Playing Tahoe

Turner Publishing is proud to present a new edition of Sandra Hochman's, Playing Tahoe

First published by Wyndham Books in 1981, Hochman's fifth novel is an unsparing and no-holds-barred look at the music business through the eyes of a woman who bets it all.

From the Wyndham edition: At age forty she was Americas greatest pop lyricist. From rock and roll through new wave, Sylvia Lundholm and her composer-partner Nick Dimani made millions while creating the platinum records in which millions found the sound of their own longing and joy.

Set against the background of the rock and roll music business in New York City and the casinos and hotels and ski lifts of Lake Tahoe, Playing Tahoe captures that specific moment in Sylvia Lundholm's life when she recognized that love was the one song she could not write, and that only by breaking with the superhype celebrity of her career might she learn in the hands of her new lover.


Revson Cranwell was the male courtesan every woman wanted. He was cold, well-bred, indifferent. But he made her hot. She had everything else that money could buy. Now she wanted him. He was her song, her lover, her best friend. She would kill for him. But he would make that unnecessary.


In Tahoe, at Harrah’s, where Dimani is performing, Sylvia and Dimani meet to create a last great album that will cover the world with his music. But as the tendrils of Dimani's music threaten to clutch Sylvia back into the world she is so desperate to leave, the clash between her passion for Revson and Dimani's desperation for Sylvia’s poetry erupts into cold-blooded violence.

Playing Tahoe will give you insight into the world of rock and roll and big casinos. But above all it will teach you the games of a woman who, gambling for love, desperately wants to hold on to the richness of her own life.

Sandra Hochman has created a novel that explores the guts of a woman in the midst of a change, who will overturn the American Dream to follow a stranger, Revson, who is a new antihero of modern fiction.