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JUDITH FREEMAN.net is the offical and personal website of writer and author Judith Freeman. Author of The Chinchilla Farm, A Desert of Pure Feeling, Red Water (fiction), and The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and The Woman He Loved (non-fiction).

About the AUTHOR

Judith Freeman is a novelist, essayist, critic, and short story writer whose first work of non-fiction, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and The Woman He Loved, is due out from Pantheon in November 2007. Her first book was a collection of short stories, Family Attractions (1988), which was praised in the New York Times and The New York Review of Books for its originality. read more

About the NEW Paperback Edition

THE LONG EMBRACE - Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved

Raymond Chandler was one of the most enduring and original crime novelists of the 20th century, and much has been written about his writing life, which began in 1933 with the publication of his first story in a pulp magazine, when Chandler was 45. But as Judith Freeman uncovers in THE LONG EMBRACE: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (Pantheon Books/November 6, 2007/$25.95), it is Chandler’s pre-writing life—which he shared with his mysterious, much older wife Cissy Pascal, in the Los Angeles of the 1920s and 30s that represents the terrain of his imagination—that reveals the substance of the writer he would become. read more

What the Crictics say..

Here is what the critics say of THE LONG EMBRACE

"Compelling . . . Ms. Freeman knows Los Angeles as well as Marlowe himself . . . Like Cissy, when she crooks her finger, it’s impossible not to follow." The New York Times

"Aches with emotion and loneliness. . . Until now, no other book has made us view this great American writer afresh." Los Angeles Times

"May be the essential book on Raymond Chandler. Like his books, it offers a rational solution to a puzzle while at the same time retaining a sense of mystery."Chicago Tribune

"Complex and delicate . . . enthralled and enthralling . . The Long Embrace is one of the literary events of the year." Los Angeles Magazine

"Atmospheric and unusual . . . A restless hallucination of a book about a woman obsessed by a mystery that she knows she will never solve---and perhaps does not wish to solve." The New York Review of Books