The Chintz Age

Fiction. Just as Soylent Green is people, so THE CHINTZ AGE is now. Everything is cheaper and chintzier than in the past, from consumer products to culture itself. Our great cities, and, in particular, New York, are being transformed as we speak, as rising rents squeeze out the artists and bohemians who honed and burnished the city's glittering cutting edge. So should we look backward in teary-eyed nostalgia for the glorious past, or grit our teeth and move forward, accepting the inevitability of change in order to carve out a place for ourselves in this Brave New New York? This book of gritty urban fairy tales represents a heartfelt prayer for the future of the arts in New York, as well as a blueprint for a moral and spiritual resistance to the forces of cultural philistinism.

In seven stories and a novella, Ed Hamilton takes on this clash of cultures between the old and the new, as his characters are forced to confront their own obsolescence in the face of this rapidly surging capitalist juggernaut. Ranging over the whole panorama of New York neighborhoods--from the East Village to Hell's Kitchen, and from the Bowery to Washington Heights--Hamilton weaves a spellbinding web of urban mythology. Punks, hippies, beatniks, squatters, junkies, derelicts, and anarchists--the entire pantheon of urban demigods--gambol through a grungy subterranean Elysium of dive bars, cheap diners, flophouses, and shooting galleries, searching for meaning and a place to make their stand.