Appointment in Samarra, John OHara
Appointment in Samarra, John OHara
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Appointment in Samarra

Author: John O'Hara

Narrator: Christian Camargo

Unabridged: 6 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 11/19/2013


Synopsis

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.
 

About The Author

John O’Hara (1905–1970) was one of the most prominent American writers of the twentieth century. Championed by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker, he wrote seventeen novels, including Appointment in Samarra, his first, BUtterfield 8, which was made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor, and Ten North Frederick, which won the National Book Award, and he had more stories published in the New Yorker than anyone in the history of the magazine. Born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, he lived for many years in New York and in Princeton, New Jersey, where he died.


Reviews

AudiobooksNow review by Lisa on 2008-01-07 12:45:25

i read this book at least a year ago and i still think about it all the time. it's a fast-paced story which will leave you wanting more. O'Hara was a genius.

Goodreads review by Vit on May 05, 2021

Appointment in Samarra is all about life of a small town: the zeitgeist and social strata, habits and manners of the inhabitants… Everything starts on the Christmas Eve in the atmosphere of general festivity… So far nothing terrible had occurred. Young Johnny Dibble had been caught stealing liquor fro......more

Goodreads review by Jim on December 29, 2019

I’ll start with two paragraphs that I think illustrate John O’Hara’s powerful writing: “It was a lively, jesting grief, sprightly and pricking and laughing, to make you shudder and shiver up to the point of giving way completely. Then it would become a long black tunnel; a tunnel you had to go throu......more

Goodreads review by David on June 21, 2011

O'Hara's distinctive literary voice is both unique and disarming. For the first hundred pages I was unsure that O'Hara was even a competent writer, nevermind author of one of the century's great novels. His narrative technique and dialogue both are steeped in the jargon of his heyday, Prohibition Er......more

Goodreads review by Jake on October 13, 2010

On the back of this novel, Hemingway offered the following blurb: "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." Unfortunately, the subject John O'Hara knows so much about, and about which he does occ......more

Goodreads review by Rolls on April 24, 2007

This is on The Modern Libraries Top 100 Novels? I can see no reason why. It's a good book - but top 100? Come on! This should be like # 552 on a list of the 1000 best novels.......more


Quotes

“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