I’m Dying Laughing

The Humorist

This last great work by one of the century’s great writers is a large and original novel of betrayal and self-delusion, madness and consuming passions, that recreates to chilling effect the political turbulence of the American Left and the clamor and menace of the McCarthy Right. Not since her classic The Man Who Loved Children has Stead fashioned such willful and memorable characters as Emily Wilks and Stephen Howard.

Emily is a woman of enormous but mercurial enthusiasms whose unflagging ebullience masks a darkness that will lead to disaster. Stephen—handsome, clever, spoiled—is a dangerous dreamer, an upper-class dropout playing at radical politics. Together, they mirror the times through which they live: the heady revolutionary fervor of the Depression, the short collaborative effort of wartime America, the fractiousness of the Cold War years.

©1986 The Estate of Christina Stead (P)1996 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Reseñas de la Crítica

“The material itself is fascinating, the writing, especially the dialogue, vital and tumultuous." ( Publishers Weekly)

Tedious

Couldn't listen to more than 33% of this. Henry James-like detail but without the insight or amusement.

Excruciatingly Great

Emily is based on Ruth McKenney, the humorist whose kid sister Eileen, in 1940, was killed in a car crash in San Pedro. Her hus'band, Nathaniel West, had run a red light... As Stead tells it, Ruth McKenney's husband did her in as sure as Eileen's did, only slower. I wonder why the CPUSA expelled Ruth and her husband in 1946...