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Appointment in Samarra Audiobook
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Publisher Description
The writer whom Fran Lebowitz compared to the author of The Great Gatsby, calling him “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.
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“[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
Quotes
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“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 -
“[O’Hara] is the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust.”
— New York Times -
“Exceptionally brilliant.”
— New York Herald Tribune -
“It is alive with compelling characters and O’Hara’s dead-on dialogue and sharp observations.”
— Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row -
“Dramatic…exciting…vivid and written at high speed…accurate and often penetrating.”
— Nation
Awards
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One of Time Magazine's Best 100 English-Language Novels from 1923–2005
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About John O’Hara
John O’Hara (1905–1970) was among the most prominent American writers of the twentieth century. Championed by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker, he wrote fourteen novels, including Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8, and had more stories published in the New Yorker than anyone in the history of the magazine.