Starlite Terrace (The Seagull Library of German Literature) - Softcover

Roth M.D., Patrick; Winston, Krishna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1803092114 ISBN 13: 9781803092119

Publisher: Seagull Books London Ltd, 2023

Synopsis

Dark stories of failed dreams and contemporary desperation in Los Angeles.

In a rundown Los Angeles apartment building―the titular Starlite Terrace―Patrick Roth unfurls the tragic linked stories of Rex, Moss, Gary, and June, four neighbors, in a sort of burlesque of the Hollywood modern. In each of their singular collisions with fame, Roth’s dark prose presages a universal and mythical fate of desperation.   In “The Man at Noah’s Window,” Rex shares the story of his father, a supposed hand double for Gary Cooper in High Noon. In “Eclipse of the Sun,” Moss, who lives in fear of the next holocaust, awaits a visit from the long-lost daughter he has tracked down. In “Rider on the Storm,” Gary, a rock drummer and born-again Christian, who “almost played” on the Turtles’ 60s-hit “Happy Together,” strives to find an escape from his personal guilt. And in “The Woman in the Sea of Stars,” June, a former Hollywood studio secretary whose husband once cheated on her with Marilyn Monroe, makes the best of a disconnected life until she emerges reborn through ashes strewn in the illuminated swimming pool of the Starlite Terrace.   In each of these four tales of wannabes and almost-weres, Roth's L.A. portraits unfold in rare style, and, in Krishna Winston’s masterful translation, the hopeless, loveless perversion of an Ed Ruscha-inspired California becomes a compelling pageant of all-American grotesques that is not to be missed.

 

About this title

About the Author

Patrick Roth has been working as a Los Angeles-based film journalist and ex-pat author of German novels and plays for three decades. Krishna Winston, professor of German studies and chair of the German Studies Department at Wesleyan University, is the principal English-language translator for the works of the Nobel Prize-winning German author Günter Grass, she also translated Peter Handke’s Don Juan.

Edition details

• Publisher: Seagull Books London Ltd
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1803092114
• ISBN 13: 9781803092119
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184