{"product_id":"9781883011284","title":"Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings","description":"\u003cp\u003eLibrary of America offers the most complete collection ever published of Nathanael West's writings. Along with the four novels for which he is famous, this authoritative collection gathers stories, poetry, essays and plays, film scripts and treatments, and letters.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the Dada-inspired \u003ci\u003eThe Dream Life of Balso Snell\u003c\/i\u003e (1931), he freely mixes high-flown literary and religious allusions with erotic and scatological humor. \u003ci\u003eMiss Lonelyhearts\u003c\/i\u003e (1933) presents, in a series of grotesque, starkly etched episodes, the spiritual breakdown of a newspaper columnist overwhelmed by his readers’ suffering. By contrast, \u003ci\u003eA Cool Million\u003c\/i\u003e (1934) reduces the eternal optimism of Horatio Alger’s novels to a brutal, cartoonish farce. In his last work, \u003ci\u003eThe Day of the Locust\u003c\/i\u003e (1939), West renders with hallucinatory precision the reverse side of the Hollywood dream, as he choreographs a cast of failures, has-beens, and deluded glamour-seekers in what becomes an apocalyptic dance of death.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlso included is a generous sampling of West’s other surviving work, ranging from freewheeling improvisations and grotesque comic tales to more mainstream work written with Hollywood or Broadway in mind, and including his anti-war satire \u003ci\u003eGood Hunting\u003c\/i\u003e and his adaptation of Francis Ile’s famous crime novel \u003ci\u003eBefore the Fact\u003c\/i\u003e. The uncollected West shows him as a writer who embodied the contradictions and crazy-quilt exuberance of American culture—and raises the question of how he might have developed had his career not been cut short. Selected correspondence with William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Malcolm Cowley, Bennett Cerf, and others rounds out the volume and sets West’s literary life in fuller context.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Library of America","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47039661539568,"sku":"9781883011284","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781883011284_p0.jpg?v=1763604473","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781883011284","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}