Published by Vintage Classics, part of Vintage Publishing
Format: Paperback
£8.99
Author:
Nathanael West
Format: Paperback
EAN: 9780099573166
£8.99
Available for dispatch within 1-2 working days
EAN: 9780099573166
Published: 5 Jul 2012
'A sun-blazed Polaroid of its moment' Jonathan Letham
In The Day of the Locust a young artist, Tod Hackett, arrives in LA full of dreams. But celebrity and artifice rule and he soon joins the ranks of the disenchanted that drift around the fringes of Hollywood. When he meets Faye Greener, an aspiring actress, he is intoxicated and his desperate passion explodes into rage...
Miss Lonelyhearts is a decidedly off-kilter, darkly comic tale set in New York in the early 30s. A nameless man is assigned to produce a newspaper advice column. It was meant to be a joke. But as endless letters from the Desperate, Sick-of-it-All and Disillusioned pile up for Miss Lonelyhearts's attention the joke begins to escape him...
'Wildly funny, desperately sad, brutal and kind, furious and patient, there was no other like Nathanael West' Dorothy Parker
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Black-as-pitch Hollywood farce
- The Guardian
The Day of the Locust has scenes of extraordinary power. Especially I was impressed by the pathological crowd at the premiere, the character and handling of the aspirant actress and the uncanny medieval feeling of some of his Hollywood background set off by those vividly drawn grotesques
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A talented and somewhat neglected author... wonderfully imaginative and slightly disturbed
- Daily Telegraph
It certainly packs a wallop
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These novels say more about the way we live now- and the things that brought us to our present pass - than any other work of fiction I can think of
- New Yorker
Nathanael West (1903-1940) published four novels - The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) A Cool Million (1934) The Day of the Locust (1939). West said that 'an artist can afford to be anything but dull'. He died almost unknown in a car crash at the age of thirty-seven. His fans include W.H. Auden, Matt Groening (there is a bookkeeper character in West's 1939 novel The Day Of The Locust called Homer Simpson), F Scott Fitzgerald and Johnny Depp.
