Dillinger in Hollywood: New and Selected Short Stories
About this book
Before John Sayles was an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and director, he was an award-winning writer of fiction. Praised for his naturalism and lyricism, the Washington Post described him as “one of our most exciting and accomplished young writers.”Now Sayles has written his first short story collection in twenty-five years. The keynote story—“Dillinger in Hollywood”—is populated by leftovers from the Golden Age of Hollywood who live in a nursing home catering for “below-the-line” talent—dancers, stunt doubles, horse wranglers, stand-ins, studio drivers—who wait for death and dementia, playing cards, breaking hips, busting ribs, and telling tall tales of days gone by.Dillinger in Hollywood showcases Sayles’s uncanny ear for language, his skill at crafting character, humor, and atmosphere, and his ability, as Barbara Kingsolver has written, “to pull apart our most cherished myths and icons and see what they’re really made of.”