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 . . .
Going West
I am next to a businessman at a formal dinner. The conversation dries up after the soup. At a loss, I ask what sort of books he enjoys. Risky, I know. Either he won’t read, ‘except on planes when...
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