big life; small space

I totally agree... on a related note a few years ago I went through the Library of the Americas collections of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I found Chandler's short stories almost impossible to read because of the level of casual racism. There were a lot of African-American and Asian-American characters scattered throughout and they were all disposable and objects of loathing and nothing more. Hammett, on the other hand, was a lot more readable even when he used slurs and stereotypes, because the characters of color were practically as three-dimensional (or one-dimensional, depending on context) as the white characters. He even has a story called "Dead Yellow Women" set in Chinatown that was hard to read but basically not as horrible as it sounds.