Letters From Hollywood
(non-fiction)
London: Harrap hardcover, 1986 (September);
original price: £10·95;
232 pages;
I.S.B.N.: 0-245-54379-1;
cover artist: Michael Foreman (also interior);
no other edition.
Letters From Hollywood is probably best described by the following brief extract from opening paragraphs of its introduction:-
“This book began as a series of personal letters to my friend J.G. Ballard who, as prose editor of the magazine Ambit, suggested he publish parts of them as ‘Letters from Hollywood’ (though strictly not all of them were sent from Hollywood). It was he also who first suggested I reprint them in book form. Never having produced anything quite like them before I hesitated to take him up on this second idea, but favourable response to the magazine pieces made me decide to go ahead…
“I decided to reorganise the letters, taking a small amount of additional material from my journals, using a few simple narrative devices to give some sort of shape and progression to the book, amplifying here and there where I thought it necessary. All this really means is that sometimes the sequence of events, a few names and one or two locations have been modified for obvious reasons…
“I wrote the bulk of these letters while living in Los Angeles, largely between 1979 and 1982, though a very small amount of material comes from 1976 and 1984, when I was last based in L.A. Initially nothing was intended for publication. More recently some material was specifically written for Ambit…”
Of peripheral note: the book’s wraparound dust-jacket (of which only the front is shown, above) was originally due to be a different design — see below (also showing front only) — but was supplanted before publication, with its predecessor becoming instead the book’s double-spread frontispiece.
Moorcography.org 