Something New For the Wish List
Library of America to Publish Philip K. Dick volume:
NEW YORK (AP) — One of the world’s favorite cult writers, Philip K. Dick, is being canonized.The Library of America, which releases hardcover editions of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and other literary masters, will publish four of Dick’s futuristic novels next summer, including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?— the basis for the classic film, Blade Runner.
“He is someone, like Raymond Chandler, who took the conventions of a pulp genre and made very adventurous literary use of them,” Max Rudin, publisher of the Library of America, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
Jonathan Lethem, whose novels include Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, is editing the Dick volume. News of the project first surfaced earlier this week when Lethem was interviewed by the literary blog, The Elegant Variation.
Beyond literary merit, Rudin cited a couple of factors in choosing Dick — the 25th anniversary next summer of Blade Runner, which will be marked by director Ridley Scott’s remastered “final cut,” and the positive response to the Library of America’s volume of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, published in 2005.
“There were a lot of people who felt their reading tastes were validated by including Lovecraft in the library,” Rudin said. “We had been thinking for a long time about Philip K. Dick and other genre writers, and because of the success of the Lovecraft book, and because of Blade Runner coming out, it seemed like a good time to go ahead with this.”
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Blade Runner is the only film of a Dick work that even approached what he wrote. He has been brought to film by others, but I won’t even dignify the attempts by naming them.
He is an acquired taste, but it was worth the effort.
After reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner wasn’t quite there, either. Strangely enough, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was closer to Dick than any other movie yet made.