The Sweep of the Second Hand - Hardcover

Monti, Dean

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0897334906 ISBN 13: 9780897334907

Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2001

Synopsis

Malcolm Cicchio, a manager of a failing foreign film movie theater, leads a very uneventful life in which his girlfriend is marrying a doctor, he can't sleep because there are yellowjackets in his bedroom, and he meets Darlene, a punk rock singer.

About this title

About the Author:

DEAN MONTI is the author of several plays and has had his words staged in Chicago and Norfolk, Virginia. He has also written short stories, and has been published in ELF: The Eclectic Literary Forum and other literary journals. He is a feature writer for a large trade journal and has read his work on WBEZ, National Public Radio in Chicago.

A current Wheaton resident, Dean Monti has lived in the Chicago suburbs all of his life, and his fictional depictions of suspicious downtonw night-clubs, wary suburban landladies, and foreign film-house patrons are sure to delight anyone familiar with Chicago’s real-life equivalents.

From Library Journal:

In this comic debut, Malcolm Cicchio loses one minute of sleep with each passing night; at that rate, he figures that his heart will explode in 16 months. The manager of a failing art film theater, he has recently split up with Lena, his girlfriend of seven years, who is set to marry a successful cardiologist. He feels that he might as well have loser tattooed on his forehead. And then the babes seemingly start falling from the sky. First he meets Anne, who answers the phone at an emergency switchboard and admits that her favorite movie is Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. This is reason enough to schedule a two-day film festival, to which he invites Soren Sonderby, a Swedish actor who claims to have had the limp-on part of a leper in Bergman's Seventh Seal. Then there's Darlene, the singer with the Circadian Rhythm Section, who wrangles an invitation to play Lena's wedding the same weekend as the film festival with Malcolm in tow. That string of days serves as the book's culmination when everything may or may not come together for Malcolm in the middle. A comic novel all too often can be little more than a string of gags, but Monti begs comparison with Woody Allen and Nick Hornby (High Fidelity). More, please. For all larger public libraries. Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0897334906
• ISBN 13: 9780897334907
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 324