It looks like the Library of America is going to have a second volume of Philip K. Dick novels edited by Jonathan Lethem. It seems like it was only last Fall I was blogging about the first volume, and it was. They must have gotten great sales from that first volume–makes a great stocking stuffer in the holidays, no doubt.
PKD is the perfect writer for that institution to memorialize in this post-postmodern minute. I am not knocking the process or the result in any way shape or form. But I do have to wonder if PKD, in his most prolonged vacations from reality, foresaw anything like the Nachleben he has been afterliving: a Hollywood big-shot on the one hand, spawning movie after movie, and on the other hand a canonized establishment author, his pulpy paranoid operas (paranoperas?) entombed in those beribboned black permabooks. Not even he could have made this stuff up.
I would guess that some of the Library of America “Old Guard,” if there is such a thing, just hates the presence of Dick, HPL, Raymond Chandler, Hammett, and others abasing the sacred premises. My fondest wish would be to see their reaction if Modern Library someday did a volume of REH’s best Conan stories. It’s amusing enough to watch Tolkien fanatics froth whenever I mention Howard in the same breath as JRR; I think the Serious Literature crowd would die on the spot, committing sepuku with a slim volume of English verse.
It would be great if they (LoA) would do some collections of genre fiction like they’ve done of noir. But I think it will take a while before a volume of outright fantasy appears among the big black monoliths. Although if they started with someone literary like Cabell… hmmm…