Slaves of New York (Expanded Edition) Kindle Edition

"I consider every moment of my life spent unaware of the existence of novelist Tama Janowitz a complete and utter waste of consciousness...I would build a city of pearl and onyx for Tama Janowitz with my own raw and useless hands." -- Mallory Ortberg, The Toast Tama Janowitz’s bold and sophisticated modern classic of Manhattan life includes three never-before-collected stories in this first ever ebook edition. Slaves of New York spoke for a new generation of Americans when it was released in 1986. Acclaimed for her novel American Dad (published when she was just twenty-four) and for her stories in The New Yorker, Interview and Paris Review, Tama Janowitz gave a name to a stylish and highly peculiar new breed of young urbanite. Some of the slaves of New York are bewildered, opinionated young women like Eleanor, a jewelry designer new to the city. She lives in one room with her artist boyfriend Stash, who paints heroic canvases of Donald Duck and Quick Draw McGraw. She’d like to leave him but they have a dog. And it’s his apartment. What’s a slave to do? Join the ranks of the others: eerie East Village performance artists, a harried art dealer and his mistress, and a prostitute who happens to be from one of the best Southern Jewish families. In Tama Janowitz’s keenly observed world, these urbanites share cramped apartments, endure cramped love affairs and waft half-cheerful, half-lost through the city. Their lives are fiercely funny – and ultimately moving. "Janowitz is a fearless writer. Her details are quirky, her language is lean and her sentences sprint along with deceptive ease. The protagonists in her stories share with her a shyness and a sense of always being out of place. Although they try in earnest to fit in, they put on the wrong clothes or say the wrong thing or fail to grasp the subtle messages other people send their way" - The New York Times "[Readers] will be grateful for the shrewd observation, the skewed invention, which are the gifts of a singular talent" - Jay McInerney, The New York Times Book Review "Whacked-out and weird...an ironic intelligence and new wave sensibility unparalleled among contemporary chroniclers of post-modern life... these wickedly funny, terribly knowing tales heighten and transform an already absurd world." - Kirkus Reviews "Timeless...funny and smart." - The Airship "Great! Sizzling! Wow!" - Andy Warhol Read more