Girls - Softcover

Nic Kelman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852428767 ISBN 13: 9781852428761

Publisher: Serpents Tail, 2004

Synopsis

girls is a journey into the most forbidden corners of male desire and a brilliantly provocative novel about lust obsession and power. A wealthy father of two deserts his family in order to spend the night in a college girl's dorm room. A CEO visiting his friends villa feigns a sprained ankle in order to have sex with their teenage daughter. A businessman in Korea has the best sexual experience of his life with a young woman whose true age he never learns. These are the men who have left their safe lives, who have replaced their old dreams with dreams of the girls they yearn for. In an age when everything is for sale, girls' subject matter is the power and fascination young girls have over rich men and vice versa. Juxtaposing philosophical asides and travelling deep inside the most forbidden corners of male desire, Nic Kelman's insights are both revealing and shocking.

About this title

About the Author:

Nic Kelman studied Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, Boston. After spending a few years working in independent film, he attended Brown University on a full scholarship for his MFA in Creative Writing and where he was awarded the James Assatly Prize for graduate fiction for girls. He now writes and teaches in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly:

The three jaded, wealthy protagonists of Kelman's sexually explicit debut have spent a lifetime battling other men for money and status in the cutthroat business world. Having sold their souls for the kind of success that spells easy access to women, they find they're less drawn to them than they ought to be-instead, they prefer enthusiastic young girls, who have not yet become the calculating gold diggers that adult women are. Fortunately, there are plenty of dewy-often underage-strippers, prostitutes, club kids, daughters' friends, friends' daughters and miscellaneous nymphets eager to have their innocence despoiled by middle-aged men with sports cars and Cuban cigars. Kelman chronicles the resulting debaucheries in minute detail, writing in a detached second-person voice that barely individuates his nameless male characters and often reduces the female characters to anatomical figments of a collective male libido. Amid all the sex there is a commentary on sexual politics drawn from snippets of sociobiology, statistics on the prevalence of divorce and infidelity and philosophical ruminations on the origins and linguistic indeterminacy of dirty words. The whole is given a mythic overlay by the insertion of excerpts from Homer, in which warriors confront each other at spear point for the possession of slave girls, archetypes in the dog-eat-dog struggle for power and women that is the essence of a man's life. Kelman's blend of Penthouse-grade sexual transgression, Nietzschean bombast and Sinatra-esque rue is a vigorous rendering of a certain misogynist mindset of masculine privilege, but for all its artfulness, it never quite transcends the cliches it wants to dissect.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Serpents Tail
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1852428767
• ISBN 13: 9781852428761
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224