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Paperback Manhattan Loverboy Book

ISBN: 1888451092

ISBN13: 9781888451092

Manhattan Loverboy

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Format: Paperback

Condition: Very Good

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Book Overview

--Named "Best Indie Novel of 2000" by the Montreal Mirror

--Named "Best Book for the Beach, Summer 2000." by Jane Magazine

"Part Lewis Carroll, part Franz Kafka, Nersesian leads us down a maze of false leads and dead ends . . . Joey's dilemmas are told with wit and compassion, drawing the reader into a world of paranoia and coincidence while illuminating questions of free will and destiny. Highly recommended." --Library Journal

"MLB sits somewhere between Kafka, DeLillo, and Lovecraft--a terribly frightening, funny, and all too possible place." --Literary Review of Canada

A selection of the Akashic Urban Surreal Series.

Nersesian's debut novel, The Fuck-Up, is now an underground classic, a thriller with a literary soul set in the pre-chic Lower East Side. Nersesian's brilliant follow-up novel, Manhattan Loverboy (MLB), is paranoid delusion and fantastic comedy in the service of social realism. Updating the picaresque chronicles in L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz and Kafka's The Trial, MLB is the tale of an orphan whose only known background is that of the city itself, a scaffold-covered grid sewn together with "Do Not Cross" tape. In this overly suspicious masterpiece, love is expressed through corrective surgery, and families meet across boardroom tables. At each unsignaled turn of the narrative track, Nersesian's Man-Boy protagonist, Joseph Ngm, must look outside of his own hollow corpus for answers to questions as disparate as "What is my true ethnicity?" "Why are there no vowels in my name?" and "Why am I being toyed with by a corporate scion?" Throughout, Joe dimly discerns that his path has been mapped by someone other than himself.

Raised by mysterious and cold adoptive parents, Joe Ngm searches through history books and Talmudic scriptures for answers. Finding no resolution in an errant sojourn to an Israeli kibbutz, he seizes life's reins and returns home, proclaiming his new identity through a name change. "In New York, I found myself: I was a man without a consonant--Joey A-e-i-o-u." While nurturing his new self, the pudgy protagonist is suddenly awarded an unsolicited graduate fellowship at Columbia University. But the fellowship is yanked away just as quickly by unseen powers. Tracing this defunding to a rhombus-shaped citadel on Wall Street, Little Joseph breaks out of his hermitude to challenge the man behind the disappearing funds: Andrew Whitlock. In Joe Aeiou's haphazard confrontation with the lugubrious CEO of Whitlock Incorporated, he succeeds in falling through the Looking Glass. From that moment on, the modern-day warlord sets his sites on retribution, while from inside a plate-glass skyscraper, Joe falls into "adversarial polarity," something strangely like love.

Customer Reviews

5 ratings

A Wild Ride!

From start to finish this book is a wild ride. Arthur Nersesian breaks all the rules and comes out a winner. His characters in Manhattan Loverboy are far from perfect, almost warped even, yet the reader is so intrigued it's nearly impossible to put the book down. By the end of this book, I couldn't believe the twists it had taken!I'd recommend Nersesian's books to anyone who is looking for something a little different and a lot of great reading.

Deep light Reading

Neresian has the talent to create tales which are easy to swallow in a few sittings but are surprisingly loaded with character depth and strange twists and turns. This novel, like his previous works, does the same: by taking an under achiever-below avegerage character and putting them into extraordinary circumstances. It's very hard to even explore these stories without giving away some of the plot devices which make them so addictive.

paranoia reaches the level of sublime

Nersesian's narrator Joey Aeiou embodies the perfect paranoia found only in Manhattan, where overcrowding, vanity, and extreme economic imbalalance breed fear and grandiosity on a large scale. The book dispenses with the plausible and moves directly into the real--the kind of real that echoes Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka, Katherine Dunn, etc. Way more than a moral tale. Plan to laugh out loud.

perfect

everything about this book is great....the story is hysterically funny....the size of the book is perfect for subway reading, which is also the perfect setting {the subway, that is}. also, its really cool that he is still doing books with akashic. very funny, crazy book!

Joey's Wild Ride

Nersesian's newest book is a fast-paced ride through the turbulent life of a grad. student with an imagination bigger than my professors' egos. I identified with Joey's fanatical behavior when his funding source pulled his grant, but the events that unfloded afterward could have only happened in NYC. Nersesian's quick wit and dark satire weave a fantastic story about what can happen when we try too hard to believe everything we think we see. Without question, I recommend this book as a welcome relief from the familiar ennui of graduate studies.
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