My Face for the World to See (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Hayes, Alfred

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241342309 ISBN 13: 9780241342305

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2018

Synopsis

A brilliant, bruising depiction of the dark side of 1950s Hollywood, from the author of In Love.

At a Hollywood party, a screenwriter rescues an aspiring actress from a drunken suicide attempt. He is married, disillusioned; she is young, seemingly wise to the world and its slights. They slide into a casual relationship together, but as they become ever more entangled, he realises that his actions may have more serious consequences than he could ever have suspected. Hayes' exquisite novella, written in his cool, inimitable style, holds a revealing light to the hollowness of the Hollywood dream and exposes the untruths we tell ourselves, even when we think we have left illusions behind.

'A masterpiece ... an insider's manual for all those who would aspire to fame, the ghostly glamour of the movies' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

'Hayes is the poet of the things we think about while lying in bed, when sleep refuses to carry us off' David Thomson

About this title

Review

A masterpiece ... An insider's manual for all those who would aspire to fame, the ghostly glamour of the movies (Nick Lezard 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 (Paul Bailey 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)

About the Author

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 Paisà, 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).

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0241342309
• ISBN 13: 9780241342305
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128