Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust (Paperback)

from abirdman

Two works of fiction which depict West's nightmare vision of Los Angeles pre-1940, which has, oddly, almost completely come true but is no longer considered a nightmare-- it's just LA.

from slickdpdx

The protagonist of this short novel (or long story) is a young man playing the part of Miss Lonelyhearts for the agony column of a NYC-based newspaper during the great depression. He is in the midst of an existential crisis that is aggravated by the banal but real pain expressed in the letters of...

from TheAmpersand

Lean, vicious, brilliant, and oddly familiar, these two novellas weren't quite what I expected. Even though it's very short and its prose is ruthlessly economical, I had a lot of trouble getting my head around "Miss Lonelyhearts," which, despite all the cynicism (provided in bulk by Shrike, the e...

from mrtall

Although The Day of the Locust is the longer and more famous of the two works this volume comprises, I preferred Miss Lonelyhearts. Miss Lonelyhearts is an odd and haunting story: the eponymous protatgonist is actually a young man who's fallen into the job of writing an agony aunt column for a ne...

from araridan

Of these two novellas, Miss Lonelyhearts was by far my favorite. "Miss Lonelyhearts" is actually a male employee of a New York newspaper who write the advice column much in the vein of Ann Landers. He initially treats his job as a huge joke, but day after day of letters dealing with horribly depr...