Lit Life

Kurt Wenzel

ISBN 10: 0375760318 / ISBN 13: 9780375760310

Published by Random House, 2002

About this Item

Lit Life (2002) ? Kurt Wenzel Random House | ISBN: 9780375760310 | Condition: Good | Sold by Crappy Old Books Welcome to the Upper East Side in the late ?90s: where novelists strut like minor deities, editors sweat over their espresso, and everyone secretly hopes the New York Times Book Review will save (or destroy) their career with a single paragraph. In Kurt Wenzel?s Lit Life , the publishing world gets the satirical X-ray treatment, revealing a landscape equal parts glamorous and absurd, where literary ambition rubs shoulders with neuroses, martinis, and too many bad book parties. The novel juggles a gallery of characters?some desperate, some deluded, some drunk on advance money?trying to survive in the swirling circus of Manhattan letters. Think The Devil Wears Prada , but swap the handbags for manuscripts and the catwalks for writing desks. Wenzel skewers the egos of authors, the foibles of editors, and the oddball ways in which literature and commerce hold each other in a mutually exasperated embrace. Why this copy? Condition: Good. A veteran of its own publishing journey?cover still bright, pages intact, spine with just the right creases to suggest someone read it at a café while pretending to be noticed. Random House 2002 edition. Crisp satire in its original hardback-born form, a time capsule of the book world just before Kindles came to ruin the cocktail banter. From Crappy Old Books. We don?t just shovel medieval chronicles and union memoirs onto your shelves?sometimes we bring you novels that remind you why publishing people are both maddening and irresistible. Specs at a glance Author: Kurt Wenzel Title: Lit Life Publisher: Random House , 2002 ISBN: 9780375760310 Condition: Good This is the kind of novel that makes you laugh at the industry while quietly recognising your own secret wish to have a book launch with too much cheap wine. A comedy of manners, a skewering of pretension, and a reminder that in publishing?as in life?everybody?s faking it until the second print run. Warning: may cause sudden urges to wear black turtlenecks, start a manuscript you?ll never finish, or casually drop the phrase ?my agent? into dinner conversation.  .

Seller Inventory # 4406

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Lit Life
• Publisher: Random House
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375760318
• ISBN 13: 9780375760310
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

Which is worth more—celebrity or credibility? Set in Manhattan and the Hamptons, Lit Life identifies and deconstructs this dilemma as it takes the reader on a hilarious tour through the world of two eccentric writers. Kyle Clayton, a “once hot, now not” young author and provocateur with a serious case of writer’s block, navigates New York nightlife in an inebriated haze until he meets his literary hero, the dyspeptic and obscure novelist Richard Whitehurst, who is smitten with the notion of Kyle’s former fame. Richard is suffering his own form of breakdown because of the looming collapse of his marriage, not to mention years of public ambivalence toward his work. As the two writers’ lives collide, they find in each other the crutch they’ve each been seeking—and, perhaps, the salvation that has eluded them both.

Kurt Wenzel’s taut, coruscating prose and intimate, precisely rendered take on the literary scene make this the most brilliantly realized novel about the publishing world since Martin Amis’s The Information.

About the Author

Lit Life is Kurt Wenzel’s first novel. In addition to writing fiction, he is a contributing editor at Privymagazine.com. He and his wife live in New York City and East Hampton, New York.