New York Graphic
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品牌: Adam Lloyd Baker
基本信息出版社:Anchor (2000年4月18日)平装:288页正文语种:英语ISBN:0385498438条形码:9780385498432商品尺寸:14 x 1.9 x 21.6 cm商品重量:354 g品牌:AnchorASIN:0385498438商品描述内容简介A delicious, darkly comic work of new urban noir from an original new literary talent.
Meet Virgil Strauss, a physically and emotionally unkempt yet somehow appealing tabloid photographer whose passion is bearing photographic witness--à la Weegee--to the obscene, malevolent and sanguine viscera of New York culture.
To his disapppointment and defeat,The New York Graphic--the city's most renowned shock-based tabloid daily--has routinely rejected Virgil's work. But when Virgil and his friend Larry Onions rip off a local church, he gets the picture of a lifetime, a job at theGraphic, and a generous measure of trouble, leading to serious indiscretions that include (but aren't limited to): grave robbing, straining his neighbor's dog's feces for an inadvertently consumed diamond, widely circulating the work of a renowned "art terrorist," and being an FBI informant in a serial bombing case. Helping Virgil through his hard times is Marcy, HIV-positive porn-star girlfriend, whose wispy, hardened, tragic strength brings tenderness and humanity to Virgil's cold-blooded reality.
New York Graphicis a winningly fresh contribution to the noir genre: alternately hilarious, vulgar, touching, seriously disturbed--and a delightfully heady reading.
编辑推荐Penzler Pick,June 2000:For noir fans still nostalgic for the feverish (un)reality of Englishman James Hadley Chase's concocted American underbelly and its depraved denizens, here's the book you've been waiting for. The 1939 hitNo Orchids for Miss Blandishwas Chase's debut effort, andNew York Graphicis Baker's: what they have in common is the sense readers will have that both British authors are more concerned with ultimate impact than any verisimilitude. What we get is the USA as hard-boiled theme park. For Baker--onetime gravedigger, embalmer, movie projectionist, and theology student, all of which stints he puts to gleeful use--the city of New York provides the perfect staging ground for going far, far, far over the top. And into this urban nightmare, where rats are as common as dogs and sky-high Japanese shopping malls charge admission, he plunks down just the right sort of protagonist: Virgil Strauss, a tabloid photographer waiting for his big break.Originally published in London,New York Graphicfollows Virgil into its own version of metropolitan hell, one that just happens to have "Business Improvement Districts" and a city dump appropriately named Fresh Kill. But the title isn't just a description of Baker's visceral style; it also refers to the newspaper where Virgil is finally employed and the pinnacle to which he's aspired. (The guiding spirit ofNew York Graphicowes less to William Randolph Hearst than it does to, say, John Waters or James Ellroy.)With its references to iconic mystery-genre masterpieces such asPsycho,The Maltese Falcon, and "The Fall of the House of Usher,"New York Graphicreminds us of tradition at the same time that it abandons many standards of characterization and plotting. Does such knowingness make it postmodern? I'm not sure, but such voyeurism as Virgil Strauss's is always one way to illuminate crime fiction's darkest corners. "So many stories. So much random death." That's what Virgil thinks. And if you take the ride with him and his buddies--ex-junkie Larry Onions, porn pinup Marcy, Johnny from Jersey, among others--so will you.--Otto Penzler
