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Original Essays | November 9, 2009

Jesse Bullington: IMG Abash'd the Devil Stood



I don't believe in evil. It's a word I use, certainly, because words are shortcuts and we all take the short way round from time to time, but that's... Continue »
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Kissing in Manhattan

by David Schickler

Kissing in Manhattan Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Hilarious, sexy, and deeply tender, Kissing in Manhattan was one of the most celebrated debuts in recent years. Acclaimed author David Schickler’s collection of linked stories follows a troupe of love-hungry urbanites through a charmed metropolis and into the Preemption--a mythic Manhattan apartment building. The Preemption sets the stage for a romantic fantasy as exuberant, dark, and dazzling as the city it occupies. Behind closed doors, the paths of an improbable cast of tenants--a seductive perfume heiress; a crabby, misunderstood actor; a preternaturally sharp-sighted priest--tangle and cross, while a perilous love triangle builds around three characters:

James Branch, a shy young accountant with an unusual love for the Preemption’s antique elevator, and a strange destiny...

Patrick Rigg, a Wall Street lothario who soothes his pain by seducing

beautiful women, carrying a gun, and attending the nightly sermons of a foreboding priest...

Rally McWilliams, a fetching, hopeful young writer who roams the city at night, searching for the soulmate she believes in but can’t find...

Charged with joy and a deadly sense of humor, Kissing in Manhattan is a daring new writer’s vision of a world where men and women, good and evil, love and sex, meet, battle, and embrace on every street corner.

Review:

"This wonderful book — magical at times, surprisingly sweet at others — never ceases to amaze and impress." Kristine Huntley, Booklist

Review:

"These 11 loosely connected stories...are aimed at a young, hip, New York audience, but Schickler's talent is such that even readers outside that demographic will find much to enjoy here....The stories are funny, tragic, disconcerting, moving, and all combinations thereof." Library Journal

Review:

"A jumbled debut collection....These are stories that achieve their successes, when they do, through the deft craftsmanship of their prose and the surprises they spring on the reader. But their characters remain two-dimensional, existing mainly to serve semifantastical plot twists....A first effort by a talented writer that tries too hard to be more than a collection." Kirkus Reviews

Review:

"The loose architecture of linked stories...may be a convenient medium for delivering riffs on the fractured, episodic experience of being young and on the loose in the big city. But too many interconnections whet the reader's appetite for a kind of narrative payoff that [Schickler's] two-dimensional main characters just don't deliver....Schickler falls between two stools by being self-consciously precious in his details and deadly earnest in his main characterizations. One wishes this often entertaining writer had cut some of the bits..." Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times Book Review

Review:

"One of the most charming and memorable debuts this year is Kissing in Manhattan....Tenderness and darkness are around every corner...There are Gothic overtones, bits of magical realism, moments of true eroticism with hints of danger....This tender, lovely book and these love-starved and hopeful individuals linger like a reader?s dream." The New Orleans Times-Picayune

Review:

"Schickler?s playfully alive voice is uniquely his own — sprightly, exact, Herculean in all the fundamentals. What talent! From beginning to end, here you have some of the most pleasurable storytelling of this — or any — year." Darin Straus, author of Chang and Eng

Synopsis:

Hilarious, sexy, and deeply tender, "Kissing in Manhattan" follows an unforgettable troupe of love-hungry urbanites through a magical Manhattan, a charmed metropolis where fantasy collides with fate.

About the Author

David Schickler is a graduate of the Columbia M.F.A. program. He lives in New York. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and Zoetrope.

Table of Contents

Checkers and Donna — Jacob's bath — Fourth angry mouse — The opals — Kissing in Manhattan — Duty — The smoker — Serendipity — Telling it all to Otis — In black — The green balloon.

Product Details

ISBN:
9780385335676
Author:
Schickler, David
Publisher:
Dial Press
Location:
New York, N.Y.
Subject:
General
Subject:
Manhattan (new york, n.y.)
Subject:
Manhattan
Copyright:
Edition Number:
1st paperback ed.
Series Volume:
0607
Publication Date:
August 27, 2002
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Pages:
288
Dimensions:
8.16x5.58x.64 in. .52 lbs.

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