Nightmare Alley

Name: Nightmare Alley
Brand: Naxos
Availability: InStock
Author: William Lindsay Gresham
ISBN: 9781843794837

Author: William Lindsay Gresham

Narrator: Adam Sims

Unabridged: 10 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Naxos

Published: 03/28/2011

Categories: Fiction, Classic

Synopsis

Stanton Carlisle is smart, good-looking and ambitious. Among the outcasts, freaks and geeks of the Ten-in-One sideshow, he learns that the public is there to be gulled, and he learns how to do it. Amoral and brilliant, he aims for the brighter lights of vaudeville before a much bigger coup faking spiritualism for the rich. But his own dark fears haunt him, and he is not the only one taking advantage of terror and desire. Published in 1946, Nightmare Alley is a noir classic – at once a vivid insight into the sub-culture of the carny, and a bleak and gripping fable.

About William Lindsay Gresham

William Lindsay Gresham was born in Baltimore on August 20, 1909. His family moved briefly to Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1916, then to New York City, where he graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1926. Gresham's was a tortured mind and a tormented life, and he sought to banish his demons through a maze of dead-end ways, from Marxism to psychoanalysis to Christianity to Alcoholics Anonymous to Rinzai Zen Buddhism. From these demons came his novel Nightmare Alley, one of the underground classics of American literature. He wrote one more novel, Limbo Tower, which went largely unnoticed. Three nonfiction books followed: Monster Midway, Houdini, and The Book of Strength. Nightmare Alley brought Gresham fame and fortune, but he lost it all. The second of his three wives, the poet Joy Davidman, left him in 1953 for the British author C. S. Lewis. He killed himself in New York City on September 14, 1962.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jeffrey

“How helpless they all looked in the ugliness of sleep. A third of life spent unconscious and corpselike. And some, the great majority, stumbled through their waking hours scarcely more awake, helpless in the face of destiny. They stumbled down a dark alley toward their deaths. They sent exploring f......more

Goodreads review by Ellie

Rounded up from around 2.5 stars ⭐️ Nightmare alley follows the rise and fall of Stan Carlisle. Starting off in a Carnival, Stan wants to better himself and he uses his imagination and cunning to do so. But can he keep himself at the top? I want to start by saying that there were many things I enjoye......more

Goodreads review by Paul

You know that old saying “if you can’t say something nice about a person don’t say anything at all” – if William Gresham really believed that he would have written NIGHTMARE ALLEY THE END There’s a lady in the audience tonight, I think her first name begins with a C and her last name with a G, and she......more

Goodreads review by James

Stan Carlisle is a mentalist in a traveling carnival. But the young man has higher aspirations and not many moral qualms. In the carnival he hooks up with Molly, an attractive young woman who becomes his partner in a vaudeville routine. Still aiming higher, Stan buys a mail-order divinity degree and......more