I must admit that I was upset when I heard that another film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was due out this year. It is one of my favorite novels of all time and it’s already been loused up a handful of times including the 1974 film starring Robert Redford Continue reading
Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara (1934)
The decline and fall of Julian English. Merry Christmas!
This was my first experience with John O’Hara and it was a good one. This book came highly recommended to me by my father who read it some years ago. I admittedly did not know what to expect based on the title. I figured somebody made a dinner date in Iraq; sort of like when I picked up Catcher in the Rye as a teenager thinking it was going to be like Field of Dreams. The cover of my edition (as seen above) shows the silhouette of a wasted looking dude slumped in the passenger seat of a Cadillac. That is what I should have been expecting.
The story surrounds Continue reading
the self-hating hipster 