Zeroville by Steve Erickson

Zeroville by Steve Erickson

A Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Newsweek Best Book of the Year

It is an August afternoon in 1969. A hippie family led by Charles Manson commits five savage murders in the canyons above L.A. The same day, a young, ex-communicated theology student walks Hollywood Boulevard, having just arrived in town with the images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his shaved head.

At once childlike and violent, Vikar is not a cineaste but cineautistic, sleeping in the Roosevelt Hotel where he is haunted by the ghost of D. W. Griffith. He has stepped into the vortex of a culture in upheaval: drugs that frighten him, a sexuality that consumes him, a music he doesn't understand. He's come to Hollywood to pursue his obsession with film, only to find a Hollywood that's as indifferent to film as it is to Vikar.

While the movies have appeared in a number of Steve Erickson's novels, from Days Between Stations to The Sea Came in at Midnight, they dominate Zeroville with the force of revelation. Over the decade of the seventies and into the eighties, as the old studios crumble before the onslaught of a new renegade generation, Vikar becomes an unlikely film editor, possessed of an astonishing artistic vision. Through his encounters with starlets, burglars, revolutionaries, escorts, punk musicians and veteran film-makers, he discovers the secret that lies in every motion picture ever made. Combining an epic scope with popular accessibility in the spirit of its subject, Zeroville is the ultimate novel about the Movies, and the way we don't dream them but rather they dream us.

Steve Erickson is the author of nine other novels (including Zeroville, Our Ecstatic Days, and These Dreams of You) and two nonfiction books that have been published in ten languages. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals, such as Esquire, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, American Prospect, and Los Angeles, for which he writes regularly about film, music, and television. Erickson is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Currently he teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781933372396
ISBN 10	1933372397
Title	Zeroville
Author	Steve Erickson
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Europa Editions
Year published	2007-11-01
Number of pages	329
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable