Why We Came to the City
A Novel
(Sprache: Englisch)
December, 2008. A heavy snowstorm is blowing through Manhattan and the economy is on the brink of collapse, but none of that matters to a handful of guests at a posh holiday party. A sweeping, funny, and poignant novel about a tight-knit group of...
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December, 2008. A heavy snowstorm is blowing through Manhattan and the economy is on the brink of collapse, but none of that matters to a handful of guests at a posh holiday party. A sweeping, funny, and poignant novel about a tight-knit group of twentysomethings in New York whose lives are forever altered by an unexpected tragedy.
Klappentext zu „Why We Came to the City “
"Joyful and tragic, Jansma s book will appeal to readers who loved Hanya Yanagihara s A Little Life. Men s JournalStunning . . . A beautiful, sprawling, and generous book. Jansma is a brilliantly talented writer, but he also has a unique insight into what friends mean to one another, and what it means to be part of a city in which you never quite belong, but can t quite bring yourself to leave. It s a heartfelt novel, tender and painful and cathartic all at once, and even if the characters belong to New York, the story belongs to us all. NPR
December, 2008. A heavy snowstorm is blowing through Manhattan and the economy is on the brink of collapse, but none of that matters to a handful of guests at a posh holiday party. Five years after their college graduation, the fiercely devoted friends at the heart of this richly absorbing novel remain as inseparable as ever: editor and social butterfly Sara Sherman, her troubled astronomer boyfriend George Murphy, loudmouth poet Jacob Blaumann, classics major turned investment banker William Cho, and Irene Richmond, an enchanting artist with an inscrutable past.
Amid cheerful revelry and free-flowing champagne, the friends toast themselves and the new year ahead a year that holds many surprises in store. They must navigate ever-shifting relationships with the city and with one another, determined to push onward in pursuit of their precarious dreams. And when a devastating blow brings their momentum to a halt, the group is forced to reexamine their aspirations and chart new paths through unexpected losses.
Kristopher Jansma s award-winning debut novel, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, was praised for its wry humor and charmingly unreliable narrator in The New Yorker and hailed as F. Scott Fitzgerald meets Wes Anderson by The Village Voice. In Why We Came to the City, Jansma offers an unforgettable exploration of friendships forged in the fires of ambition, passion, hope, and love. This
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glittering story of a generation coming of age is a sweeping, poignant triumph.
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Lese-Probe zu „Why We Came to the City “
1Living Vicariously
Irene Richmond ran down the narrow foyer, helping guests get out of their coats, which were dusted with flakes of snow that had been coming down heavily all day and still drifted lightly onto the hotel balcony. Coats that cost more than she earned in a month and that were works of art themselves. Hoods lined with fox fur imported from Finland. A quilted sateen coat filled with goose down and patterned in the latest Japanese style of concentric circles. A long vest made of rabbit. Mongolian lamb s wool. Irene got a thrill from just holding them, but it was always short- lived. By the time the guests had finished warning her not to crease the collars or wrinkle the hems, there was someone else making an even more fashionable entrance.
During rare pauses, she checked her phone for messages from George and Sara. Nothing. And nothing from Jacob either. Twisting in front of the hallway mirror, she reseated the bobby pins that kept her blond hair up off her shoulders. She liked the way her neck looked in the golden light by the door. An elegant extension of her one bared shoulder. She hoped it wasn t too much. Abeba had said only to look nice, but Irene had sensed an implication that she not look nicer than the guests. Juliette then added that it was important to look hip, which Irene took to mean young, vital, and strange. Therefore: cerulean leggings, crochet sweater dress, peacock feather necklace, and a braided skinny-belt. Irene hoped these projected the artistic, professional image specified. Every job had its uniform.
She checked her eye shadow, which made her irises look a shade darker, almost black instead of blue. She rubbed at a spot beneath her left eye that had been there for a month now but had only recently begun to feel sore. Buzz went the door, and
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she was off to collect a giraffe-print bolero from the next artist or heiress to stagger in on midnight- black stilettos.
The K Gallery s annual holiday party at the Waldorf Astoria was always an impressive affair. All year Irene and her friends looked forward to this night, the second Friday in December. Not that they didn t go out other nights, not that living in the city wasn t sometimes glamorous, but never anything compared to this. There were seventy-eight people on the exclusive guest list, and renowned chef Marc Herradura was catering. Honest-to-God movie stars attended. Last year they d seen that guy from The Office, and the year before that, Cyndi Lauper! This was that other New York: always around them but never visible. For this one night it elonged to them too.
Even with the first big storm of winter going on outside and flights canceled at JFK and LaGuardia (only Newark soldiered on), they had nearly full attendance. All day the gallery s owners, Juliette and Abeba, had been commanding Irene from one end of Manhattan to the other. They d thrust her into snow-capped cars in Chelsea with a wrought-iron baboon skeleton (a steal at just $300,000) whose shrieking head had extended dangerously out the window into traffic. Wearing a pair of Abeba s oversize duck boots, Irene had sloshed across the posh lobby of the Lexington Avenue hotel, aching under the weight of a moldy yam encased in bile-green polypropylene (starting at just half a million).
Five years ago, when she d first begun working at the gallery, Irene had gotten a thrill simply from being near such valuable art, but by this point she was considering telling the driver to take her and the oversize p
The K Gallery s annual holiday party at the Waldorf Astoria was always an impressive affair. All year Irene and her friends looked forward to this night, the second Friday in December. Not that they didn t go out other nights, not that living in the city wasn t sometimes glamorous, but never anything compared to this. There were seventy-eight people on the exclusive guest list, and renowned chef Marc Herradura was catering. Honest-to-God movie stars attended. Last year they d seen that guy from The Office, and the year before that, Cyndi Lauper! This was that other New York: always around them but never visible. For this one night it elonged to them too.
Even with the first big storm of winter going on outside and flights canceled at JFK and LaGuardia (only Newark soldiered on), they had nearly full attendance. All day the gallery s owners, Juliette and Abeba, had been commanding Irene from one end of Manhattan to the other. They d thrust her into snow-capped cars in Chelsea with a wrought-iron baboon skeleton (a steal at just $300,000) whose shrieking head had extended dangerously out the window into traffic. Wearing a pair of Abeba s oversize duck boots, Irene had sloshed across the posh lobby of the Lexington Avenue hotel, aching under the weight of a moldy yam encased in bile-green polypropylene (starting at just half a million).
Five years ago, when she d first begun working at the gallery, Irene had gotten a thrill simply from being near such valuable art, but by this point she was considering telling the driver to take her and the oversize p
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Autoren-Porträt von Kristopher Jansma
Kristopher Jansma is the author of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award. A graduate of Columbia University s MFA program, he is now an assistant professor of English and creative writing at SUNY New Paltz and a graduate lecturer in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College. He has written for the New York Times, Salon, The Believer, The Millions, Slice, BOMB, and Electric Literature. He lives with his wife and son in Brooklyn, New York.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Kristopher Jansma
- 2017, 432 Seiten, Masse: 14,1 x 21,3 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Penguin US
- ISBN-10: 0143109642
- ISBN-13: 9780143109648
- Erscheinungsdatum: 18.04.2017
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
Praise for Why We Came to the CityA tremendous accomplishment: an elegant and deeply moving meditation on friendship and mortality, both fearless and finely wrought. I believe this book will stay with me for a very long time.
Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven
Stunning . . . A beautiful, sprawling, and generous book. Jansma is a brilliantly talented writer, but he also has a unique insight into what friends mean to one another, and what it means to be part of a city in which you never quite belong, but can t quite bring yourself to leave. It s a heartfelt novel, tender and painful and cathartic all at once, and even if the characters belong to New York, the story belongs to us all.
Michael Schaub, NPR
A brilliant stylist, Kristopher Jansma draws readers into an intricate web of lives in the big city in his astonishing new work. He writes with power and passion . . . and inhabits his characters, thinking what they think and feeling what they feel so compellingly that he pulls the reader into the story and won t let go. . . . A wonderful, unforgettable novel.
Miami Herald
Jansma s novel is a love letter to Manhattan, the letter so many of us who moved here in our 20s have written. . . . Like the rest of us, his characters learn that things don t always work out the way we plan, but if we stick with our city, our city delivers.
Helen Ellis, The New York Times Book Review
Enticing . . . Much like a modern Great Gatsby, this book is awash in the feeling of the city.
Melissa Ragsdale, Bustle
Fans of Bret Easton Ellis s stream-of-consciousness narratives will enjoy Jasma s paean to New York City.
In Style
Joyful and tragic, Jansma s book will appeal to readers who loved Hanya Yanagihara s A Little Life.
Men s Journal
As the characters navigate the complexities of an untimely and unexpected
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tragedy . . . Jansma artfully counters the heaviness of these themes with a delightful, and at times laugh-out-loud hilarious, narrative. Dialogues are smart, absurd, and addictive; and the author s insights border on the philosophically expansive and profound.
Santa Cruz Sentinel
"Like A Little Life and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Jansma's Why We Came to the City shows us, with beauty and insight, what it's like to be young and smart in this time, and in this place. It's a major achievement."
Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life
Why did we come to the city, anyway? And why on earth would we ever leave? In Jansma's able hands, these are and are not metaphors. We came because we are more ourselves as part of a collective. We came to learn our limits. We came so that we might know when to leave. This is a lively, addictive party of a book, and you're invited."
Elisa Albert, author of After Birth
Fantastic. This beautiful, boisterous novel is a paean to New York, to the hubris of youthful optimism, and, especially, to the powerful magnet of friendship. It s full of as much heartache and humor as the city itself. And like the city, this story will break you apart in a dozen ways, only to teach you, tenderly, how to put yourself back together. I wanted it never to end, but when I read the last page, I loved it even more. Jansma is a star.
Alena Graedon, author of The Word Exchange
Kristopher Jansma s dazzling Why We Came to the City is at once a tribute and a breakup letter to New York, timeless as the elegant architectural details that jut ornately from older buildings, yet timely as a phone freighted with an urgent missive. The constellation of relationships he charts feels so vivid and visceral that we not only see it but find ourselves caught, swaying in its gravitational tugs and tilts. In page after page abounding with wit, candor, and compassion, Jansma reveals the indelible nature of our connections and commitments to one another, along with their gossamer fragility.
Tim Horvath, author of Understories
Lively and elegant . . . poised to make Jansma a name you know.
Meredith Turits
A deeply emotional ode to friendship . . . Jansma s narrative shines.
Kirkus Reviews
Jansma s compelling paean to New York City features a group of post-college friends who manage the vagaries of love and friendship against the backdrop of living in the big city. . . . A tightly written, smartly conceived story that puts an insightful spin on life in the Big Apple.
Publishers Weekly
This hefty novel, with its multiple characters and shifting relationships, is the kind that book clubs will love. . . . Gets at the heart of what it s like to be young and alive in the big city.
Library Journal
Santa Cruz Sentinel
"Like A Little Life and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Jansma's Why We Came to the City shows us, with beauty and insight, what it's like to be young and smart in this time, and in this place. It's a major achievement."
Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life
Why did we come to the city, anyway? And why on earth would we ever leave? In Jansma's able hands, these are and are not metaphors. We came because we are more ourselves as part of a collective. We came to learn our limits. We came so that we might know when to leave. This is a lively, addictive party of a book, and you're invited."
Elisa Albert, author of After Birth
Fantastic. This beautiful, boisterous novel is a paean to New York, to the hubris of youthful optimism, and, especially, to the powerful magnet of friendship. It s full of as much heartache and humor as the city itself. And like the city, this story will break you apart in a dozen ways, only to teach you, tenderly, how to put yourself back together. I wanted it never to end, but when I read the last page, I loved it even more. Jansma is a star.
Alena Graedon, author of The Word Exchange
Kristopher Jansma s dazzling Why We Came to the City is at once a tribute and a breakup letter to New York, timeless as the elegant architectural details that jut ornately from older buildings, yet timely as a phone freighted with an urgent missive. The constellation of relationships he charts feels so vivid and visceral that we not only see it but find ourselves caught, swaying in its gravitational tugs and tilts. In page after page abounding with wit, candor, and compassion, Jansma reveals the indelible nature of our connections and commitments to one another, along with their gossamer fragility.
Tim Horvath, author of Understories
Lively and elegant . . . poised to make Jansma a name you know.
Meredith Turits
A deeply emotional ode to friendship . . . Jansma s narrative shines.
Kirkus Reviews
Jansma s compelling paean to New York City features a group of post-college friends who manage the vagaries of love and friendship against the backdrop of living in the big city. . . . A tightly written, smartly conceived story that puts an insightful spin on life in the Big Apple.
Publishers Weekly
This hefty novel, with its multiple characters and shifting relationships, is the kind that book clubs will love. . . . Gets at the heart of what it s like to be young and alive in the big city.
Library Journal
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