Book

Nightmare alley / William Lindsay Gresham ; introduction by Nick Tosches.

Gresham, William Lindsay, 1909-1962 (author.).

Summary

Summary:

Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a carnival-show geek--alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd's gleeful disgust and derision--going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There's no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him. And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he's going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute assistant (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan's for the taking. At least for now.

Item details

ISBN: 1681376105
ISBN: 9781681376103
Physical Description: xiii, 275 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm
Edition: Movie tie-in edition.
Publisher: New York : New York Review of Books, 2021.
Copyright: ©1946

Contents / Notes

General Note:

Novel originally published in 1946. This edition is a tie-in to the 2021 motion picture, but was originally published in 2010 by New York Review Books.