Alfred Hayes

New York in the 1950s. A man on a barstool is telling a story about a woman he met in a bar, early married and soon divorced, her child farmed out to her parents, good-looking, if a little past her prime. Theyd gone out, theyd grown close, but as far as he was concerned it didnt add up to much. He was a busy man. Then one day, out dancing, she runs into a rich awkward lovelorn businessman. Hell pay for her to be his, pay her a lot. And now the narrator discovers that he is as much in love with her as she is with him, perhaps more, though it will take him a while to realize just how utterly lost he is.Executed with the cool smoky brilliance of a classic Miles Davis track, In Love is an unequaled exploration of the tetheredand untetheredheart.

Un hombre en fuga termina encontrando siempre su pasado. Quien huye en Mi perdición es Asher, un guionista que abandona Hollywood después de descubrir a su esposa en brazos de un compañero de tenis. Viaja a Nueva York, ciudad de su infancia, donde conoce a una pareja de jovenes irreverentes: Michael, un poeta rudo que escribe versos pornograficos, y Aurora, una atrevida italianita dispuesta a visitar su cuarto de hotel casi todas las noches. Michael no tiene problemas en "prestarle" a su novia a cambio de un sueldo como acompañante en sus exploraciones por una Nueva York ya perdida. Pronto, sin embargo, se revela que el trio amoroso no es mas que una trampa en la que Asher terminara siempre mal parado, un juego cruel que le enseñara los limites morales de su propia generacion.Escrita a fines de los sesenta, una decada que puso en situacion de idolatria a la juventud, esta novela de Alfred Hayes deslumbra con la honestidad y el despojamiento estilistico de siempre. Genio incomparable de la captura del instante, del fuego de la intensidad y del veredicto de decadencia inmediata, Hayes se muestra en Mi perdicion, al igual que lo habia hecho en Los enamorados y Que el mundo me conozca, como un autor insustituible, sui generis, unico en su especie.

«Un dels millors llibres mai escrits sobre la fi d'una relació amorosa…La bellesa de les frases de Hayes recrea la agonia, sovint inexplicable, que comporta una relació que s'està morint. »  The New

Hayess masterpiece is an exquisite depiction of a doomed love affair set in noirish, 1950s New York.In a Manhattan bar, a middle-aged man tells a pretty girl a story: of how he fell into a relationship with a lonely young divorcee of how one night she was offered a thousand dollars to sleep with a stranger and of how he and she would subsequently betray each other in turn. In Alfred Hayess exquisite novella, love - in all its bewildering turns of longing, elation, heartbreak and regret - is dissected with unforgettable honesty and heartbreaking clarity.

Alfred Hayes escribió por única vez una obra maestra. Las fórmulas del amor -las que suponen un paraíso de éxtasis y felicidad, las que reclaman un vacío recíproco de identidad y posesión- pueden incluirse en los pliegues del relato, que consiente todas las situaciones y circunstancias capaces de sustentarlas. Afinada y entonada por una voz que no permite dudar acerca de lo que cuenta, esta novela inédita hasta ahora en español despertó la admiración del público y de lectores tan exigentes como Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith y Antonia White. Este tribunal femenino respalda la turbulenta veracidad o por lo menos la verosimilitud tortuosa de una confesión: la del espléndido aislamiento de un hombre perdido en el laberinto de su amor.

"Ras i curt: Alfred Hayes és literatura en majúscules."Una cara coneguda s'ambienta a Hollywood, on la tònica és la fama i on només ets viu en la mesura que és viva i real la teva imatge. En una fest

A dark love story set in wartime Rome from the author of In Love and Your Face for the World to See Rome, 1944. Robert is a lonely American soldier looking for a girl. Lisa is cold and hungry, obliged to seek work at Mamma Pulcini's house on the Via Flaminia. Their lives come together in what should be a simple exchange, a temporary arrangement without love or complication. But in a city broken by war, its people defeated, nothing is simple. Based on Alfred Hayes'own experiences of wartime Italy, this spare, searing novel exposes the dark complexities of the relationship between men and women, victor and vanquished. 'Hayes has done for bruised men what Jean Rhys does for bruised women, and they both write heartbreakingly beautiful sentences' Paul Bailey, Guardian 'Rings true as gold ... every single character in the book is sharp with the infallible stroke of art' Daily Mail

A brilliant, bruising depiction of the dark side of 1950s Hollywood, from the author of In Love.At a Hollywood party, a screenwriter rescues an aspiring actress from a drunken suicide attempt. He is married, disillusioned she is young, seemingly wise to the world and its slights. They slide into a casual relationship together, but as they become ever more entangled, he realises that his actions may have more serious consequences than he could ever have suspected. Hayes exquisite novella, written in his cool, inimitable style, holds a revealing light to the hollowness of the Hollywood dream and exposes the untruths we tell ourselves, even when we think we have left illusions behind.A masterpiece ... an insiders manual for all those who would aspire to fame, the ghostly glamour of the movies Nicholas Lezard, GuardianHayes is the poet of the things we think about while lying in bed, when sleep refuses to carry us off David Thomson