McCoy's classic novel is a powerful story of ambition, desperation, and determination in 1930s America
Horace McCoy was born near Nashville, Tennessee in 1897. His varied career included reporting and sports editing, acting as bodyguard to a politician, doubling for a wrestler and writing for films and magazines. A founder of the celebrated Dallas Little Theatre, his novels include I Should Have Stayed Home and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. He died in 1955.
An extraordinary achievement and every bit as shocking and moving
today as it must have been for its original readers. The characters
are both more, and less, than human, the writing is tersely
perfect, and the ending almost unbearably moving.
*Guardian*
The first existentialist novel to have appeared in America
*Simone de Beauvoir*
A classic novel about hardscrabble survival in 1930s Depression-era
America
*The Times*
A heartbreaking existentialist fable about a gruelling marathon
dance contest [that] assumes the weight of Greek tragedy ... a
masterpiece.
*Independent on Sunday*
Sordid, pathetic, senselessly exciting ... has the immediacy and
the significance of a nerve-shattering explosion
*New Republic*
Were it not in its physical details so carefully documented, it
would be lurid beyond itself
*Nation*
Language is not minced in this short novel which presents life in
its most brutal aspect
*Saturday Review of Literature*
A brilliant, bitter, wonderful portrait of mother and daughter,
artist and lover
*Kirkus*
Horace McCoy shoots words like bullets
*Time*
A spare, bleak parable about American life, which McCoy pictured as
a Los Angeles dance marathon in the early thirties ... full of the
kind of apocalyptic detail that both he and Nathanael West saw in
life as lived on the Hollywood fringe
*New York Times*
Captures the survivalist barbarity in this bizarre convention, and
becomes a metaphor for life itself: the last couple on their feet
gets the prize
*Independent*
I was moved, then shaken by the beauty and genius of Horace McCoy's
metaphor
*Village Voice*
It's the unanswerable nature of the whydunnit that ensures the
book's durability
*booklit.com*
Takes the reader into one of America's darkest corners ... The
story has resonance for contemporary America and the current craze
for reality television. How far are we from staging a dance
marathon for television?
*readywhenyouarecb.com*
This almost sadistically frank pulp fiction from 1935 will cure
anyone of the delusion that earlier generations didn't know the
score. With murder, incest, abortion, and the like generously added
to a plot about people entertaining themselves by watching the
misery of others, it's like one of these eliminationist "reality"
television shows (Survivor, Big Brother, etc.) as conceived by the
creative team of Thomas Hobbes and Charles Darwin. These lives are
indeed nasty, brutish, and short. It doesn't make for a pretty
story, but you have to admire the zeal and energy with which Horace
McCoy drives his point home
*Brothersjudd.com*
A sharply-honed novella... Brilliant
*Daily Mail*
America's first existential novel
*Evening Standard*
And finally, showing the modern writers how it's done... the 1930s
existentialist noir classic... it's a breathtaking piece of
storytelling that is still thrillingly relevant today.
*Big Issue*
The brutality of the story is offset by the poetic beauty and
precision of the narrative... In our world of fleeting reality TV
stardom, this stark, urgent novel feels more timely than ever.
*Observer*
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