Metropolis - Rilegato

Gaffney, Elizabeth

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1400061504 ISBN 13: 9781400061501

Casa editrice: Random House Inc, 2005

Riassunto

Elizabeth Gaffney’s magnificent, Dickensian Metropolis captures the splendor and violence of America’s greatest city in the years after the Civil War, as young immigrants climb out of urban chaos and into the American dream.

On a freezing night in the middle of winter, Gaffney’s nameless hero is suddenly awakened by a fire in P. T. Barnum’s stable, where he works and sleeps, and soon finds himself at the center of a citywide arson investigation.

Determined to clear his name and realize the dreams that inspired his hazardous voyage across the Atlantic, he will change his identity many times, find himself mixed up with one of the city’s toughest and most enterprising gangs, and fall in love with a smart, headstrong, and beautiful young woman. Buffeted by the forces of fate, hate, luck, and passion, our hero struggles to build a life–just to stay alive–in a country that at first held so much promise for him.

Epic in sweep, Metropolis follows our hero from his arrival in New York harbor through his experiences in Barnum’s circus, the criminal underground, and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and on to a life in Brooklyn that is at once unique and poignantly emblematic of the American experience. In a novel that is wonderfully written, rich in suspense, vivid historical detail, breathtakingly paced, Elizabeth Gaffney captures the wonder and magic of a rambunctious city in a time of change. Metropolis marks a superb fiction debut.

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Recensione:

“Gaffney has engineered a thrilling Brooklyn Bridge of a novel, at once old-fashioned and utterly modern, grand and charming, elegant and massive, imposing and delightful, carrying us in inimitable style across the rich, rank waters of New York City’s history.”
–MICHAEL CHABON, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
“Elizabeth Gaffney’s Metropolis is vibrant, richly detailed, and compellingly plotted. The territory of her late-nineteenth-century underworld resembles that of Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York or Frederick Busch’s The Night Inspector–but the sensibility is all her own, and her characters are unforgettable.”
–Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever

“Trust the excellent Elizabeth Gaffney-–in her debut novel, no less–to use the best of both history and her own considerable powers of creation to construct this compelling tale of a young immigrant’s journey through the chaotic underbelly of post—Civil War New York. The star of Gaffney’s dazzling show may be male, but the true heroes are the crafty, clever, and resilient female cast members who, with their own nineteenth-century brand of girl-gang feminism, help to reinvent the world.”
–Helen Schulman, author of P.S. and The Revisionist

“What an absorbing experience to visit Elizabeth Gaffney’s imagination while it shakes, shimmers, and sizzles with extraordinary storytelling against the backdrop of history.”
–Anna Deavere Smith

“A towering work of brilliant imagination, as exquisitely written as it is intricately constructed. Metropolis, with all its brawn and brains and heart, will no doubt find its way into the skyline of the greatest of the great New York City classics.”
–David Grand, author of The Disappearing Body

L'autore:

ELIZABETH GAFFNEY is an advisory editor of The Paris Review. In addition to teaching writing at New York University, she has translated from German The Arbogast Case (Thomas Hettche), The Pollen Room (Zoë Jenny), and Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany (Ika Hugel-Marshall). Her short fiction has appeared in North American Review, Colorado Review, Brooklyn Review, Mississippi Review, The Reading Room, and Epiphany. Metropolis is her first novel. To learn more about Elizabeth Gaffney, please visit her website at www.elizabethgaffney.net

Elizabeth Gaffney teaches writing at New York University.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Random House Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1400061504
• ISBN 13: 9781400061501
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 458