Synopsis
Writing for the Tribune, Sarah Rosen launches celebrities like rote zombies. She describes them as her editor dictates, to anoint the next wave of "it" and "who." One afternoon Sarah covers the dinner party of Roxy--a sculptor who carves figurine replicas of herself--and something, literally, snaps. Roxy's sculpture is decapitated by a rolling rack of designer clothes. Lola, Roxy's haphazard lover--an erotic actress--smokes weed with her bar back boyfriend. And Rick, son of an iconic metal guitarist reluctantly participates in Sarah's staged news story. Questioning her journalistic role as the ultimate fabricator, Sarah crosses personal and professional boundaries when she meets Roxy for a drink. Through the revolving perspectives of Sarah, Roxy, Rick, and Lola, the reader travels the tenuous thread that links them. Sarah comes from a Jewish family on the poor side of the tracks and dry cleans thrift store designer cast offs so she won't be found out. Roxy transforms herself from Waspy Connecticut prep into a goth narcissistic monster who lives rent free in her father's Tribeca building. Rick hides his original collection of Shakespeare plays and his substandard penis. And Lola experiments with sex and drugs in order to forget a pup tent in Texas and a mother's curse that ultimately drove her to New York City, the land of opportunity. WHO TOWN is a world that blurs sexual identity with ego gratification, artistry and pornography, religious taboos and addiction, and an increasingly falsified media that perpetuates a soul killing cult of insta-celebrity.
About the Author
Susan Kirschbaum started her writing career as a journalist, penning fashion and art stories for Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, the Jewish Forward, the London Times, New York Observer, New York Magazine, and the New York Times, among others. She has written forwards and synopses for photography books for Steidl/Dangin, notably Roni Horn, Craig McDean, and Tierney Gearon. After dipping into investigative journalism and then personally, spending several late hours in back rooms with celebrities and rock stars, she decided to delve deeper into the human psyche and write fiction. She’s never looked back. Her first novel –”Who Town” — a social parody has been called by literary critics the “New York hipster Less than Zero." Her former agent described her as the love child of Mary Gaitskill and Bret Easton Ellis. There’s a second novel in the works that pays homage to some of her literary heroes including Nabokov, Philip Roth, Henry Miller, Jim Morrison, and her late grandmother Eva “Marge” Kirschbaum, all great story tellers in their own right.
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