Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (Arena Books) - Softcover

Manuel Puig's debut novel disects the quiet despair of small-town life where nothing ever happens, the future is often the same as the present, the past all but forgotten. The women talk about the movies they've seen, they actresses they'd like to be, the actors they'd like to love...and one young man plans how he'd handle Rita Hayworth, so she'd never betray him the way she's betrayed everyone else!

Mauel Puig was born in 1932 in a small town in the Argentinian pampas. He studied philosophy at the University of Bueonos Aires, and in 1956 won a scholarship from the Italian Institute in Buenos Aires and chose to pursue studies in film direction at the Cinecitta in Rome. There he worked in films until 1962, where he began to write his first novel. Exiled from Argentina, he settled in New York City in 1963. Puig's novels - Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Heartbreak Tango, The Buenos Aires Affair, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages- have been translated into fourteen languages and secured his international reputation. He died in July 1990.