Life Goes to the Movies

A tour de force, Life Goes to the Movies is the love story of two straight men: a dark devil of a Vietnam vet-turned-filmmaker, and the naive Italian American innocent who follows him to the edge of madness and beyond. Funny, engaging, and entertaining, this is just a great story told well.

Peter Selgin’s short story collection Drowning Lessons won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He’s also published book-length nonfiction and an award-winning children’s book. He’s the fiction editor of Alimentum: The Literature of Food.

Wonderfully innovative and elegantly crafted, Life Goes to the Movies brims with exuberance and wit. Both a celebrationand something of an elegy for the golden age of Hollywood, this novel reeled me in with its propulsive energy and won me over before I had finished chaper one.

– Frederick Reiken, author of The Lost Legends of New Jersey

Life Goes to the Movies is the irresistable account of a passionate friendship between two young men, both star-struck by art. Selgin’s vivid account of New York in the 1970s, his richly complex characters, his encyclopedic knowledge of film and his sense of how small the gap is between good luck and bad make this an utterly absorbing novel. A wonderful read.

– Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street

With Life Goes to the Movies, Peter Selgin aims far higher than most of us poor storytellers ever dare. From beginning to end, Ikept imagining the funnels of smoke that surely must have risen from his keyboard as he wrote this potent, superbly crafted, and wonderfully ambitious novel.

– Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff