Description: The story of two talent agents and their three troubled boys, heirs to Hollywood royalty. It's a sweeping narrative about fathers and sons, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood and, by extension, American life.
Brief description: Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound; a nonfiction book, The Sting; and the forthcoming memoir The Golden Hour (Ecco/HarperCollins). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Vogue, GQ, Black Clock, and Open City. He has been a MacDowell fellow, and is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He resides in Los Angeles. www.matthewspecktor.com
Review Quotes:
"With coolness and precision, Specktor comes across as a West Coast Saul Bellow in this sweeping narrative, but his energetic, pop-infused prose is markedly his own."
--"Booklist"
"Specktor's book deserves a special space in the L.A. canon, somewhere looking up at Pynchon and Chandler. Even as the narrator searches through his past to uncover the truth about his family, the author is searching, too."
--"LA Weekly"
..".Matthew Specktor's "American Dream Machine" [is] a big and generous novel that functions both as elegy for a recent past and fictional anthropology . . . .it evokes a world with casual ease and unexpected tenderness, recalling and referencing lots of other fiction (both Hollywood and non) while contriving to establish its unique authority."
--LA Review of Books
"Specktor's great achievement is to make familiar territory original, the Hollywood novel born anew. It's bold, weird, an d unforegetable, as startling as a poke in the eye."
--"The Sunday Telegraph Magazine"
"Specktor does for L.A. what Hemingway did for Paris and what Hunter S. Thompson did for Las Vegas: create a character that lives and breathes a city. Like hotels in Vegas, we see characters rise, grow dusty, and collapse." --"Daily Beat, Hot Reads"
""American Dream Machine" takes readers into situations that might seem familiar: the drug-fueled party at a star's house in the hills, tense meetings between executives, dimly-lit wood-paneled bars filled with players and movie stars. Yet Specktor's lyrical writing and insights into human nature elevate the novel into fresh territory."
--"Kirkus"
"["American Dream Machine"] is a vivid evocation of the entertainment business from the 1960s to the near present, an L.A. bildungsroman and a murder mystery, all wrapped in one . . . entertaining package."
--"New York Daily News"
""American Dream Machine" is grand, complex, lush, intelligent and lively, funny as hell and generous i