unbearable in its intensity. A live reading strips away any buffer between that language and the audience.
James Ellroy rewrote the possibilities of American crime fiction with the L.A. Quartet — The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz — and then did it again with the Underworld USA trilogy. His prose style, his moral scope, his willingness to go further into darkness than the genre had gone before: there’s no one else doing what Ellroy does.
Red Sheet is his new novel, and a launch event at 92NY means a reading from the book itself — which, with Ellroy, is an experience. His voice on the page is inseparable from his voice in person: the same compressed rhythm, the same refusal to look away.
For readers who have lived inside his books, this is the event. For readers who haven’t yet — start anywhere in the L.A. Quartet and you’ll understand why this evening matters.