Word: samarra
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...best stories in the new collection lacks any trace of sameness. It is about the suicide of a bass-fiddle player, and with beautiful simplicity it conveys a sense of sadness and longing more intense than any work of O'Hara's since Appointment in Samarra...
...Hara is looking forward to his return to active journalism, a profession that he left in 1933, after stints on the Herald Tribune, Hearst's New York Daily Mirror and TIME, to write Appointment in Samarra, his first novel, an immediate popular and critical success. O'Hara's contract at Newsday was drawn precisely to the O'Hara taste. "They agreed to print everything I said, and not change a word," he said, "and the dough was extremely attractive. I could live comfortably on it alone." Newsday plans to syndicate the O'Hara column, which...
...King Midas saw his concubines turn to gold at his touch. The city of Ephesus, sacred to the goddess Artemis, and Aphrodisias, sacred to Aphrodite, are yielding their age-old secrets. The remnants of Hatra, destroyed long ago by the Persians, have been recovered from the debris of centuries. Samarra is being excavated-that lovely capital of Abbasside caliphs, who ruled over the Near East during Europe's dark ages...
...collection's best charting of vacant depths, perhaps, is a novella called Pat Collins. Like the author's brief, bitter novel. Appointment in Samarra, it follows the decline and fall of a Gibbsville auto dealer. Some readers may find it better than Samarra, and that is saying a lot. In fact, if John O'Hara were not so good at writing prefaces, it might be hoped that he would continue to devote himself to short stories...
...Johnson, the author of a sensitive but minor novel entitled Now in November, could understand why Miss Johnson won the 1935 fiction prize in a year that also saw publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra. Ernest Hemingway had to wait until 1953 to win his first Pulitzer, with The Old Man and the Sea, having previously missed with two American classics (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms). Some of the Pulitzer drama prizes so enraged Broadway critics, e.g., in 1935 Zoe Akins...