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Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Vote for Your Favorite Thriller...on NPR?

Last summer, NPR asked its listeners to nominate their favorite beach reads. I posted about it here.

This year they are asking people to nominate their favorite thrillers. As I know from lecturing about thrillers, the are hard to define. From the story:
This process is bound to raise the question: What is a thriller? It's tricky, because the genre overlaps with so many others. There are medical thrillers, legal thrillers, political thrillers, crime thrillers, lots of spy and police thrillers — even sci-fi and historical thrillers. What distinguishes a thriller, say, from a mystery? One answer, as James Patterson once wrote, is that thrillers are defined by the "intensity of emotions they create ... of apprehension and exhilaration, of excitement and breathlessness. ... By definition, if a thriller doesn't thrill, it's not doing its job." As many people have observed, the classic mystery is about discovery. Thrillers are more visceral, more oriented towards action and suspense.
So head on over here to nominate your favorite thriller. Their only caveat, it needs to be an individual title, not an entire series.

This is going to be fun. I am still deciding what to nominate myself. I am leaning toward Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry, Amazonia by James Rollins, or Relic by Preston and Child. What about you?

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