YEAR OF ENDLESS SORROWS - Softcover

Rapp, Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374293430 ISBN 13: 9780374293437

Verlag: FSG Adult, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

From "one of the more daring young stylists working today" (Time Out New York) comes a novel of New York in the early '90s and one man's brutally funny coming of age.

New York City, the early 1990s: the recession is in full swing and young people are squatting in abandoned buildings in the East Village while the homeless riot in Tompkins Square Park. The Internet is not part of daily life; the term "dot-com" has yet to be coined; and people's financial bubbles are burst for an entirely different set of reasons. What can all this mean for a young Midwestern man flush with promise, toiling at a thankless, poverty-wage job in corporate America, and hard at work on his first novel about acute knee pain and the end of the world?

With The Year of Endless Sorrows, acclaimed playwright and finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing Adam Rapp brings readers a hilarious picaresque reminiscent of Nick Hornby, Douglas Copeland, and Rick Moody at their best-a chronicle of the joys of love, the horrors of sex, the burden of roommates, and the rude discovery that despite your best efforts, life may not unfold as you had once planned.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Adam Rapp is an OBIE Award-winning playwright and director, as well as a novelist, filmmaker, actor, and musician. His play The Purple Lights of Joppa Illinois had its world première last month at South Coast Repertory. His other plays include Red Light Winter (Citation from the American Theatre Critics Association, a Lucille Lortel Nomination for Best New Play, two OBIE Awards, and was named a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize), Blackbird, The Metal Children, Finer Noble Gases, Through The Yellow Hour, The Hallway Trilogy, Nocturne, Ghosts in the Cottonwoods, Animals and Plants, Stone Cold Dead Serious, Faster, Gompers, Essential Self-Defense, American Slingo, and Kindness. For film, he wrote the screenplay for Winter Passing; and recently directed Loitering with Intent. Rapp has been the recipient of the 1999 Princess Grace Award for Playwriting, a 2000 Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, the 2001 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, and Boston's Elliot Norton Award; and was short-listed for the 2003 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, received the 2006 Princess Grace Statue, a 2007 Lucille Lortel Playwriting Fellowship, and the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Year of Endless Sorrows

A NovelBy Rapp, Adam

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright ©2006 Rapp, Adam
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780374293437

Part One
 
Towns 

We’re from the Midwest mostly. We’re from Lawrence and Davenport and Dubuque. We’re from Kankakee and Oswego. We’re from Griffith and Joliet and Mechanicsville. Platteville and Green Bay. And Altoona and DeKalb and Clinton.
 
            We’re from Joplin.
 
            The words of the cities themselves conjure certain smells and songs. Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night” and lightly buttered yams. Thirty-Eight Special’s “Hold On Loosely” and the Fourth of July gunpowder drifting below the exploding purple girandoles at the speedway. Anything by Joan Jett and the sulfuric fetor of the steel mill. Stevie Nicks and the rancid, spoiled-fruit stench of the oil refinery.
 
            Or they simply evoke the feeling of a rotisserie fork turning hotly in our stomachs.
 
            Most of us grew up in well-heated, well-lit homes. Gabled houses with garages cleaner than grocery stores. Flagstone-laid, pinecone-spotted paths leading to the front porches. The black spruce bending toward the neighbor’s Tudor like it’s keeping a secret. A licorice-red swing set in the backyard. A small ceramic man with a Scottish hunting cap protecting the mailbox—stoic yet somehow noble.
 
            Our towns have water towers. Great steel orbs and graffiti-smeared globes and flying saucers on stilts. An enormous iron aspirin tablet next to the high school. The Tin Man’s inverted head with MAQUOKETA sucks in running spray paint.
 
            ELKHART in all of its unscathed, civic propriety.
 
            ELVON looming over several acres of unharvested wheat.
 
            Some of us were raised on farms. We can talk about silos and combines and grain elevators and detasseling corn. We can talk about counting the beans and the fever itch of hay and how it can drive you to rinsing your arms with gasoline. We can talk about cow tipping and crop blight. We can talk about the pig doctor and how he swallows the viscous, worm-like, bluish membrane after castrating the hogs—how he plucks it out of the mutilated genitals with a pair of homemade forceps.
 
            We can talk about highway driving and the solemn, solitary beauty of a fodder-filled silo receding in the distance; how it’s there for miles and then suddenly disappears as if the horizon imagined it and then reclaimed the thought with a god-like whimsy.
 
            We can talk about fishing.
 
            A few of us grew up in trailer parks, and our rooms had lots of paneling. Infinite, impeccably grooved, pecky-pecan paneling. Long sheets of synthetic wood that we could drive a thumbtack through. Paneling that splinters and warps and chafes with a kind of sinister eczema. Paneling that is made to be unmade.
 
            We are long-boned because we were well fed. We ate potatoes and barbecued beef. We drank milk by the gallon—two percent, with the royal blue cap. Some drank it whole.
 
            Most of us have skin the color of a paper towel lightly dabbed in Wesson Oil.
 
            In the winter, with the aluminum taste of frigid air in our lungs, we can look out over tractor-scarred fields of frozen mud and know exactly who we are.
 
            We were raised with tornado culture and good dental histories.
 
            When we came to New York we left behind pets. We left behind coaches and priests. We left behind friends who went to work for insurance companies. We left behind half-dead cars and VCRs and laminated baseball-card collections. We left behind two-lane, mercilessly straight, never-ending highways.
 
            We didn’t say goodbye to everybody. We couldn’t possibly have said goodbye to everybody.
 
            Some of us had never eaten garlic. To most of us, basil sounded like a prison town in southern Illinois. Ginger was that girl on Gilligan’s Island. Some of us thought cappuccino was a cup of chino.
 
            Most of us have some variation of blond in our hair. We’re spaniel blonds. Rhubarb blonds. Cottonbox blonds. Peach blonds. We’re soda-cracker blonds and bloodhoney blonds. We’re Formica blonds.
 
            We generally look like the people walking through the Indianapolis Metropolitan Airport on any given day.
 
            We are Catholics and Protestants and Lutherans and Presbyterians and Episcopalians and we can recite the prayers by rote. Even though most of us have vehemently denounced our faith and want to be (or pretend that we want to be) Atheists and Marxists and Anarchists, we can still recite the prayers.
 
            And at a pretty good clip, too.
 
            The sofas back in our Midwestern homes smell like beef Wellington and forest rain and something not unlike the woodchip mulch used to bed gerbil terrariums.
 
            We smell things on the street that remind us of the old pullout back in Manteno. The love seat back there in Fond du Lac. A vinyl record on the Second Avenue sidewalk between Fifth and Sixth can do it to us. A feather duster from the vintage shop on First between Ninth and Tenth can do it to us. The inside of an old bowler hat—something from an altogether different time—even that can do it to us.
 
            Certain things always seem to send us back.
 
            We have strong middle names like David and Matthew and Esther. Biblical names that followed us from the fishfly fogs of the Mississippi and the broken-bottle shores of Lake Michigan and the muddy, mosquito-misted banks of the Des Plaines River; middle names that quietly pursue us like private, invisible birds.
 
            We have snapshots of our dogs. That’s Waldo...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: FSG Adult
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0374293430
• ISBN 13: 9780374293437
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 420
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland