Day after day, ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ sits in his office responding to letters from ‘Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, and Desperate’, dispensing words of hope, inspiration, and other platitudes to get his readers through their tormented days.
But it’s all getting to be too much for Miss Lonelyhearts. Under the weight of his colleagues’ mockery and the endless gloom of his correspondence, Miss Lonelyhearts finds himself crippled with cynicism and dysfunction.
Set in New York City at the height of the Great Depression, Miss Lonelyhearts stands as one of the most intelligent and hilarious works of the 20th Century. Laced with dark humour, irony and razor-sharp insight, this novel is as hauntingly relevant today as it was nearly a hundred years ago.
‘Wildly funny, desperately sad . . . There was no other like Nathanael West.’ – Dorothy Parker
‘A miniature comic epic.’ – Edmund Wilson
‘In dark times, Miss Lonelyhearts shines the brightest light in the blackest places. For this reason West’s novel has never felt more alive than today.’ – Daily Beast
‘Rendered with scalpel-precision… the great precursor to Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, George Saunders, and so much else.’ – Jonathan Lethem