The Lost Weekend (Penguin fiction) - Softcover

Jackson, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140110798 ISBN 13: 9780140110791

Publisher: Penguin, 1990

Synopsis

This book was first published in 1944 and also made into a film. It deals with the subject of alcoholism, and is seen through the eyes of Don Birnam. He is an intelligent, cultured man with a loving family but as an alcoholic he has crazed imaginings which lead to depression.

About this title

Review:

"A masterpiece of psychological precision. . . . The most compelling gift to the literature of addiction since De Quincey."
--"The New York Times Book Review"

"Marvelous and horrifying. . . . The best fictional account of alcoholism I have read."
--Kingsley Amis

"The author has taken this unlikely subject and has made something of a masterpiece of it, a book so powerful and understanding that many readers will find themselves riveted to their chairs until the end."
--"The Saturday Review of Literature
"
"The novel is a miracle, handed down to Mr. Jackson by a higher power. Every sentence is right. The book may be a little forgotten, but let's put it on the top shelf again, for all us lucky ex-drunks."
--Barry Hannah

"A masterpiece of psychological precision."
--"The New York Times Book Review"
"Marvelous and horrifying. . . . The best fictional account of alcoholism I have read."
--Kingsley Amis
"A masterpiece . . . a book so powerful and understanding that many readers will find themselves riveted to their chairs until the end."
--"The Saturday Review of Literature
"
"The novel is a miracle, handed down to Mr. Jackson by a higher power. Every sentence is right. . . . Let's put it on the top shelf again, for all us lucky ex-drunks."
--Barry Hannah

"A masterpiece of psychological precision."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Marvelous and horrifying. . . . The best fictional account of alcoholism I have read."
--Kingsley Amis

"A masterpiece . . . a book so powerful and understanding that many readers will find themselves riveted to their chairs until the end."
--The Saturday Review of Literature

"The novel is a miracle, handed down to Mr. Jackson by a higher power. Every sentence is right. . . . Let's put it on the top shelf again, for all us lucky ex-drunks."
--Barry Hannah

About the Author:

Charles Jackson was born in 1903 and raised in the township of Arcadia, New York, in the Finger Lakes region, where much of his fiction is set. After a youth marred by tuberculosis and alcoholism, Jackson achieved international fame with his first novel, The Lost Weekend (1944), which was adapted into a classic movie by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. Over the next nine years, Jackson published two more novels and two story collections, while continuing to struggle with alcohol and drug addiction. In 1967, after a fourteen-year silence, he returned to the best-seller lists with a novel about a nymphomaniac, A Second-Hand Life, but the following year he died of an overdose at the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan.

Blake Bailey is the author of Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson. His other books include A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Cheever: A Life, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He edited a two-volume edition of Cheever's work for The Library of America, and in 2010 received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0140110798
• ISBN 13: 9780140110791
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224