Feeling guilty for enjoying a good mystery or science fiction? Browbeaten into reading highbrow rather than lowbrow literature by cultural tastemakers? Along comes Peter Swirskis excellent From Lowbrow to Nobrow, arguing for ending the highbrow vs. lowbrow debate and for a nobrow aesthetic that is only interested in the aesthetic and entertainment value of texts.

In Part 1 Swirski argues against the lowbrow concept in general:

• ● he disproves the myth of declining book sales and culture, showing that the numbers of books sold and read are greater than ever before, meaning a great variety in popular literature from hack writing to texts demonstrably worth reading;

• ● he argues against prejudices, generalizations and the negative influences that popular literature is supposedly having and dispels the notion of writers of popular fiction being uneducated, and refutes the claim that highbrow writers are only in it for arts sake and not for the money, citing William Faulkner who wanted to make money with his highly controversial Sanctuary (49); and

• ● he shows that genre-casting arbitrarily classifies or devalues popular literature, demonstrates that lowbrow literature is as various as highbrow literature and that the latter is as susceptible to the criticism of repeating the same story pattern over and over.

In Part 2 Swirski illustrates his nobrow concept by analyzing three novels generally perceived as lowbrow:

• ● The War with the Newts (1936) by Czech writer Karel Čapek. A novel of immense intertextual richness and political and futuristic implications against the background of upcoming war in Europe that is both a nailbiting reading adventure and an intellectual treat that transcends the categories of highbrow and lowbrow.

• ● Playback (1958) by Raymond Chandler. A novel widely criticized for not adhering to the conventions of the hard-boiled mystery but which in fact goes beyond the genre using such diverse elements as “cross genre adaptations, intertextual borrowings, self-reflexive asides, metafictional references, playfully deconstructed clichés, authorial intrusions, ironic wordplay, and passages of sociological and existential discourse”(146).

• ● Chain of Chance (1976) by Polish philosopher–essayist and novelist Stanislaw Lem. Another mixture of various genres ranging from different subgenres of the thriller and mystery to futuristic and philosophical concepts like the uncertainty principle and political commentary, all in the same novel.

Thus Swirski convincingly illustrates his concept of nobrow, or, to use another of his expressions, his idea of “artertainment,” texts which are both art and entertainment.