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Appointment in Samarra: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
The writer whom Fran Lebowitz called "the real F. Scott Fitzgerald" makes his Penguin Classics debut with this beautiful deluxe edition of his best-loved book.
One of the great novels of small-town American life, Appointment in Samarra is John O'Hara's crowning achievement. In December 1930, just before Christmas, the Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, social circuit is electrified with parties and dances. At the center of the social elite stand Julian and Caroline English. But in one rash moment born inside a highball glass, Julian breaks with polite society and begins a rapid descent toward self-destruction.
Brimming with wealth and privilege, jealousy and infidelity, O'Hara's iconic first novel is an unflinching look at the dark side of the American dream--and a lasting testament to the keen social intelligence if a major American writer.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Book Details
- Publisher: Penguin Classics
- Publish Date: Apr 30th, 2013
- Pages: 240
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.30in - 5.60in - 0.70in - 0.57lb
- EAN: 9780143107071
- Recommended age: 18-UP
- Categories: • Classics• Literary• Family Life - General
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About the Author
Charles McGrath (introducer) is the former editor of The New York Times Book Review and former deputy editor of The New Yorker. He is currently a writer at large for The New York Times.
Neil Gower (cover illustrator) is an internationally acclaimed graphic artist. He spent ten years as a contributing artist to Condé Nast Traveler and has provided art for major publishing houses and for such magazines as The New Yorker, The Economist, and Vanity Fair. He lives in Sussex, England.
More books by John O'Hara
What people are saying
Historian of Architecture / Frances and Gilbert P. Schafer Visiting Professor of Architecture @TaubmanCollege / Views my own
The dust jacket for Eleanor Catton’s new novel reminds me of Alfred Maurer’s dust jacket for John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra (1934) https://t.co/c3JPksDIq8
A great story well told may be the finest art. Ted Lasso: "Be curious, not judgmental."
Before O'Hara, sex in American novels—polite novels, anyway—was mostly adulterous, not something that proper married women engaged in, or if they did, they weren't known to enjoy it. CHARLES McGRATH, "Introduction" #SundaySentence John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra https://t.co/NC82cXbVax
Flaneur, Fallibilist, Product @JarAppHQ, Past: VP-Product @Paytm, Co-Founder @getshifu (acquired by @paytm), Glass half full kind of guy.
https://t.co/H1pswrpweX This is @jgebbia 's new venture. Looks very interesting. I wonder if the name is inspired by "Appointment in Samarra" by John O'Hara/ Somerset Maugham
Praise for this book
"With a dazzling new cover and smart new introduction, one of my favorite novels, Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara, is reborn. . . . This novel about class, drinking and sex is fun--and incredibly smart." --Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune
"[A] gorgeous new edition . . . Appointment in Samarra still astonishes and amazes; and [O'Hara's] style and themes--a bridge, if you will, between F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Updike--remain painfully and beautifully relevant today." --Huffington Post
"Suspenseful, character-driven--it deserves to be read more." --Joshua Ferris, Details
"Transfixing . . . A Jazz Age novel set amidst the early throes of the Depression . . . A striking antidote to contemporary novels like Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts and Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, which remain startling for their implacably cynical view of humanity. O'Hara offers a more nuanced, and more subversive view of the national mood at the cusp of the Depression." --Nathaniel Rich, The Daily Beast
"Nobody who's read it ever forgets Appointment in Samarra." --San Francisco Chronicle
"An attractive new edition of Samarra, with deckled edges and a jazzy cover." --The Philadelphia Review of Books
"If you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well, read Appointment in Samarra." --Ernest Hemingway
"Appointment in Samarra lives frighteningly in the mind." --John Updike
"It is alive with compelling characters and O'Hara's dead-on dialogue and sharp observations." --Chicago Tribune's Printers Row
"[O'Hara] was as acute a social observer as Fitzgerald, as spare a stylist as Hemingway, and in his creation of Gibbsville, in western Pennsylvania, he invented a kind of small-bore variation on Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County." --Los Angeles Times
"An author I love is John O'Hara. . . . I think he's been forgotten by time, but for dialogue lovers, he's a goldmine of inspiration." --Douglas Coupland, Shelf Awareness
"O'Hara was one of Mom's favorite authors. . . . 'So I finally read Appointment in Samarra, ' I told her. 'I'd always thought that book had something to do with Iraq.' . . . 'It does apply to Iraq, even if that's not at all what it's about. It's a book about setting things in motion and then being too proud and stubborn to apologize and to change course.' " --from The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe
What people are saying
Historian of Architecture / Frances and Gilbert P. Schafer Visiting Professor of Architecture @TaubmanCollege / Views my own
The dust jacket for Eleanor Catton’s new novel reminds me of Alfred Maurer’s dust jacket for John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra (1934) https://t.co/c3JPksDIq8
A great story well told may be the finest art. Ted Lasso: "Be curious, not judgmental."
Before O'Hara, sex in American novels—polite novels, anyway—was mostly adulterous, not something that proper married women engaged in, or if they did, they weren't known to enjoy it. CHARLES McGRATH, "Introduction" #SundaySentence John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra https://t.co/NC82cXbVax