Appointment in Samarra

Praise

“John Updike did it later, but I actually think John O’Hara did it better—dissecting the country club set, the ways everyone interacts with each other, their sex lives and the way men cheat. I can’t think of when I’ve read a book and thought it had such a modern feeling to what he chooses to say about marriage.” —Delia Ephron, The Wall Street Journal 

“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