The Man Who Lost His Face

By Alexander Belyaev

He was the funniest man in America. Then he got what he wished for.

Tonio Presto is the highest-paid comedian in pictures and the ugliest man in California - short-legged, huge-headed, with a nose like a shoe. He has built a fortune out of a body that gets him laughed at in the street. When he asks the star Hedda Lux to marry him, she laughs too.

So Presto goes to a Russian doctor in a quiet clinic outside Sacramento, a man who says the human body is not a fixed thing at all but a river - and who can redirect it.

The treatment works. Presto comes back young, tall, and beautiful. He also comes back a stranger. The studio won't hire him, his own servant won't let him in the door, the courts won't say he exists, and the woman he wanted still wants the man the crowd adores. His face was his fortune, and he has signed it away.

What he does to the people who took it from him is where Belyaev's Hollywood satire turns cold.

First published in Russian in 1929 by the writer often called the Soviet Jules Verne. Newly translated into English.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HKCN7Y8M
• ISBN13: 9798175499248
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.41 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.3" x 6.0"