Denis Johnson, the new Dickens?
This story from US art blog flyover.

Last summer, the same critics who’ve long noted Playboy’s declining cultural relevance were surprised to learn that the magazine had commissioned Denis Johnson — author of the 2007 National Book Award-winning novel Tree of Smoke — to write a 40,000-word serial novel.

Given the impotence of Playboy’s impact — losses for the last quarter of 2008 exceeded $145 million — Johnson’s crime caper will likely get more exposure now that it’s been published in book form by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Nobody Move deserves the attention. Not just for refreshing the hard-boiled idiom of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but also for inventing a variation of the ethical obsessions of Charles Dickens.
The whole story in the Pittsburgh City Paper …