Exiles

by Michael Arlen

Back in print, “a wry and moving . . . rare and minute accounting of growing up.” ( Time )

Exiles is the story of two glamorous people — one, a beautiful aristocrat; the other, a self-made man, one of the most famous authors of the 1920s. In this slender volume, which was nominated for the 1970 National Book Award and helped reestablish the memoir as a genre, Michael J. Arlen evokes — with humor and honesty — his parents’ seemingly charmed life in Hollywood and New York, his own childhood spent between homes and boarding schools, and the decline of a family full of love, joy, and pride in one in other words, a family as ordinary as it is unusual.

240 pages, Paperback

Published October 12, 2010

About the author

Original name Dikran Kouyoumdjian. Armenian essayist, short story writer, novelist, playwright, and scriptwriter, who had his greatest successes in the 1920s while living and writing in England. Although Arlen is most famous for his satirical romances set in English smart society, he also wrote gothic horror and psychological thrillers, for instance "The Gentleman from America", which was filmed in 1956 as a television episode for Alfred Hitchcock's TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Near the end of his life, Arlen mainly occupied himself with political writing. Arlen's vivid but colloquial style came to be known as 'Arlenesque'.