Betrayed by Rita Hayworth

Finally back in print, Manuel Puig's celebrated first novel is a startling anatomy of a small town in thrall to its own petty lusts, betrayals, scandals, thefts, and gossip—but most of all, to the movies. Centering around a boy named Toto, privy to the town's secrets and always eager to fill in the ugly or upsetting moments of his childhood with Hollywood-inspired fantasy, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth is a symphony of disappointed, comic, bitter, and bawdy voices, all hemmed in by life's refusal to behave like the silver screen, and is perhaps the funniest and most honest coming-of-age story of its time.

Finally back in print, Manuel Puig's celebrated first novel is a startling anatomy of a small town in thrall to its own petty lusts, betrayals, scandals, thefts, and gossip—but most of all, to the movies. Centering around a boy named Toto, privy to the town's secrets and always eager to fill in the ugly or upsetting moments of his childhood with Hollywood-inspired fantasy, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth is a symphony of disappointed, comic, bitter, and bawdy voices, all hemmed in by life's refusal to behave like the silver screen, and is perhaps the funniest and most honest coming-of-age story of its time.

Library Journal

A brilliant Argentine novelist, indebted to Joyce and Faulkner, but endowed with formidably original comic talents . . . Only a writer with an extraordinary imagination should attempt the stream-of-consciousness novel. It is done here nearly as well as it has ever been done. For everybody.

Manuel Puig was born in Argentina in 1932 and died in Mexico in 1990. He is the acclaimed author of many novels, including Heartbreak Tango and Kiss of the Spider Woman. In coming seasons, Dalkey Archive Press will be publishing Heartbreak Tango as well as Puig's Buenos Aires Affair.

Suzanne Jill Levine is the author of, among other books, Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions and The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press). She has been awarded a Guggenheim, a PEN American Award for Career Achievement in Hispanic Studies, and grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the National Endowment for the Humanities.