Sign-In
Cart
Manhattan Loverboy
Paperback
FantasyGeneral FictionLiterary Fiction
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
ISBN13: 9781888451092
Publisher: Akashic Books, Ltd.
Published: Jul 1 2000
Pages: 203
Weight: 0.44
Height: 0.54 Width: 4.43 Depth: 6.92
Language: English
--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.
Also in
Fantasy
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Paperback
The Princess Bride Deluxe Limited Edition: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure
Goldman, William
Paperback
Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution
Kuang, R. F.
Paperback
Japanese Gothic: A Folk Horror Novel of Japanese Mythology, Murder, and Family Duty Across Two Timelines
Baker, Kylie Lee
Hardcover
Assistant to the Villain: A Cozy Fantasy Romantic Comedy from a Tiktok Sensation
Maehrer, Hannah Nicole
Paperback
Before I Knew I Loved You: A Cozy Magical Realism Novel of Time Travel, Love, and Memory, Set in a Fabled Tokyo Café
Kawaguchi, Toshikazu
Hardcover