City on Fire

A big-hearted, boundary-vaulting novel that heralds a remarkable new talent: set in 1970s New York, a story outsized in its generosity, warmth, and ambition, its deep feeling for its characters, its exuberant imagination.

Zusatztext 73379196 Informationen zum Autor GARTH RISK HALLBERG lives in New York with his wife and children. This is his first novel. Klappentext National Best Seller • Named a Best Book of the Year by: New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Vogue, The Atlantic, Newsday "A novel of head-snapping ambition and heart-stopping power-a novel that attests to its young author's boundless and unflagging talents." -Michiko Kakutani, New York Times New York City, 1976. Meet Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city's great fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Samantha, two suburban teenagers seduced by downtown's punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter and his idealistic neighbor-and the detective trying to figure out what any of them have to do with a shooting in Central Park on New Year's Eve. The mystery, as it reverberates through families, friendships, and the corridors of power, will open up even the loneliest-seeming corners of the crowded city. And when the blackout of July 13, 1977, plunges this world into darkness, each of these lives will be changed forever. City on Fire is an unforgettable novel about love and betrayal and forgiveness, about art and truth and rock 'n' roll: about what people need from each other in order to live . . . and about what makes the living worth doing in the first place. From the Hardcover edition. Chapter 22 Those first few weeks of grief counseling, Charlie took the LIRR in. He was always late, though; invariably his train would get hung up in the East River tunnel. He couldn't tell how much time had passed unless he asked other peoplehis dad's watch still lay in a coffin-shaped box in his underwear drawerand they were already looking at him funny because he was doing his nervous humming thing. The stares only made him more nervous, which led to more humming, and when he came out of the subway he'd bolt the last five blocks to the doctor's and arrive sweaty and short of breath, sucking on his inhaler. Dr. Altschul must have said something to Mom, because after he got his driver's license, in May, she insisted on his taking the station wagon, as she'd insisted on the counseling in the first place. The office was on Charles Street, in the half-basement of a brownstone you wouldn't necessarily have known was anything other than a residence. Even the discreet plaque below the buzzer All appointments please ring made no mention of specialties. This was probably for the peace of mind of clients (patients?), so no one in the waiting room would know what you were there for, who needed board-certified grief counseling and who needed whatever it was Dr. Altschul's wife (also, confusingly, named Dr. Altschul) did. Honestly, that Dr. Altschul should be married at all was a mind-bender. He was the kind of bosomy overweight man who could make even a beard look sexless. Charlie kept trying to memorize the doctor's zippered cardigan, so that he could determine at the next session if it was the same one. But as soon as he'd settled in, Dr. Altschul would sort of tip back in his large leather chair and place his hands contentedly on his belly and ask, So how are we doing this week? Charlie's own hands stayed tucked under his thighs. We were doing fine. Which could mean only one thing: Charlie was still in denial. For eight or ten weeks now, he'd been resisting the pressure of Dr. Altschul's questions, the Buddha-like invitation of those flattened but not knotted fingers. Charlie focused instead on the oddments of the therapist's desk and wallsdiplomas, little carved-wood statuettes, intricate patterns woven into the tasseled rug. He'd had the suspicion, from the very first, that Dr. Altschul ( Bruce, he kept telling Charlie to call him) meant to vacuum out hi...

“City on Fire, by Garth Risk Hallberg: Dickensian, massively entertaining, as close to a great American novel as this century has produced.” —Stephen King

“The year’s most exciting fiction debut . . . A book that is truly that great, rare thing: a wholly inhabitable universe, reflecting back our lives while also offering an exhilarating escape from them.” —Rolling Stone

“City on Fire is a spectacular debut.” —Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven

“City on Fire is a big, stunning first novel and an amazing virtual reality machine, whisking us back to New York City in the 1970s with bravura swagger and style and heart . . . The ghosts of New York memorialized by earlier writers—F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger, Richard Price—hover over City on Fire. At the same time, the novel’s ambition and Dickensian storytelling ardor will remind many readers of Donna Tartt’s dazzling The Goldfinch, while its fuel-injected prose and nimble stacking of plot complications will recall for others Martin Amis’s classic portrait of Gotham in Money. But this novel is defiantly and indelibly Hallberg’s own: a symphonic epic that reaches a crashing crescendo during the blackout of July 13, 1977 . . . [In] Hallberg’s XXL tool kit as a storyteller: a love of language and the handsprings he can make it perform; a bone-deep knowledge of his characters’ inner lives that’s as unerring as that of the young Salinger; an instinctive gift for spinning suspense. He also possesses a journalistic eye for those telling details that can trigger memories of the reader’s own like small Proustian grenades . . . A novel of head-snapping ambition and heart-stopping power—a novel that attests to its young author’s boundless and unflagging talents.” —*Michiko Kakutani, *New York Times
 
“Dazzling . . . City on Fire is an extraordinary performance . . . Hallberg inhabits the minds of whites and blacks, men and women, old and young, gay and straight with equal fidelity . . . making every one of them thrum with real life . . . And what endlessly fascinating characters they are! . . . [The novel’s] Whitmanesque arms embrace an entire city of lovers and strivers, saints and killers.” —*Ron Charles, *Washington Post

• “A singular achievement . . . The story engages from the first page.” *—Entertainment Weekly* 
• “An uncommon pleasure . . . It’s easy to understand the excitement. City on Fire is an epic and absorbing novel.” —USA Today
   
  “Profoundly illuminating . . . Timeless . . . Hallberg ties these characters’ fates together with an artful intricacy that is truly remarkable.” —Seattle Times

“A probing look at New York City in the mid-1970s. The plot winds and twists through just about every corner of the city . . . And all this amid the blinding light of love, in a great midsummer blackout.” —Scott Simon, NPR/Weekend Edition

“Locating the best of times within the worst of times is no mean trick, especially in a historical novel where the history is recent enough that many readers remember firsthand just how bad those times were. That’s the delicate and ultimately moving balancing act that Garth Risk Hallberg pulls off in City on Fire . . . His talent is as conspicuous as the book’s heft. There’s rarely a less than finely honed sentence or a moment when you don’t feel that a sophisticated intelligence is at work . . . [The climax] is a tour de force.” —*Frank Rich, *New York Times Book Review
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*“Spectacular . . . New Yo…