"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, their son evokes - with humour 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 another: in other words, a family as ordinary as it is unusual.

Author Biography

Michael J. Arlen is an Anglo-Armenian writer and former television critic for The New Yorker. He is the author of the acclaimed Passage to Ararat (FSG Classics, 2006), an autobiographical narrative of his Armenian ancestry, and Living-Room War.