James Leo Herlihy

The film of MIDNIGHT COWBOY has assumed a life of its own, but the novel upon which it was based has been undeservedly eclipsed. James Leo Herlihy was one of a clutch of Sixties cult novelists who sought to chart America's loss of innocence, bringing to bear a raw, recording eye on the American novel. In depicting Buck's relationship with the crippled street hustler Ratso Rizzo and their lives lived on the margins of society, Herlihy takes his place among a group of distinguished American novelists, including Burroughs and Kerouac, who wrote with a new frankness about those at the edges of existence.

Midnight Cowboy

La stagione della strega

Midnight Cowboy is the powerful and unforgettable novel of the compelling need of human beings for one another--a wrenching story of pain and loss. Freewheeling loser Joe Buck arrives in New York City and embarks on a quest to live the American dream. Along the way he meets street hustler and petty criminal Ratso Rizzo. Together, the two form an extraordinary relationship full of heartbreak and hope, resulting in a compelling American novel about the bonds of friendship. A gritty but compassionate novel about an ingenuous young man's confrontation with the unpleasant realities of urban life, Midnight Cowboy is an under-appreciated classic of postwar American literature.

Der Kultroman über Liebe und Einsamkeit Joe Buck wächst bei einer Gruppe von Prostituierten auf, sieht dort den Cowboys zu, die abends im Schoß der Frauen Gitarre spielen. Eines Tages beschließt er, all sein Geld zusammenzunehmen und sich echte Cowboy-Stiefel zu besorgen. James Leo Herlihy erkundet die Untiefen unseres Verlangens nach Ruhm, Sex und Geld, aber die Geschichte von Joe Buch und Ratso Rizzo erzählt auf berührende Weise von einem viel stärkeren Bedürfnis: einem anderen Menschen nah zu sein. Midnight Cowboy zählt zu den besten Roman der amerikanischen Nachkriegsliteratur. Der gefeierte Autor Daniel Schreiber ermöglicht es mit seiner Neuübersetzung nun erstmals die ganze sprachliche und emotionale Wucht dieses Romans auf Deutsch zu erleben.

Roman

THE STORIES: In LAUGHS, ETC. a woman tells about an impromptu party that she and her lawyer husband gave in their East Village apartment. The woman is a complete phony, totally, unlovably false. She has not a shred of kindness or feeling in her sle

Three Short Plays

Stop, You're Killing Me

The Season of the Witch

By the author of Midnight Cowboy: A teenage girl runs away to the East Village in “one of the best and most convincing novels . . . of the Woodstock generation” (Publishers Weekly). As she explains in her diary, seventeen-year-old Gloria Random is running away from her Midwest childhood home. It’s the fall of 1969, and her best friend John has been called up for the draft. It’s time to escape the Big Finger, and their mundane lives. Renaming themselves Witch and Roy, they head to New York City in search of Witch’s biological father. Landing in the East Village, they fall into an underground world of mysticism, drugs, and free love as they burrow further into hiding from the realities they left behind. In his last novel, the iconic author of Midnight Cowboy and All Fall Down captures the heady mix of anxiety and experimentation that permeated New York at the height of the anti-war movement. With his trademark wit and insight, James Leo Herlihy brings together a colorful cast of characters straight from the heart of the countercultural revolution. “A tour de force!” —The New York Times “Herlihy writes with an edge of iron.” —Nelson Algren, National Book Award–winning author of The Man with the Golden Arm

A Novel

Season of the Witch

Clinton Williams, a young boy who writes down everything he hears, grows up in Cleveland Ohio, the youngest member of an eccentric family that includes an alcoholic father and a wandering older brother

James Leo Herlihy

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