The Golden West: Hollywood Stories - Hardcover

"Nobody else writes like Daniel Fuchs. I think of him as a natural -- a poet who never had to strain after a poetic effect, a magician who made magic look almost too easy." -- John Updike, The New Yorker

"I think of him as a 'true' writer, in the dictionary sense of 'reflecting sincerely one's feelings.' His prose rarely makes any claims on its own behalf. All is at the service of the moment rendered, a bit of fading history. . . . 'The Golden West' is first-rate, worth placing beside Fitzgerald's and West's evocations of the Hollywood frenzy -- that lunatic desperation that keeps these people, their hearts eaten away by success and memory, clinging to the slopes to avoid falling into bankruptcy yet still dreaming that, with a yank here, a twist there, they'll again make a cool million." -- Irving Howe, The New York Review of Books

"Fuchs knows the facts of Hollywood, but his interest is in the demons beneath. The action of 'West of the Rockies' is seen throughout as a sort of sad trance: Fuchs studies the details, then changes the focus so that the facts become figurative. He has a humane gift -- not facile compassion but the ability to put the ephemeral into phrases that, paradoxically, fix their ephemeralness. The lovely phrases, the sharp precepts, are almost like reminders to him and to us that this is not just more Hollywood fiction, this is serious." -- Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic

"Sympathy is a dominant note in Fuch's writing. He has a keen eye, an excellent ear for the speech of his characters, for the human animal. . . . I know of few novelists in America today who possess Fuchs's natural talent and energy or his sense of life." -- James T. Farrell, The Nation