Three film scripts, including an Academy Award nominee, from the man described as an "Antonioni with a sense of humor" ( The New Yorker).From his earliest works to the Emmy-nominated Showtime limited series Escape at Dannemora, Michael Tolkin is known as one of the industry's biggest talents—and sharpest satirists. This volume contains three of his acclaimed screenplays.The Player, about the twisted world of Hollywood, was directe...

"An amazing novel" that plunges into the all-too-gray area between the public and private in contemporary American life ( Los Angeles Times Book Review).Michael Tolkin's acclaimed second novel, Among the Dead, is an arresting examination of public and private grief in the wake of unspeakable disaster, a slow-burning tour de force of psychological fiction. When Frank Gale writes a passionate letter to his wife confessing an affair, he hopes all can...

A "provocative" psychological suspense novel about "a character who is bound inevitably to a disastrous past" ( The Oregonian).Years ago, Tom Levy worked an insurance scam that left him rich, but he is about to learn that wealth can't always protect you from bad decisions. While vacationing in Jamaica, Tom witnesses a man goading his four-year-old daughter into a vulgar display on the dance floor. The man also happens to be married to the woman who has bee...

The “shrewd, entertainingly dark Hollywood novel” that inspired the award-winning Robert Altman film (The New York Times Book Review).Hollywood insider Michael Tolkin perfectly skewers the movie-making business through the mind of Griffin Mill, senior vice president of production at a major Hollywood studio. Ruthlessly ambitious, Mill is driven to control the levers of America’s dream-making machinery. He listens to writers pitch him stories all day, sitti...

This follow-up to the classic black comedy about the film industry is "a wicked fever dream of a novel" ( San Francisco Chronicle).In The Player, the Hollywood novel that was adapted into the celebrated movie by Robert Altman, film executive Griffin Mill got away with murder. Now Mill is back, down to his last six million dollars, i.e., broke. His second wife wants to leave him. His first wife still loves him. His children hate him. And, believing...

A panoramic vision - suspenseful, comedic, prophetic - set in a near-future California that has been devastated by NK3, a memory-destroying virus from North Korea.The H LYW OD sign presides over a Los Angeles devastated by a weaponized microbe that has been accidentally spread around the globe, deleting human identity. In post-NK3 Los Angeles, a sixty-foot-tall fence surrounds the hills where the rich used to live, but the mansions have been taken ...

A Hollywood novel of a very different kind by the author of The Player: A timely and "darkly satirical" dystopian thriller ( The San Francisco Chronicle).Michael Tolkin is known as a master chronicler of show business culture. Now, in his new novel, the H LYW OD sign presides over a city devastated by a weaponized microbe that's been accidentally spread around the globe, deleting human identity.In post-NK3 Los Angeles, a sixty-foot fence s...

In post-NK3 Los Angeles, a sixty-foot-tall fence surrounds the hills where the rich used to live, but the mansions have been taken over by those with the only power that matters: the power of memory. Life for the community inside the Fence, ruled over by the new aristocracy, the Verified, is a perpetual party. Outside the Fence, in downtown Los Angeles, the Verified use an invented mythology to control the mindless and nameless Drifters, Shamblers, and Bottle Bangers who serve the gift eco...