• ISBN13: 9781803092119
• Binding: Paperback
• Subject: Creative Writing, Fiction
• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Publisher Imprint: Seagull Books
• Publication Date: October 16, 2022
• Pages: 184
• Original Price: 599.0 INR
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 160 grams

In a rundown Los Angeles apartment building—the titular Starlite Terrace—Patrick Roth unfurls the tragic linked stories of Rex, Moss, Gary and June, four neighbors, in a sort of burlesque of the Hollywood modern. In each of their singular collisions with fame, Roth’s dark prose presages a universal and mythical fate of desperation. In “The Man at Noah’s Window,” Rex shares the story of his father, a supposed hand double for Gary Cooper in High Noon. In “Eclipse of the Sun,” Moss, who lives in fear of the next holocaust, awaits a visit from the long-lost daughter he has tracked down. In “Rider on the Storm,” Gary, a rock drummer and born-again Christian, who “almost played” on the Turtles’ 60s-hit “Happy Together,” strives to find escape from his personal guilt. And in “The Woman in the Sea of Stars,” June, a former Hollywood studio secretary whose husband once cheated on her with Marilyn Monroe, makes the best of a disconnected life until she emerges reborn through ashes strewn in the illuminated swimming pool of the Starlite Terrace. In each of these four tales of wanna-bes and almost-weres, Roth's L.A. portraits unfold in rare style, and, in Krishna Winston’s masterful translation, the hopeless, loveless perversion of an Ed Ruscha-inspired California becomes a compelling pageant of all-American grotesques that is not to be missed.

Patrick Roth is a German writer. The author of more than a dozen books, he has won a number of literary prizes including the Rauris Literature Prize, the Hugo-Ball-Preis and the Literaturpreis der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung. Krishna Winston is an American academic and translator of German literature.