About this Item
Handsomely bound in finely woven blue cloth stamped brightly in gold on the front boards and on the spine. Very clean and tight throughout. Virtually unread. With Wagner's presentation inscription to Isaac Bashevis Singer: "For Isaac Bashevis Singer with great admiration/ Eliot Wagner/ October, 1956."on the front endpaper. In lightly soiled rear panel with some wear at the top of the spine. A handsome pictorial dust jacket designed by John O'Hara Cosgrave II. Black and white photo of Eliot Wagner on the rear panel.With the original price of $3.75 at the bottom of the front inside flap. A rather attractive copy of Wagner's first novel, inscribed. Grand Concourseis a book about people in transit literally. If theres any culture that permeates the story, its the culture of New York buses, subways, trolley cars, taxis, commuter trains: hardly a chapter goes by without someone squeezing into one or the other. Pretty impressive for a book that received only mildly positive reviews when it came out.Commentarys reviewerpraised Wagners "modest ambition." In the New York Times, Dan Mankiewicz said it was "what used to be called a slice of life'" then added that Alfred Hitchcock called drama "a slice of life, with the drab spots removed."These were bum raps.Grand Concoursemay not be a masterpiece, but it's a solid, lively, entertaining book, rich with Bronx atmospherics. The story revolves around the six Margulies, a family trying to work its way up the social and economic ladder. Living on Tiffany Street in the Hunts Point neighborhood ("poor in most things, but never in garbage"), they dream of moving into an apartment with a doorman on theGrand Concourse. Papa runs a corner grocery store and spends his day hectoring the local housewives not to squeeze the tomatoes, and Mama keeps careful track of the rise of acquaintances like the Eislers, who run a successful restaurant in Times Square, or Deborah Weiss, who married into money and moved all the way up to a big house in Reverdale. Julie, the oldest, goes to night school and aspires to get a job and apartment in Manhattan. And Gerald, perhaps like Wagner, kills time as an usher at the Excelsior, the local movie house, and fills notebooks with unpublished poems and stories "the sum of his false starts." As Constance Rosenblum wrote in her 2011 book,Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope Along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, "Despite the books obscurity,Grand Concourseis an unexpectedly moving work, peopled by characters whose lives are measured almost entirely by their proximity to or distance from the thoroughfare of the title." Just a generation after their parents and grandparents emigrated to America, the Margulies and their friends may not have reached the Grand Concourse but they have already lost contact with theshtetlculture. (Neglected Books) First Edition with "First Edition" Stated on the copyright page.
Seller Inventory # 1011
Contact seller
Report this item
