Lillian and Dash

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This exciting novel about Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man) and Lillian Hellman (The Children’s Hour) reintroduces their larger-than-life personalities and the vicissitudes of their affair that spanned three decades.Toperoff reimagines the highs and lows of a fast-living, hard-drinking literary couple, and their individual passions, projects, and literary creations. Hammett and Hellman’s relationship evolves during major artistic and political epochs—Hollywood’s heyday, the New York literary scene, the Spanish Civil War, McCarthyism, and both world wars—and each movement is captured with subjectivity and credible insight. Populated with writers, drinkers, filmmakers, and revolutionaries, Lillian and Dash chronicles the unusual affair of two prominent and headstrong figures.Review''Toperoff captures time and place and most importantly two vital people. It is not easy to write about writers, but with energy and wit and skill, Toperoff brings Hellman and Hammett's talent and pain directly into the present.'' --George Vecsey, former sports columnist, New York TimesI have been reading Sam Toperoff's fiction for decades. He is a wonderful writer, shamefully underappreciated . . .Fascinating and engrossing, one of those rare books that would help you through an airplane flight without insulting your intelligence. In a word, it s literature. It also happens to be dark and sexy and, I would think, ripe for the movies.'' --Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner''Over the years, Toperoff has been a master at blending fact and fiction...and in this book his handling of the Hammett/Hellman relationship and the Hollywood of their time is exemplary and brilliant. He has a great ear for their speech, and Toperoff delivers the historical period with not only credibility, but insight as well. And of course it's a book about writers and writing, and thus the relationships between ego and talent, success and the lure of self-destruction.'' --Stephen Dunn, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry''This is a novel that reimagines their relationship . . . with a strong dose of Golden Age romanticism.'' --Los Angeles TimesAbout the AuthorSAM TOPEROFF has authored a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, including Jimmy Dean Prepares and Queen of Desire, and his stories and articles have appeared in Atlantic, Harper's, Granta, New York Times Magazine, Town & Country, and Sports Illustrated. He lives in France in a house he built.