Requiem for a Dream

Requiem for a Dream is a 1978 novel by Hubert Selby, Jr., that concerns four New York individuals whose lives spiral out of control as they succumb to their addictions. It's written without quotation marks or apostrophes, and some of the characters have heavy accents.

This story follows the lives of four people: Harry, Marion, Tyrone, and Sara. Harry and Marion are in love and Tyrone is their friend. Sara is Harry’s lonely, widowed mother. They are all searching for the key to their dreams, and in the process, they get flung into a devastating life of addiction. Sara’s dream is to be on television, and when a phone call from a television casting company gets her hopes up, she spends the next months of her life binging on diet pills to lose weight. She becomes delirious and ends up in the hospital, but it only gets worse from there. Harry, Marion and Tyrone decide that they want to make money by buying some uncut heroin and selling it.

The novel was later adapted into the critically-acclaimed film of the same name.

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