A brilliant, bruising depiction of the dark side of 1950s Hollywood.
Alfred Hayes (1911-1985) was born in London and grew up in New York, where he later worked as a newspaperman. After joining the army in 1943 he served with the US forces in Italy. While in Rome he met Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini on the film Pais , and began his career in script-writing. He moved to Hollywood to work in the movies and was twice nominated for an Oscar for his scripts. Hayes' seven novels include The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1949), In Love (1953), My Face for the World to See (1958) and The End of Me (1968).
A masterpiece ... An insider's manual for all those who would
aspire to fame, the ghostly glamour of the movies
*Guardian*
More than fifty years later, Hayes strikes me as more interesting
and honest than so many of those famous novelists of the era ... It
is time we recognized him as the author of two novels no reader
will easily forget
*David Thomson*
An exciting, engrossing work, written with beautiful economy and
the sure skill of an artist who knows what he is doing ... Hayes
has created characters that are the essence of human hopes and
frailty
*The New York Times Book Review*
Hayes has done for bruised men what Jean Rhys does for bruised
women, and they both write heartbreakingly beautiful sentences
*Guardian*
Like a delayed Fitzgerald (think The Last Tycoon) or an encounter
with Pavese in an unexpected quarter, elegant in its hopelessness,
or hopeless in its elegance: a real find
*Michael Hofmann*
The most vivid picture of Hollywood since Nathanael West's Day of
the Locust
*Nelson Algren*
Intimate, disconsolate, acute
*Kirkus Reviews*
His most achieved portrait of male self-deception ... A sharp,
forensic examination of power and money ... Hayes charts the
couple's disintegration with luminous precision and lends it an air
of dream-like inevitability ... His novels perfectly capture the
texture of midcentury American life
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Hayes has recently become something of a passion for those who find
in his writing the mastery that makes a work of literature take up
a permanent place in a reader's inner life
*New York Review of Books*
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