My Face For The World To See

Hayes has done for bruised men what Jean Rhys does for bruised women, and they both write heartbreakingly beautiful sentences

Paul Bailey, Guardian

The most vivid picture of Hollywood since Nathanael West's Day of the Locust

Nelson Algren

An exciting, engrossing work, written with beautiful economy and the sure skill of an artist who knows what he is doing ... Hayes has created characters that are the essence of human hopes and frailty

The New York Times Book Review

Like a delayed Fitzgerald (think The Last Tycoon) or an encounter with Pavese in an unexpected quarter, elegant in its hopelessness, or hopeless in its elegance: a real find

Michael Hofmann

More than fifty years later, Hayes strikes me as more interesting and honest than so many of those famous novelists of the era ... It is time we recognized him as the author of two novels no reader will easily forget

David Thomson

A masterpiece ... An insider's manual for all those who would aspire to fame, the ghostly glamour of the movies

Nick Lezard, Guardian

Intimate, disconsolate, acute

Kirkus Reviews

His most achieved portrait of male self-deception ... A sharp, forensic examination of power and money ... Hayes charts the couple's disintegration with luminous precision and lends it an air of dream-like inevitability ... His novels perfectly capture the texture of midcentury American life

Los Angeles Review of Books

Hayes has recently become something of a passion for those who find in his writing the mastery that makes a work of literature take up a permanent place in a reader's inner life

Vivian Gornick, New York Review of Books