Slaves of New York

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780671745240
• Demand: New
• Notes: Tag NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

Description

Meet the denizens of New York City: artists, prostitutes, saints, and seers. All are aspiring toward either fame or oblivion, and hoping for love and acceptance. Instead they find high rents, faithless partners, and dead-end careers. But between the disappointments come snatches of self-awareness, and a strange beauty in their encounters with one another.

---

In Tama Janowitz's story collection of mid-1980s manners, it's all about real estate. Her coterie of New York artists and grad students, junkies and collectors dwells in walk-ups and covets lofts. The occasional socialite wafts through, characterized tersely by statements of fact; for example, "Millie owned her own co-op." But, for the most part, these are the also-rans of Manhattan life, literally looking for a toehold in the city. The main character who emerges is shabby Eleanor, an appealing heroine who appears in several linked stories. A jewelry maker, she lives with an artist named Stash and a treasure-trove of insecurities. Much is made of the squalor of their apartment. In Eleanor, Janowitz finds a channel for her vulnerability--a nice counterpoint to her affectless prose, which attempts and occasionally achieves a deadpan humor.

Intertwined with the Eleanor stories are the unreliable first-person narratives of Marley Mantello. Marley, too, has serious real estate issues: "My apartment, the sublet from which I was being evicted, looked just as terrible as when I had gone out earlier--worse, even, for there was a foul reek of something fecund and feline, like the stench of old lion spoor upon the veldt."

The rest of the stories are brief thumbnails, which Janowitz calls "modern saints" and "case histories." Stabbing at experimentalism, they showcase her shortcomings--the lazy satire, the easy laugh. This author's prose seemed of-the-moment when it came out, and time has not been altogether kind. "I was startled to find him so far uptown, knowing how he usually refused to travel above Fourteenth Street, claiming it led to mental decay," says the narrator of "In and Out of the Cat Bag." This kind of observation may have seemed edgy in 1985, but has little staying power. At its best, Slaves effervesces a bittersweet nostalgia for a time when artists could still afford to live in Manhattan. --Claire Dederer

---

Area Code 212: New York Days, New York Nights

Description

---

The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group

Description

She's Pamela Trowel, a New Yorker, single and singular: holed up in her swampy basement apartment when she isn't peddling guns and ammo ads for "Hunter's World" magazine. Pamela attracts Manhattan's wrongest kind of men: the cinematographer-exhibitionist Alby; her masochistic, creepy, boss-of-all-bosses Daniel; her cross-dressing psychiatrist Martin, who conducts his pracice in a bar. Pamela is batting zero - until she meets Abdhul, a wise your urchin who follows her home from a pizza parlor, and worms his way into her heart.

---

A Certain Age: A Novel

Description

From the bestselling author of Slaves of New York comes a hilarious, clear-eyed, satiric novel about the sad plight of a misguided woman on the make in Manhattan. Thirty-two-year-old Florence Collins is an "aging filly-about-town"--still beautiful enough to be (sometimes) invited to the best parties and the right restaurants, but unmarried and rapidly going broke. In her world, marriage to a wealthy man is all that can save her, although Florence's hard-hearted search for security and status takes her on an inevitable downward spiral.

New York "society novels" at the turn of the nineteenth century gave us a piercing look at the world and rituals of the city's wealthy; Janowitz here casts that tradition in a fresh light, giving us a tirn-of-the-century society novel that demonstrates how little seems to have changed. In a sly and unforgettable portrait of New York's haute monde, Janowitz brilliantly evokes a young woman's struggle for love and survival in the city that is as unforgiving today as it was a hundred years ago.

---

"It was the sort of education that a young woman might have once had simply in order to be able to make civilized conversation at dinner." A stray passage from an Edith Wharton novel? No, it's Tama Janowitz's tale of Manhattan life in the '90s, which follows a decidedly Whartonian downward spiral. Florence Collins wants a rich husband. And although she is accomplished, a good conversationalist, a snappy dresser, and stunningly beautiful, she can't seem to find one. Why? Because she lives in New York; in her early 30s, she is past her prime; and her name is legion.

Florence disastrously visits the Hamptons, goes out to a lot of expensive restaurants, and halfheartedly performs her job at an auction house, but finds her matrimonial quarry ever elusive. Janowitz tells us, "By high school she had realized that no matter what women filled their lives with, there was still no status for them apart from whoever-whatever they had married." No clue is given as to how Florence comes to this arresting conclusion, but the author chooses to make her pay for her callowness. So predictable is Janowitz's notion of moral failure that we find our once-fastidious gal smoking crack by novel's end as well as friendless and broke. What's missing here are the psychological atmospherics found in The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country. Instead, we get loving descriptions of department-store sprees: "She went to up to the men's department and spent seven hundred dollars on a black cashmere crew neck sweater--three hundred fifty dollars--two black t-shirts, fifty dollars each, a matelot shirt ... for seventy dollars and a pair of brown linen-silk blend trousers with pleats and cuffs, on sale for two hundred." This is yuppie porn--disguised as a scorching indictment of yuppie porn. Janowitz wants to have her sushi and eat it, too. --Claire Dederer

---

By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee

Description

From the author of Slaves of New York and The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group, this satire in the all-too-rare genre of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One tells a compelling story of the sex lives of people and invertebrates at the end of America's 20th century.

---

"Did you know that the blood fluke lives in a state of permanent copulation, inside a chicken?" asks Maud Slivenowicz, the 19-year old daughter of Evangeline Slivenowicz, who is the central character in Tama Janowitz's novel The Shores of Gitchee Gumee. If you think that's shocking, try this one on for size: Tama Janowitz, author of The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group and Slaves of New York, has written a novel that was inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Song of Haiwatha." Maud is one of five children, who are sired by five different fathers, living in a crappy little trailer down by the Gitchee Gumee. Before it's all over, the trailer rolls into the lake, a kidnapping occurs, and the whole kit and caboodle end up in Southern California. Janowitz is in fine fettle here. But you can blame it on Longfellow.

---

Toe Popper

Description

A twisted beach novel.

A terrorist plants landmines on the beaches of Southern California.

Major Joel Lane, a Special Forces adviser and landmine expert, is called-in from the wilderness of Cambodia to hunt him down.

Teamed with the beautiful female FBI agent assigned to the case, Lane battles his past demons, opium addiction, and a diabolical opponent who is only getting started.

Equal parts Tom Clancy, Charles Willeford and Tama Janowitz - Toe Popper is a thrilling ride along the giddy edge of entertainment and suspense.

What people are saying:

"A highly complex and very well written novel."

-- Carolyn Marino - HarperCollins

"A serious-money thriller."

-- Jim Trupin - literary agent for Charles Willeford

"A high-concept story."

-- Mark Tavani - Ballantine Books

"Great fun!"

--Scott Moyers - Penguin Press

Read the first chapter at http://www.toepopper.com

About the author:

Jonny Tangerine is a member of the WGAw.

---

A twisted beach novel.

A terrorist plants landmines on the beaches of Southern California.

Major Joel Lane, a Special Forces adviser and landmine expert, is called-in from the wilderness of Cambodia to hunt him down.

Teamed with the beautiful female FBI agent assigned to the case, Lane battles his past demons, opium addiction, and a diabolical opponent who is only getting started.

Equal parts Tom Clancy, Charles Willeford and Tama Janowitz - Toe Popper is a thrilling ride along the giddy edge of entertainment and suspense.

What people are saying:

"A highly complex and very well written novel."

-- Carolyn Marino - HarperCollins

"A serious-money thriller."

-- Jim Trupin - literary agent for Charles Willeford

"A high-concept story."

-- Mark Tavani - Ballantine Books

"Great fun!"

--Scott Moyers - Penguin Press

Read the first chapter at http://www.toepopper.com

About the author:

Jonny Tangerine is a member of the WGAw.

---