Download or read book The Complete Works of Nathanael West written by Nathanael West and published by New York : Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. This book was released on 1957 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The Dream Life of Balso Snell' (1931), originally published in Paris, is in words of Robert Coates 'a fantasy, about some rather scatological adventures of the hero in the innards of the Trojan Horse.' 'Miss Lonelyhearts' (1933) is considered his [the author's] masterpiece. 'It is one of the books, ' writes Malcolm Cowley, 'that had very few readers for the first edition, but simply refuse to be forgotten.' 'A Cool Million' (1936), with the subtitle, 'The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin, ' is a satiric success story in the midst of the depression, written in mock Horatio Alger Style. 'The Day of the Locust' (1939), which is considered the best novel ever written about Hollywood, is a savage indictment.'

Download or read book Miss Lonelyhearts written by Nathanael West and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1969 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two classic short stories, one about a male reporter who writes an advice column, and the other, about people who have migrated to California in expectation of health and ease.

Download or read book The Dream Life of Balso Snell written by Nathanael West and published by . This book was released on 1934 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Lonelyhearts written by Marion Meade and published by Mariner Books. This book was released on 2011-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " ... A dazzling joint biography of Nathanael West and his wife, set against the world of New York writers and Hollywood screenwriters in the 1930s."--Inside jacket.

Download or read book Politics Desire and the Hollywood Novel written by Chip Rhodes and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2008-09 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of what happens when a serious writer goes to Hollywood has become a cliché: the writer is paid well but underappreciated, treated like a factory worker, and forced to write bad, formulaic movies. Most fail, become cynical, drink to excess, and at some point write a bitter novel that attacks the film industry in the name of high art. Like many too familiar stories, this one neither holds up to the facts nor helps us understand Hollywood novels. Instead, Chip Rhodes argues, these novels tell us a great deal about the ways that Hollywood has shaped both the American political landscape and American definitions of romance and desire. Rhodes considers how novels about the film industry changed between the studio era of the 1930s and 1940s and the era of deregulated film making that has existed since the 1960s. He asserts that Americans are now driven by cultural, rather than class, differences and that our mainstream notion of love has gone from repressed desire to “abnormal desire” to, finally, strictly business. Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel pays close attention to six authors—Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Budd Schulberg, Joan Didion, Bruce Wagner, and Elmore Leonard—who have toiled in the film industry and written to tell about it. More specifically, Rhodes considers both screenplays and novels with an eye toward the different formulations of sexuality, art, and ultimately political action that exist in these two kinds of storytelling.

Download or read book Miss Lonelyhearts The Day of the Locust New Edition written by Nathanael West and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2009-06-23 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A primer for Big Bad City disillusionment, unsparing in its portrayal of New York's debilitating entropy."—The Village Voice. With a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem. First published in 1933, Miss Lonelyhearts remains one of the most shocking works of 20th century American literature, as unnerving as a glob of black bile vomited up at a church social: empty, blasphemous, and horrific. Set in New York during the Depression and probably West's most powerful work, Miss Lonelyhearts concerns a nameless man assigned to produce a newspaper advice column — but as time passes he begins to break under the endless misery of those who write in, begging him for advice. Unable to find answers, and with his shaky Christianity ridiculed to razor-edged shards by his poisonous editor, he tumbles into alcoholism and a madness fueled by his own spiritual emptiness. During his years in Hollywood West wrote The Day of the Locust, a study of the fragility of illusion. Many critics consider it with F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished masterpiece The Last Tycoon (1941) among the best novels written about Hollywood. Set in Hollywood during the Depression, the narrator, Tod Hackett, comes to California in the hope of a career as a painter for movie backdrops but soon joins the disenchanted second-rate actors, technicians, laborers and other characters living on the fringes of the movie industry. Tod tries to seduce Faye Greener; she is seventeen. Her protector is an old man named Homer Simpson. Tod finds work on a film called prophetically “The Burning of Los Angeles,” and the dark comic tale ends in an apocalyptic mob riot outside a Hollywood premiere, as the system runs out of control.

Download or read book Alive Inside the Wreck written by Joe Woodward and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joe Woodward combs through the archives at The Huntington Library and the John Hay Library at Brown University to paint a portrait of Nathanael West's obsession with violence and literature in 1930s America

Download or read book A Cool Million written by Nathanael West and published by . This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Cool Million subtitled "The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin," is a satiric Horatio Alger story set in the midst of the Depression and is written in a bracing, mock-heroic style that has lost none of its wit or power.

Download or read book The Virginity of Famous Men written by Christine Sneed and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Virginity of Famous Men, award-winning story writer Christine Sneed's deeply perceptive collection on the human condition, features protagonists attempting to make peace with the choices--both personal and professional--they have so far made. In “The Prettiest Girls,” a location scout for a Hollywood film studio falls in love with a young Mexican woman who is more in love with the idea of stardom than with this older American man who takes her with him back to California. “Clear Conscience” focuses on the themes of family loyalty, divorce, motherhood, and whether “doing the right thing” is, in fact, always the right thing to do. In “Beach Vacation,” a mother realizes that her popular and coddled teenage son has become someone she has difficulty relating to, let alone loving with the same maternal fervor that once was second nature to her. The title story, “The Virginity of Famous Men,” explores family and fortune. Long intrigued by love and loneliness, Sneed leads readers through emotional landscapes both familiar and uncharted. These probing stories are explorations of the compassionate and passionate impulses that are inherent in--and often the source of--both abiding joy and serious distress in every human life.

Download or read book The Sentimental Touch The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism written by Aaron Ritzenberg and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sentimental Touch' explores the strange, enduring power of sentimental language in the face of a rapidly changing culture.

Download or read book Miss Lonelyhearts Nathanael West written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays on Nathanael West's novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, arranged in chronological order of publication.

Download or read book Modernism in The Day of the Locust 1939 by Nathanael West written by Linda Schug and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2005-12-02 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Frankfurt (Main), course: Decadence and Moderism in the Late 20th Century American Cinema, language: English, abstract: Jonathan Veitch asserts in the preface of his book American Superrealism that critics have had problems in placing Nathanael West within the literature of the 1930s and American literature in general. They understood him for example as "a poet of darkness", as "an apocalyptic writer", as "a homegrown surrealist", as "a writer of the left" , as a "universal satirist" , in a way as "the prototype of the contemporary Jewish-American novelist" (Wisker 1-2) or as a realistic writer (Martin, see Roberts). Although some of these characterizations are contradictory, they all fit because they reflect different facets of the author, or rather his work. West combined all these elements and probably even several others in his writings. His "style was never constant. At times his pictorial technique closely resembles collage [but also] cartoon strips, movies, and several different schools of painting, as well as such non-graphic visual arts as the tableau and the dance." (Reid 9) Taking the (though not planned) final result of his development as a writer, his last book The Day of the Locust (1939) as an example, I want to show in my essay that at least one of West's books does not "fall between the different schools of writing" (Wisker 2), as he once noted. He is certainly a representative of modernism, the "literary movement" and "point of view" of his time (see O'Conner) not only because a "struggle for definition is part of what those years are about" (Wisker 121). Nathanael West was influenced by the same historical events and used many of the strategies other contemporary writers employed to express his way of seeing the world. I will point out the features of modernism in the novel because, as Randall Reid states, "[i]n a century which has made experimental writing almost an absolute value, he is one of the more interesting innovators. [...]" First of all, it will be useful to look at the historical background to understand modernism before defining it with emphasis on decadence as a special characteristic. In the next part of my essay, I am going to show how modernism, that is surrealism, Dada and the typical modernist themes, is reflected in the novel. Finally, I will summarize the resulting main points in the conclusion.

Download or read book Some Time in the Sun written by Tom Dardis and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 1988 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coworkers and friends of the literary giants who worked as screenwriters in the 30s and 40s describe their experiences in and impact on Hollywood

Download or read book S J Perelman Writings LOA 346 written by S. J. Perelman and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 605 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adam Gopnik presents the very best of S. J. Perelman, America's zaniest humorist. S. J. Perelman (1904-1979) wrote for the Marx Brothers films Horse Feathers and Monkey Business and won an Oscar for his screenwriting on Around the World in Eighty Days, but he remains best known for his many sketches and essays penned for The New Yorker during its golden age of humor. In these short comic pieces--Perelman called them feuilletons--his penchant for wordplay, witticism, spoofery, self-deprecation, and plain zaniness are on full display. The New York Times once noted his ability in these magazine pieces "to transform the common cliché or figure of speech into an exploding cigar." Author and New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik has selected the very best of them, including Perelman's parodies of books and films, his biting social satire, autobiographical pieces, and a selection from the celebrated Cloudland Revisited series, in which Perelman reminisces nostalgically about books and movies encountered in youth before describing in his inimitable hyperkinetic style the rude shock of revisiting them as an adult. Also included in this volume are the acclaimed play The Beauty Part (1963) from Perelman's Broadway career; profiles of the Marx Brothers, Dorothy Parker, and his brother-in-law Nathanael West; and a selection of letters written to correspondents such as Groucho Marx and Paul Theroux.

Download or read book Under the Wave at Waimea written by Paul Theroux and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2021 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From legendary writer Paul Theroux comes an atmospheric novel following a big-wave surfer as he confronts aging, privilege, mortality, and whose lives we choose to remember.

Download or read book My Annihilation written by Fuminori Nakamura and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What transforms a person into a killer? Can it be something as small as a suggestion? Turn this page, and you may forfeit your entire life. With My Annihilation, Fuminori Nakamura, master of literary noir, has constructed a puzzle box of a narrative in the form of a confessional diary that implicates its reader in a heinous crime. Delving relentlessly into the darkest corners of human consciousness, My Annihilation interrogates the unspeakable thoughts all humans share that can be monstrous when brought to life, revealing with disturbing honesty the psychological motives of a killer.

Download or read book The Day of the Locust written by Nathanael West and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Day of the Locust" by Nathanael West. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.